Brian Downs has spent his whole career helping Shift4 Payments thrive. In his 16 years on the finance team at Shift4—an innovative payments processing firm—he’s held managerial positions, director roles and now serves as Senior VP of Finance and Treasury. As Shift4 continues to blossom into a shining star of the payments industry, Brian always ensures finance fulfils its purpose as a planning powerhouse by delivering insights and bottom-line analysis on millions of processed transactions.

However, prior to implementing Vena, meaningful profitability analysis was a lot harder to execute for Brian and his colleagues in finance. In those days, tedious copy-and-paste spreadsheet processes meant it took a whole week to generate reports after the month-end close was complete. As a result, reported metrics would be outdated by the time they were shared with stakeholders—and finance didn’t have the bandwidth to focus on making the business more efficient.

“We process billions of dollars in volume. We couldn’t afford to spend all our time fetching and validating data. We needed to be analyzing data,” says Brian. “We’re essentially counting pennies in this business, but pennies can hide in big datasets like ours. If we’re not really digging into our numbers, we might miss little variances highlighting that something is off. And over millions of transactions, those pennies can translate into very real dollars.”

Brian also grappled with input errors before Vena, which he attributes to the sheer complexity of consolidating GL data with reporting hierarchies in Excel. After a series of major acquisitions at Shift4 with even more growth on the horizon, Brian knew he needed a solution to help their planning process flourish at scale. 

“We had one Excel workbook that only one person could work in at a time. This lent itself to an unacceptable degree of natural human error,” he says. “It just wasn’t sustainable for the reporting demands being placed on my team.”

In June 2020, after months of rigorous effort working remotely during the global pandemic, Shift4 Payments successfully went public (NYSE: FOUR). The IPO was a huge undertaking for the entire finance and accounting group, but Brian says it was all made easier thanks to the reporting structure they’d developed in Vena.

“One of the heavier lifts during this process was revisiting our historical financials. It was so important for my team to be fully in sync with the accounting team,” he says. “Vena gave us the ability to input topside adjustments via a template and give us our first system-generated historical results under PCAOB audit standards. That very same formatting is now in our Ks and Qs.”

Today, Brian and his cross-functional colleagues are collaborating better than ever before as they all continue to adjust to the realities of public company life. Instead of rushing out reports that are based on outdated actuals, Shift4’s finance team is a partner to every arm of the business—giving decision makers the data they need to lead confidently through this next phase of growth. 

“For me, all of this really boils down to better outcomes for the business. When everybody is rowing in the same direction and with the same rhythm, it’s a smoother ride,” says Brian. “You need reliable infrastructure and that’s what we have with Vena. When I think back to when we were a small company, I still marvel at how we even did anything back then, compared to how professionally the team carries out our business today.”