A food manufacturer, a client of Rina Accountancy, an accounting firm based in Walnut Creek, Calif., was struggling with what to do to improve cash flow and deal with major debt commitments. The client had spent time manipulating the numbers in his profit-and-loss statement. But Tim Tikalsky, head of Rina's consulting department, says that what the client really needed was a study of his company's balance sheet. While the client had been juggling the numbers in Excel, the standard for much budgeting and analysis, Tikalsky used ProfitDriver, a data analysis tool marketed by Riverwoods, Ill.-based CCH.
"I spent 10 minutes plugging the numbers in ProfitDriver into its sensitivity analysis, and the first thing that came up was 'Increase your prices,'" says Tikalsky. "He said, 'I can do that.'" The change was possible only "a couple of pennies" on each product and because the pricing fit nicely into price breaks in the competitive landscape.
"He did it and the rest is history," says Tikalsky, who continues to use ProfitDriver at the client's board meetings to make presentations to analyze results.
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