How Cisco Gave Finance Full Visibility into Marketing’s Billions
How one company achieved 99.5% budget accuracy, audit-ready marketing data, and budget approvals in under 48 hours
The Question Every CFO Asks
“Show me what marketing actually delivered last quarter.”
It is a simple request. Yet according to recent industry research on marketing accountability, only 22% of marketing organizations have enough data to provide a confident answer. At Cisco, that question once triggered weeks of spreadsheet archaeology, conflicting reports from regional teams, and numbers that never quite reconciled with what Finance had in their systems.
The result? A CFO who viewed marketing as a cost center to be managed, not a growth engine to be fueled. Sound familiar?
This is the story of how Cisco transformed that relationship. How they moved from millions of dollars in budget variance and constant reconciliation battles to 99.5% accuracy and budget approvals in under 48 hours. More importantly, it is the story of how Finance finally gained an auditable, real-time view of every marketing dollar, turning budget reviews from adversarial negotiations into strategic conversations.
Company at a Glance
The Challenge: When Marketing Speaks Campaigns and Finance Speaks GL Codes
Cisco’s marketing organization operated at massive scale. Over 1,000 marketers across global regions, each managing budgets, campaigns, and agency relationships. The challenge was not a lack of activity. It was a complete absence of a shared set of numbers between Marketing and Finance.
“We didn’t have a shared view of data or shared taxonomy,” explains one of the marketing leaders at Cisco. “Marketing was planning by campaign. Finance was tracking by GL code. And nobody could connect the two in any meaningful way.”
This disconnect created a cascade of problems that will sound painfully familiar to any finance leader who has tried to get clarity on marketing spend:
• Budget accuracy hovered at ±2% meaning millions in variance that Finance had to chase down every month
• Only 10% of the marketing budget could be articulated in terms Finance could audit or validate
• ROI modeling was essentially impossible because spend data and performance data lived in completely different systems
• Month-end reconciliation consumed weeks of effort from both Marketing Ops and FP&A teams
The result was predictable. Finance could not defend marketing budget decisions to the board because there was no reliable way to connect marketing’s investments to company revenue. Without that link, every budget cycle became a debate about cost rather than a discussion about growth.
The Breaking Point: Shrinking Budgets and Zero Visibility
“We saw our marketing budgets shrink because we couldn’t demonstrate our impact,” Gunter recalls. “It wasn’t that marketing wasn’t working. We simply couldn’t prove it was working in a way that Finance could trust.”
This is the moment that many finance leaders recognize. The quarterly budget review where Marketing presents impressive-sounding metrics, but the numbers do not reconcile with what Finance sees in the ERP. The planning cycle where every budget request feels like a negotiation rather than a strategic discussion. The executive meeting where the CFO asks a straightforward question about marketing ROI and receives a complicated answer that raises more questions than it resolves.
Industry research confirms this is not unique to Cisco. According to CMO vs CFO alignment research, 42% of finance professionals say marketing lacks a basic understanding of how finance operates. Meanwhile, 32% report frustration that marketing requests more budget without reporting return on previous spend. The Gartner CMO Spend Survey further confirms that 59% of CMOs report insufficient budget to execute strategy. The gap is not about competence. It is about systems and data.
At Cisco, this gap had become untenable. Finance needed a way to get trustworthy, auditable data on marketing spend without forcing marketers to abandon the campaign-level planning that drives their work.
The Approach: One Platform, Two Perspectives
Cisco implemented Uptempo as a system of record for marketing that gave Finance the visibility and alignment to marketing dollars they needed, while marketers could still plan and budget in campaigns and initiatives.
The key insight was structural. Uptempo provided two hierarchies. The budget hierarchy is where marketers manage their budget line items, organized by region, cost center, or functional department to match their organization’s fiscal year. Within that hierarchy, line items automatically map to GL codes and cost centers, giving Finance the view they need. The planning hierarchy is where marketers manage campaigns and initiatives, organized by region and business objective.
This meant that for the first time:
• A $1 million agency invoice could be understood both as “advertising spend” (Finance’s view) and as investment across 12 different campaigns in 4 regions (Marketing’s view)
• Budget changes could flow automatically between Marketing’s planning system and Finance’s ERP
• Month-end reconciliation became a verification step rather than an excavation project
• Performance data could finally connect to financial data in a way that enabled real ROI analysis
The Transformation: From Weeks to Hours
The results were immediate and measurable. Budget accuracy improved from ±2% to 99.5%, a level of precision that Finance had never seen from a marketing organization. Budget approval cycles collapsed from weeks to under 48 hours because Finance no longer needed to validate the numbers. The system did that automatically.
