CHALLENGE:
Operational growth outpacing financial visibility
With a wide network of businesses, the company wanted a clearer understanding of how their operational spending affected their financials. This included forecasting labor and non‑labor costs, evaluating shop performance, and gaining insights into revenue forecasts tied to services performed and reflected in the P&L.
The company relied heavily on spreadsheets to manage its financial data. Over time, however, its growth began to outpace the limitations of spreadsheet-based planning processes. To address this challenge, the company engaged Spaulding Ridge to help establish a scalable planning foundation, that could connect operational drivers to financial outcomes and support continued growth.
SOLUTION:
Intelligent forecasting and unified operational‑to‑financial planning
To strengthen revenue forecasting, we built an intelligent, machine learning-powered revenue model backed by the company's extensive historical dataset. The revenue model produced monthly driver-based forecasts that automatically updated as new operational and financial data flowed into the system. For new store openings, forecasts were modelled using performance patterns from comparable existing locations. Planners could adjust or override the forecasts based on their own expertise.
Anchored in operational drivers, we calibrated rolling averages tied directly to drivers like tire and lube quantities used, roadside hours, and mechanic hours. This created full shop floor traceability across P&L lines and enabled visibility at the shop, district, division, and enterprise levels. As a result, leadership could view P&L and EBITDA performance at any level of granularity, breaking it down by store maturity, scenario, and time horizon, all from the same model.
We also enabled the company to tightly link workforce decisions to financial impact, with wages flowing directly from technicians and staff counts using general ledger‑derived cost‑per‑head rates. This allowed planners to evaluate staffing efficiency at each location based on service mix and workload, comparing actuals to forecasts to identify gaps and optimize headcount.
RESULTS:
A performance‑driven planning model
The solution delivered exactly what the team needed — a unified, operationally grounded financial planning environment. The truck care company now has:
- A single financial model and one version of truth for their business, rolling from individual shops to the total company, eliminating the previous spreadsheets entirely.
- Automatic surfacing of underperforming shops, resulting in shifting from reactive reviews to proactive performance management.
- Improved collaboration between finance and operations where common factors help determine the outcomes.
- Separate planning and reporting for mature vs. non‑mature shops.
