Wheelhouse unlocks new KPIs on Equals

“Live data has changed our reporting habits. We have Equals spreadsheets shared across the company so that everyone can view what the numbers are saying and where they come from. That’s a pretty powerful shift in alignment. Being able to get reliable information and act instantly is irreplaceable.” – John Maus, Head of Finance and Operations

Discovering the opportunity

Wheelhouse is a software company that helps short term and vacation rental property managers optimize their revenue. Their software includes a fully transparent and customizable dynamic pricing platform along with business and competitive intelligence tools. Access to data can be a real gamechanger, and John wanted to make sure that all growth metrics for Wheelhouse – such as new users on the platform and the time it takes for them to get set up – were visible across the company.

Prior to switching to Equals, John relied on an analysis in Excel, tying together data from Hubspot and a SQL database. Not only did this analysis take a few hours a week to update, it was difficult to provide real-time visibility across the organization outside of high-level dashboards and reports. Being able to tie together multiple data sources in a single location that is visible to the entire organization in real-time has been a complete gamechanger.

Implementing changes

In Equals, John has set up all of the reports to update automatically – pulling from different data sources at the same time and summarizing KPIs neatly in one view. All of the reports are shared across the company and every member of the team has insight into the query powering the numbers. Any changes in formulas or queries are transparent to anyone working in the sheet, making wins and opportunities much clearer than before.

Favorite feature: “The combination of spreadsheets married with real time data. The core tenet of the product is a real game changer: it’s a familiar way of working with my information. These dashboards we rely on are really important and can’t be built in a BI tool. Plus, the speed at which you’re shipping stuff makes me confident that this is going to be the tool of the future.”

Unlocking growth

Granting access to the data across the board has created a cultural shift for the team at Wheelhouse. Everyone can now view where the information is coming from and see how small things influence the big picture. Almost as sweet as cutting out “busy work” is the energy change on Tuesday growth meetings. “There’s no need to present how we arrived at certain figures or what the numbers are during meetings, we can now have a discussion about what we're doing and where we want to go.”

The whole analysis cadence has changed. Everyone always has an understanding of current progress, instead of waiting to make decisions at the end of the month. John is also excited to bring on the first member of the Wheelhouse Business Operations team, who will be able to get really granular with tracking data: adding different buckets of segmentation and testing out hypotheses that wouldn’t have been possible before because the data simply wasn’t accessible. “Equals has helped the company make faster and better decisions because we’re more informed. And we have expectations on the operating side of things that are really clear now. We track nearly everything in Equals: from onboarding efficiency to top of funnel metrics – there’s very little that we haven’t moved into Equals.”