The need for automated reporting
Notion has revolutionized the note-taking world with its sleek design and intuitive interface. At Equals, we share a similar philosophy: crafting products with attention to detail and customer-centric design.
Nic, Head of Accounting at Notion, was looking to eliminate the more tedious parts of his job: downloading queried output from BI tools and pasting it into spreadsheets. The inevitable bottlenecks that come from contacting BI engineers to share access to the underlying query or the inevitable human error when copy-pasteing data were things he was looking to avoid.
When he heard that there was a spreadsheet natively connected to your data with an easy dashboard overlay, he knew he needed to give it a try.
“The kind of reporting that I run necessitates looking at details on an ongoing basis. I need the flexibility to answer questions rapidly about everything that affects the business. Equals helps me move faster daily by letting me pull in live data, aggregate or disaggregate however I like, and update ongoing analyses in real-time to pinpoint critical business trends.”
Building core company dashboards
Since adopting Equals over a year ago, Nic has leveraged its BI capabilities for multiple key business functions, including:
- ARR Reconciliation: Automating recurring revenue calculations and identifying trends faster.
- GAAP Revenue Reporting: Ensuring accuracy and consistency in financial reports.
- Month-End Close Reviews: Streamlining the reconciliation process to close books more efficiently.
- Revenue Analysis: Identifying key drivers of revenue growth and areas for optimization.
- Growth Opportunity Identification: Analyzing user behavior to uncover new business opportunities.
Now, Equals has become the default analytics tool for Notion’s Accounting team, replacing the former download from BI tool and paste into spreadsheet workflow.
“At any given time, I have six or seven Equals tabs open. I’m constantly sharing graphs I’ve made in Equals with other team members. I’ve received numerous questions about Equals from folks across Notion, and it’s exciting to see how quickly it’s being adopted in other departments.”
Aligning on goals as a team
Over the past year, Equals has become deeply embedded in Notion’s tech stack. Not only has Nic found Equals to be a critical tool, but other team members have adopted it as well.
Kevin Kim, Accounting Manager at Notion, was introduced to Equals by Nic: “I used to dread working on a Mac computer until I tried Equals. Alt mode combined with SQL has unlocked a new level of productivity for me. You don’t often find beautiful and functional software for tasks like analyzing global sales taxes. Equals has been a game-changer for automating and aggregating data from providers with difficult exports, like NetSuite.”