How Marley Spoon levelled up their revenue modelling
Success story Marley Spoon
Marley Spoon, a Berlin-based food service company, faced significant challenges as it expanded its business. Their complex cohort revenue model made their Excel file slow to run and difficult to share and visualize data. To address these issues, Marley Spoon turned to our solution, which reduced the number of formulas needed, streamlined data integration, and simplified data sharing and visualization. As a result, Marley Spoon's business analysis team saved 30 hours per month, allowing them to focus on strategic, value-add work without the need for external consultants.
How Marley Spoon leverages Lucanet Extended Planning and Analysis:
With a complex cohort revenue model, the Excel file was slow to run.
Data integration was inefficient and time consuming.
The Excel file is too complex to share directly, requiring separate Google Sheets for stakeholders.
Data was difficult to visualise and required manual updates.
About the company
Marley Spoon makes it easy to cook a delicious meal at home by sending tasty recipes and fresh ingredients directly to the customer door.
We evaluated a range of financial modelling products, but this solution was the only platform that provided the modelling flexibility that we needed, without requiring external consultants to manage it. It has freed up my team’s time to focus on value-additive work with confidence in our numbers, and the team are a pleasure to work with.
Dina Fok
Business Analysis Lead
The Challenge
Accurate revenue forecasting is crucial for Marley Spoon's business. As the company expanded, the business analysis team started reaching the bottleneck of spreadsheets.
Difficult to manage
With a complex cohort revenue model across multiple dimensions, the Excel file used to take 5 minutes to run, with no good way to keep track of different versions and run scenarios
Disconnected from data
Marley Spoon needed to pull actuals from a data warehouse and push the outputs of the model into Looker.
Difficult to share
The Excel file was too complex to directly share, so the team had to maintain separate Google Sheets displaying simple outputs for stakeholders.
Difficult to visualise data
The model’s complexity made it extremely cumbersome to create compelling visuals, and the disconnect of the output Sheets from the core model meant that visuals had to be manually updated as the model evolved.
Dina, Marley Spoon’s business analysis lead, was looking for a solution that would be flexible enough to support a bespoke and complex revenue model (including cohorts) connected to their data warehouse, while easily supporting multiple versions and scenarios, and being able to present directly to stakeholders.
The Solution
6.5 million formulas in Excel reduced 10,000x to a few hundred with version control.
Detailed Cohort Modelling
Our customer success team worked with Marley Spoon to build out their full revenue model. The model is at a weekly granularity, tracking each weekly cohort separately, spanning 6 years.
The model also spans 8 countries and 2 brands, letting Dina and her team drill down into any of the 12 combinations of 'country' and 'brand', as well as easily see aggregated views across the categories.
The total number of formulas required in the model was reduced from 6.5 million in Excel to a few hundred (a 10,000x reduction). Dina’s team are tracking multiple versions of the model separately using our Version Control functionality.
Data integrations
Marley Spoon’s model is using our live data integrations to pull 2 years of weekly cohort data for each country from their data warehouse.
We automatically refresh the actuals on a weekly basis and automatically compares them against different saved versions of Marley Spoon’s revenue forecast.
How Lucanet software benefits Marley Spoon:
Greater confidence in accuracy
100x fewer formulas and built-in scenarios reduce errors.
30 hours saved every month
Time saved via live data integrations and modelling automation.
More time for business partnering
Time freed up to focus on strategic, value-add work.
