A conversation with YipitData’s CFO and Finance Manager on why “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.”
Budgeting season is never just budgeting season. It’s forecasting season, planning season, and fighting nonstop fires season. (“Why do we have 50 different Google Sheets again?”)
In this webinar, Tom Ruello (VP GTM at SpendHound) sat down with CFO Steven Seperson and Finance Manager Lizhong Zhang to unpack how YipitData overhauled its annual budgeting process, centralized SaaS visibility, and reclaimed nearly 200 hours of time by shifting away from manual reporting.
Get the full breakdown below, and rewatch the webinar at any time.
YipitData is one of the world’s top business performance intelligence providers built on turning billions of consumer and market signals into actionable insights for investors and enterprises. Backed by $500M in funding, the company has grown from a 20 person startup into an organization of 700+ employees serving global enterprises.
It’s a scale-intensive business: multi-entity operations and a software ecosystem that grows as quickly as the company does. That complexity is exactly why disciplined budgeting is a prerequisite for operating at a billion-dollar scale.
When YipitData grew quickly, budgeting that worked for 50 people didn’t scale to 500. The team needed a way to shift from collecting numbers to interpreting them.
As Steven put it: “I don’t want the budgeting process to be viewed as an administrative task. I want it to be a strategic planning process.”
Every budgeting journey has a beginning. For YipitData, it starts early fall with a five-year strategic model, including:
“We kick off in September with a top-down model evaluating strategic initiatives over the next five years,” Lizhong explained. “That framework shapes how we think about the bottoms-up budget for the upcoming year.”
Historically, the team maintained 50+ Google Sheets, each owned by a different department. Every month, FP&A updated actuals manually, which made visibility slow and tedious.
Lizhong described the “before” state: “A lot of manual work just to get to the place where we could make decisions.” Today, submissions flow through a tighter system using:
Both Steven and Lizhong emphasized one core theme: centralized visibility is non-negotiable. “You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” Steven stated memorably.
Before SpendHound, a basic question like Who owns this tool? could take hours or days. “Sometimes a vendor would show up and you have no idea who bought it,” Lizhong said. “You have to go on a goose chase.”
Multiply that by dozens of owners, and you get 197 hours lost each cycle. Now:
“We all have this grounded truth now,” Lizhong said. “Otherwise, it’s impossible for a lean team to keep up with thousands of vendors.”
For Steven, one of the biggest improvements came from adopting a standardized intake process. “You want visibility and controls upstream, not just after spend is already in the ERP.”
SpendHound routes requests by threshold (lightweight for small purchases, heavier for six-figure commitments) and gives him line of sight.
“The approval workflows are something we use every day,” he continued. “It gives visibility and control before something becomes a contract.”
During Q&A, someone asked: What part of budgeting takes the longest?
“It’s not the actuals,” Steven replied. “Budgeting is planning for the future — aligning on key initiatives, ensuring we have the right talent, partnering across the business so everyone knows the plan.”
That alignment work is only possible when you’re not underwater in data prep.
Once SpendHound was connected to NetSuite, YipitData’s finance team finally had what they had been missing: one place to see every vendor, every contract, every renewal date, every owner, and every usage signal.
SpendHound supported a mix of new purchases and renewals by providing benchmarking data, surfacing redundancies, and identifying savings opportunities across YipitData’s software stack.
The impact:
“Now that we have SpendHound, there is an application we all leverage,” Lizhong said. “It has permissioning that allows everyone to see what they need to see.”
If YipitData’s journey proves anything, it’s that budgeting gets easier when finance teams have complete visibility, clean data, and one unified system for software spend. Long before budget season begins.
If you’re ready to cut dozens (or hundreds) of hours from budget prep and build true confidence in your numbers, then now’s the best time to get started.
Start using SpendHound for free, and make this year’s budgeting process your most strategic yet.
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