Abstract
Virgin Experience Days, a pioneer in championing connection through their range of curated anti-ordinary gift experiences, faced growing complexity in forecasting and budgeting their P&L and especially their complex cashflow processes due to voucher redemption. Managing these processes in Excel created inefficiencies, risks, and limited visibility for stakeholders.
By implementing Board, the company replaced manual processes with a unified planning platform, bringing their expertise in driving connections into their financial processes by enabling fully connected forecasting, automated financial modeling, and real-time performance access for both internal teams and investors. Board enabled a step-change in planning agility, reducing scenario analysis from days to minutes and allowing finance to support real-time decision-making at board level.
Why This Story Matters
- Complex revenue models (like vouchers and deferred revenue) break traditional tools
- Finance teams still relying on Excel are exposed to risk, inefficiency, and limited scalability
- Investor expectations for real-time transparency to drive better decision making are rising
- Board enables confidence in financial planning, even in highly complex business models
- Real-time scenario simulation enables faster, more informed, confident executive decisions
Key Learnings
- Learning 1: Complex P&L forecasting requires more than spreadsheets
- Learning 2: Unified planning improves both internal efficiency and external transparency
- Learning 3: Ease of use drives adoption and long-term scalability
- Learning 4: Trusted advisory and domain expertise can outweigh lower-cost alternatives
- Learning 5: Real-time scenario planning transforms how finance supports executive decision-making
The Company
Virgin Experience Days inspires its customers to choose connection through a curated range of Anti-Ordinary gift experiences, from theatre and music events, to sky diving, spa days, cookery, escape rooms and unexpected moments like goat yoga. Designed to make gifting easy, meaningful and flexible, our experiences help people create lasting memories and deepen real human connection.
With a multi-market presence and a complex voucher-based business model, financial planning plays a critical role in sustaining growth and ensuring accurate reporting.
The Challenge: Managing complexity beyond Excel
As well as wanting to modernise and improve its standard FP&A processes, Virgin Experience Days has some unique complexities regarding cashflow planning due to the long lifecycle of vouchers:
- Cash is received upfront when vouchers are sold
- Costs are incurred when experiences are redeemed by the recipient who is often not the original purchaser, as vouchers are frequently given as gifts
- Redemption can be delayed, expire, or be extended
- VAT is triggered upon redemption rather than at the point of sale
- Cash flow timing is complex, with revenue received upfront and supplier payments often occurring up to 12 months later
This creates a highly complex financial environment that requires precise tracking and forecasting.
Previously, these processes were managed in Excel, which limited scalability and efficiency:
- Complex redemption tracking across multiple scenarios
- Inability to produce fully integrated financial statements dynamically across entities and scenarios
- Limited forecasting accuracy
- High risk of errors
- Lack of real-time visibility for stakeholders
- Limited ability to plan at a granular level across products and customer cohorts
- Slow scenario planning cycles, delaying business-critical decisions
Simon Ashbell
We were dealing with layered complexity across redemption, extensions, and VAT. Excel just couldn’t keep up.
Why Virgin Experience Days opted for Board
While Simon was already familiar with Board from a previous company, Virgin Experience Days undertook a structured evaluation to validate the right fit for their current requirements. Board was selected based on criteria like ease of use, flexibility, and the ability to handle complex financial models.
Board stood out for its ability to:
- Ease of use enabling internal teams to build and adapt models independently
- Ability to unify financial planning and analysis (FP&A) with operational planning
- Proven experience with complex financial modeling
- Trusted advisory approach built strong CFO-level confidence
- Custom demo clearly showed how Board could handle VAT and redemption logic
Board’s scalability was a key factor, ensuring the platform could evolve alongside the organization’s growing planning needs.
We needed a platform that could truly handle the complexity of our business model. Board gave us that confidence — not just in the technology, but in the accuracy of the outcomes.
Simon Ashbell
The ability to give investors direct access to performance insights also played a decisive role.
Tom Owen
Having worked with Simon before, it’s great to see him return to bdg and Board in a new role – a strong sign of trust and collaboration. The project with Virgin Experience Days challenged both our team and the Board platform, which made it especially rewarding. Simon and his team have been excellent to work with; his hands-on approach and deep understanding of the system are key to unlocking the full flexibility of Board.
The Solution: A unified planning platform built for complexity
Working with Board partner better decisions group, Board provided Virgin Experience Days with a scalable, unified planning platform to manage its complex financial model.
The solution enables:
- Bottom-up 5-year planning based on customer cohorts and products
- Integrated financial statements (P&L, Balance Sheet, Cash Flow)
- Multi-entity and multi-dimensional reporting (UK, US, divisions, channels)
- Automated VAT and redemption modeling
- Real-time, multi-scenario simulation (e.g. revenue and cost variations)
- Granular planning across products, regions, and channels
- Use of historical data to improve forecast accuracy
Board enables direct interaction with the planning model at all levels. Even finance leadership can explore, adjust, and refine scenarios independently, without reliance on technical teams.
The Benefits: Accuracy, efficiency, and control
- ~90% faster scenario planning (from ~2 days to ~30 minutes)
- Real-time scenario simulation, enabling immediate decision support
- Ability to engage the board with live scenarios and multiple options
- Integrated financial planning, improving control across P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow
- Improved forecast accuracy through cohort-based and product-level planning
- Reduced operational risk by eliminating manual spreadsheet processes
- Enhanced investor transparency with direct access to performance data
We’ve moved from managing complexity to actually understanding and planning for it.
Simon Ashbell
Conclusion
Virgin Experience Days transformed a highly complex financial model from a fragile Excel setup into a scalable, unified continuous planning environment. With Board, the finance team now operates with confidence, accuracy, and speed, while enabling greater transparency for stakeholders.
By combining granular planning with significantly faster scenario analysis, Board enables finance to move from retrospective analysis to proactive, real-time decision support.
Outlook: Built for future expansion
The platform is already driving adoption across the organization, with business users actively identifying new use cases and opportunities to extend planning capabilities:
- Future planning by marketing channel (e.g. PPC, social, organic)
- Predictive forecasting using historical data
- Machine learning / AI capabilities
- Expansion into broader planning use cases across the business
With a unified planning platform in place, Virgin Experience Days can continuously enhance planning capabilities while maintaining control over complexity.
