AlixPartners

When AlixPartners' Product & Platforms (P&P) team set out to modernize their annual budgeting process, they were juggling over twenty products, dozens of stakeholders, and an overwhelming amount of spreadsheets. For Rose Luo and Kevin Chiu on the Finance & Planning team, managing this cycle meant long hours of manual consolidation, unclear ownership, and constant rounds of email and Slack messages just to confirm what was approved and what wasn't.

The budgeting process had grown increasingly complex. Each of the twenty product leaders managed their own budgets, while the F&P team manually consolidated everything into large Excel workbooks. Updates were submitted over email, revisions tracked in comment threads, and key data — like rate cards, hiring plans, and vendor spend — were constantly at risk of becoming outdated.

SimplaDocs partnered with AlixPartners to design and deliver a collaborative budgeting and forecasting platform built on Coda, tailored specifically to the firm's needs.

The solution centered around two connected spaces: a submission workspace for the 20 product and platform leads to enter and track their labor and non-labor budget requests, and an administrative workspace for the Finance & Planning team to review, approve, and report on submissions with automated roll-ups and forecasting dashboards.

Throughout the budgeting cycle, automated Slack notifications kept communication flowing — alerting users when requests were submitted, reviewed, or returned for updates. Dashboards gave leadership real-time visibility into budget allocations, trends, and forecasting scenarios.