With host Darrell Alfonso
While marketing and finance both play key roles in business growth, how they view and interpret financial data differ significantly. Finance relies on general ledger or GL codes, a unique identifier that helps them classify and track financial activity and create more accurate accounting records. Finance teams also pay close attention to cash flow and accruals. On the flip side, marketing needs to view financial data by campaigns, programs, channels and activities. They need the ability to shift budgets quickly to prioritize efforts that deliver the best marketing ROI.
Despite speaking different budget languages, both teams need accurate, up to date financial data to do their job efficiently. Neither can afford to waste time trying to find “truth” in competing systems, or worse, error-prone spreadsheets.
Uptempo addresses this challenge by recognizing the unique needs and priorities of:
To do this, Uptempo acts as a translation engine of sorts. Like the famous Rosetta Stone, it automatically organizes budget and financial data into tailored views that each of these audiences can understand. This helps avoid time-consuming effort to reconcile competing spreadsheets, miscommunication, errors, finger-pointing or worse.
Marketing budget owners can zoom in on specific cost centers and see exactly how much budget is planned, allocated and spent across every program, campaign, and activity. They get a comprehensive view of their investment mix, easily being able to see remaining funds in each cost center. Uptempo enables the marketing team to generate reports, allowing for flexible data analysis by dimensions like team, region, channel, and more.
In the example below, Uptempo provides a real-time view for budget owners to compare planned versus spent amounts for each campaign.
CMOs require a more strategic view, one that shows how marketing investments align with company objectives. With Uptempo, they can easily communicate to the board or executive team how funds are allocated across strategic initiatives and campaigns, focusing on funding overarching goals rather than specific tactics and channels.
Here’s a closer look at the CMO’s perspective in Uptempo:
CFOs require a different view to make their jobs easier. For CFOs, Uptempo delivers a financial perspective. A GL code view that enables finance to understand marketing investments in real-time, easily prepare financial statements, and more efficiently close the books.
Here’s how it works:
Uptempo offers a solution with real-time budget views and reports tailored to each audience’s priorities. It seamlessly translates marketing programs into finance’s financial framework, allowing marketers to concentrate on marketing without concerns about financial intricacies that are essential for finance.