Internet Network Provider Eliminates Critical Budgeting Errors by Moving from Spreadsheets to Bizview

The London Internet Exchange (LINX) provides its members with Internet network services, consisting of over 950 Internet service providers connecting from more than 80 countries worldwide. Their members get access to direct Internet routes from several international peering partners. LINX offers reliable exchange of Internet traffic with increased routing control and better performance. LINX is a not-for-profit organization, which means that they invest their service and membership fees into strengthening all their network services.

The Challenge

Prior to implementing Bizview, LINX largely relied on homemade Excel spreadsheets for budgeting, planning, and reporting. Besides taking up a lot of valuable time, the use of spreadsheets for planning and reporting generated critical errors, largely due to the confusion of numerous spreadsheets being sent back forth. Furthermore, the process was difficult to follow-up, making the organization reliant on email communication to send out forms and gather figures. The finance team would spend a lot of time consolidating figures into one cohesive budget document. Furthermore, it was hard to get the right data out, and to combine data, in reports.

Kurt Erik Lindqvist, CEO at LINX, had used Bizview in his previous position in another company. Now, faced with a cumbersome budgeting process at LINX, he knew that Bizview would be the right solution to address their budgeting challenges.

Building to Success with Bizview

LINX selected Bizview as a planning tool. They initially integrated Bizview with Sage but later switched to Xero’s cloud-based accounting software. Bizview offered direct integrations to both systems. “We have integrated Bizview with all our internal systems, and we’re very satisfied,” said Kurt Erik Lindqvist, CEO LINX.

They experienced a smooth implementation. “We’ve worked with the same product experts during all the years we’ve had Bizview and we know them well. The implementation has been successful and stable,” said Lindqvist.

During the first phase, they used Bizview for budgeting. They have now expanded the use of Bizview to financial reporting as well as introducing rolling two- and five-year forecasts as part of a continuous planning process. They have also started using Bizview for dashboards and KPI analysis, including both financial and non-financial data. Dashboards help them present key figures to their customers and partners in an effective and compelling way. “To be able to present data from various systems and to cross-reference figures in the same graph, was a bonus that we didn’t expect to benefit from. We’ve used that feature more than planned,” said Lindqvist. “It’s so easy to build dashboards in Bizview.”

Being a not-for-profit organization, they face the challenge of balancing their income and expenditure to reach their zero target, so as not to generate too much profit. They use Bizview to model scenarios in which they lower unit prices to various levels and then forecast for how long they can sustain these pricing reductions. They have greater trust in their forecasts and models now, which was not always the case prior to Bizview. “We used to have a lot of errors in our Excel spreadsheets,” said Lindqvist. “With Bizview it’s a lot easier and our forecasts are more accurate.”

With Bizview, LINX has been able to enjoy fewer errors, spend less time on manual budgeting tasks, and discover a whole new world of possibilities within reporting, forecasting, and dashboards. “Using Bizview has opened up a host of new ideas on what we should do,” said Lindqvist. “Now we just need to find the time to implement them!”