But the operational improvements were just the beginning. The real transformation was in how Finance and Marketing worked together.
“With Uptempo, we have the clarity to see what’s happening and course-correct early,” say at Cisco. “We can be really fast now and move with almost surgical accuracy.”
That surgical accuracy translated directly to financial impact. Cisco identified 25% in agency fee savings through better visibility into where money was being spent, including the discovery that they were paying for the same agency services twice across regions, and whether those investments were performing. Not through budget cuts, but through smarter reallocation enabled by trusted data.
The Finance Leader Perspective: From Auditing Numbers to Advising on Strategy
For finance leaders, the Cisco transformation illustrates a fundamental shift in what becomes possible when marketing financial data is trustworthy.
Before Uptempo, the FP&A relationship with Marketing was inherently adversarial. Finance had to be the gatekeeper because they could not trust the numbers. Every budget request triggered a validation exercise. Every variance required investigation. Every planning cycle was a negotiation.
After Uptempo, that dynamic changed completely. Finance still uses their ERP as the system of record for budgets. But now, Uptempo’s data reconciles automatically with the ERP, so Finance and Marketing are finally looking at the same numbers. The conversation shifts from “Can we trust these numbers?” to “What should we do with this budget?”
This is the insight that research consistently confirms. According to Forrester’s analysis of marketing operations maturity, organizations with unified marketing-finance systems achieve significantly higher strategic alignment compared to those relying on fragmented data. The technology does not just improve efficiency. It fundamentally changes the relationship.
At Cisco, this meant Finance could finally stop playing “budget cop” and start being the strategic partner they wanted to be. When Marketing comes with a reallocation request, Finance can evaluate it in minutes rather than weeks. When the board asks the CMO and CFO about marketing ROI, both have numbers they can stand behind.
The Ripple Effect: Aligning 1,000+ Marketers
One of the most significant outcomes at Cisco was the ability to align their entire global marketing organization around a single source of truth. With over 1,000 marketers across regions, the potential for budget chaos was enormous. Different teams using different spreadsheets, different assumptions, different ways of categorizing spend.
Uptempo eliminated that chaos by creating a shared system of record that worked for everyone. Regional marketers could plan in their local currency and their local campaign structure. Finance could see the consolidated view in the corporate GL structure. And leadership could see both.
This alignment had cascading benefits. Procurement could negotiate better agency contracts because they had visibility into total agency spend across regions. Marketing Ops could identify redundant campaigns and consolidate efforts. Finance could forecast with confidence because the data was trustworthy.The 25% agency fee savings was not a one-time win. It was the natural result of having visibility that enabled ongoing optimization. For the full Cisco implementation story, including additional details on the transformation journey, explore the full story in the Uptempo customer stories library.
Key Takeaways for Finance Leaders
The Cisco story offers several lessons for finance leaders dealing with marketing budget challenges:
The problem is not marketing competence. Marketing is the only major operating function without an enterprise-grade system of record. Finance has EPM and ERP. Sales has CRM. But marketing operates a patchwork of point solutions held together by spreadsheets. Until marketing has its own system of record, the same way finance has an ERP, neither side will have the data they need to work together effectively.
Budget accuracy is achievable. Cisco went from over 2% above budget targets to within half a percent of targets. That level of accuracy is only possible when marketing has a system of record that reconciles automatically with Finance’s ERP.
Speed comes from trust. The 48-hour approval cycle is possible because Finance has real-time budget visibility. When leaders can see exactly where marketing stands against budget at any moment, they can make decisions faster.
Savings emerge from visibility. The 25% agency fee reduction was not a budget cut. It was optimization enabled by seeing where money was actually going.The CMO relationship can change. Finance does not want to be the department that says no to budget requests. With shared, trustworthy data, Finance can confidently approve marketing investments and collaborate on where to allocate next.
Explore More
If the challenges in this case study sound familiar, you are not alone. Most enterprise marketing organizations struggle with the same gap between how Marketing plans and how Finance tracks.
To learn more about how leading organizations are bridging this gap, explore these resources:
The CMO vs CFO Ebook: Research on the three critical challenges facing marketing and finance alignment
Marketing Finance Solutions: How Uptempo helps finance teams gain visibility and control over marketing spend
Enterprise Customer Stories: Additional case studies from organizations like IKEA, GE Digital, and Juniper Networks
Five Tips for Marketing-Finance Alignment: Practical guidance for improving collaboration between departments
