CHALLENGE

As the organization approached year-end, finance leadership faced significant pressure to deliver an accurate, defensible budget under compressed timelines. Existing FP&A processes were highly manual, spreadsheet-driven, and lacked a single source of truth across operating units, creating limited visibility into historical performance and forward-looking assumptions. Misalignment between finance, operations, and leadership increased the risk of delays, reduced confidence in outputs, and constrained the organization’s ability to support informed decision-making at a critical point in the planning cycle.

OUR ROLE

ETONIEN was engaged to provide embedded FP&A execution support during a high-stakes year-end budgeting cycle. Acting as an extension of the internal finance team, ETONIEN partnered directly with finance leadership and executive stakeholders to design and operationalize a more disciplined budgeting and forecasting process. The team led detailed account-level analysis, translated executive assumptions into actionable financial models, and built a scalable budgeting framework within existing BI and ERP environments to improve accuracy, transparency, and speed.

SOLUTIONS

• Budget Execution & Validation: Built and validated the year-end operating budget directly within the BI platform to establish a single source of truth.
• Scenario Modeling: Developed Excel-based budgeting and scenario-planning models to evaluate tradeoffs and sensitivities.
• Payroll & Cost Modeling: Loaded payroll at the individual level, incorporating PTO, holidays, and cost drivers for improved labor visibility.
• Margin & Variability Analysis: Performed P&L variability and margin analysis to identify key cost and profitability drivers.
• Process Optimization: Mapped finance processes, identified waste, and streamlined budgeting workflows.
• EBITDA Impact Prioritization: Created an EBITDA-focused impact matrix to align investments with highest-return initiatives.

OUTCOME

The diligence supported investment committee review of the proposed $48M transaction by stress-testing assumptions and identifying material risks, rather than confirming the investment case. ETONIEN’s analysis highlighted execution complexity driven by multi-party operating dynamics, environmental exposure, and transition management requirements, which materially impacted risk-adjusted returns. While baseline economics showed potential upside under ideal conditions, the assessment demonstrated that downside protections and scalability assumptions were insufficiently robust relative to the execution risk profile, ultimately informing leadership’s decision not to move forward with the transaction.