How Vayda Reduced Financial Reporting Time From 2 Weeks to Half a Day with KNIME
Vayda helps farmers increase productivity and profitability with their data-driven approach to regenerative agriculture.
Summary
The challenge:
- Disjointed data systems, manual reporting processes, and inefficient financial tracking across farm operations
The solution:
- Used KNIME Analytics Platform with KNIME Team plan to automate financial reporting.
The results:
- Reduced monthly financial reporting time from two weeks to half a day.
- Daily reports generated every two hours during peak seasons.
- Quick identification and fixing of data entry errors.
Challenge: Manual and error-prone financial reporting
The accounting team at Vayda relied on multiple systems. These systems did not integrate well and required labor-intensive manual data consolidation for financial reporting.
The team created budgeting and forecasting reports manually using Excel which was time consuming. Additionally, they were unable to effectively connect historical data with forecasting tools which made it difficult to track farm profitability and sustainability metrics precisely.
At Vayda, everyone from the farm operations teams to company leadership needed financial reports on different schedules — some daily, others monthly. But the way reports were being generated was slow, making it hard to keep up.
Moreover, with multiple personnel involved in operational tracking, discrepancies were common. Product usage quantities, inventory entries, and financial records frequently contained inaccuracies, preventing reliable operational decision-making.
Solution: Automated financial reporting with KNIME Team plan
Vayda adopted KNIME Analytics Platform combined with KNIME Team plan’s automation capabilities.
KNIME Analytics Platform’s built-in connectors enabled Vayda to connect to all of its disparate data sources, bridging gaps between farm operations data and financial records.
The accounting team built visual data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) workflows in KNIME to create forecasting and budgeting reports with metrics like dollars per acre and product usage efficiency.
These workflows were set to run automatically on a schedule using the KNIME Team plan so that the metrics could be delivered to stakeholders based on their desired frequency with minimal manual intervention.
The team connected KNIME to PowerBI to generate final report visualizations.
Automation with KNIME Team plan helped the accounting team easily manage the peak harvesting season, when reports needed to be generated every few hours.
Visual workflows let them quickly identify discrepancies, such as incorrect inventory entries, preventing potentially costly mistakes.
Results:
By using KNIME to automate financial reporting processes, they were able to see significant improvements such as:
- Monthly financial reporting reduced from two weeks to half a day
- Daily reports generated every two hours during peak seasons
- Quick identification and fixing of data entry errors