One of the biggest things we've got today is being able to do scenario planning

in real time. So if the board decides at the last minute of our budget process

to ask me to add a million pounds to our forecast, I'm able to

go and, with a few clicks of the buttons in Board, to do that in half an hour.

Previously, that would've taken us maybe two days in our previous Excel model,

which meant that really, we couldn't be adaptive and flexible in our planning

process. At Virgin Experience Days, we believe

that disconnection is becoming ordinary in society, and

we're trying to change that by championing connection through our products

and people and communities.

So we inspire our customers to choose connection through a

curated range of anti-ordinary gift experiences.

So we make gifting easy, flexible, and

meaningful, and we also help people to create real lasting

memories by deepening real human connections.

When I joined the company, we were planning everything on Excel, so we

weren't able to plan as granularly as we wanted.

We wanted to get down really to the product level.

And we also had some unique things about our business.

So things like planning our cash flow is quite difficult because we have to plan

not only for when the sale is going to be made, but when the customer's going to

actually redeem that voucher. So that was very difficult to plan in Excel,

and we're able to do that in a much more automated way within Board.

One of the main reasons for me that we chose Board was the fact that it

was scalable. So while we had a small use case to begin with,

we saw that we could add lots into the platform over the next few years, and it was

going to grow with us as a business.

We started off implementing FP&A, so we use it

to plan our full P&L, balance sheet, cash flow, all our

financial statements, but not just an out-the-box solution.

We are quite different because we have some complexities, so we had to

plan those bits separately and then link it all together.

We've already put new things into the platform.

So we had a phase two implementation where we expanded to plan more

granularly by region, so by location.

And going forward, we've got lots of ideas.

We're looking at planning by marketing channels.

So if somebody comes to us through PPC or through social or

organically, we want to plan for that

sale a little bit differently. Board's a tool that I can really immerse myself

in. So rather than just being high level and looking at the final

outputs, even as a CFO, it's very easy for me to delve into the system,

understand what's going on in the background, and sometimes make changes myself if

I need to change the procedures. It's very easy for me to go in and

make those amends and change our system to how I need.