How Cerebral Therapeutics Gained Improved Financial Insights With ProcureDesk

Cerebral Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to developing innovative therapies for refractory neurological diseases. Founded by experts in the fields of neuroscience, neurosurgery and drug delivery, Cerebral Therapeutics is pioneering intracerebroventricular (ICV) therapies for people with neurological diseases. Our investigational drug therapies and companion biomarker strategies are enabled by the Company’s proprietary technology, ICVRx™.

Biotech

USA

0-200

THE CHALLENGE

Maintaining Spend Control In A Growing Company

Cerebral Therapeutics is a clinical-stage, venture-backed startup in the life sciences space, aiming to be the first company to bring a direct-to-brain delivered epilepsy drug to market. As with many start-up companies, Cerebral Therapeutics is developing a lot of its processes from the ground up, and evolving these as the company grows.

As with many companies in the life sciences industry, a vast majority of Cerebral Therapeutics’ spending is to third-party vendors and service providers. From day one, the company implemented manual spending processes, from POs generated on Microsoft Word, to Excel sheets for tracking expenses. As Cerebral Therapeutics grew, it became clear that these manual processes were no longer sustainable.

The manual accounting processes in place at Cerebral Therapeutics were time-consuming and error-prone, particularly as the company scaled. In fact, management would have needed to hire 2-3 additional administrative personnel to keep up with the manual processes currently in place for PO generation, order tracking, and reconciliation.

Another big challenge for Cerebral Therapeutics was the lack of insight the team had into their spend analysis. Whether it was capturing and tracking cumulative spending against POs, establishing how much had been spent per vendor over time, or use existing data to project future budgeting and cash flow management, Cerebral Therapeutics needed a solution for quickly generating these reports.

“We needed to know how much we had spent by vendor over time, and with the systems we had, it was extremely difficult to figure that out. That was the impetus for me to say, “Hey, we have to do something different here.” When we can’t answer basic questions, it’s a big problem.”

Guy Anthony

CFO – Cerebral Therapeutics

The easiest way To implement tighter Spend controls

“I think the biggest impact ProcureDesk has had for us is being able to avoid hiring people to continue to support our manual processes. We would otherwise have had to hire one to two more administrative personnel to keep scaling what we were doing.”

Guy Anthony

CFO – Cerebral Therapeutics
THE SOLUTION

A Scalable Cost Control System

Cerebral Therapeutics needed procurement software that could automate its current manual processes, and met core requirements, including:

Vendor-by-vendor cost analysis reporting over time Automated PO generation, order tracking, and reconciliation processes Built-in integration with Xero accounting software

By using ProcureDesk to automate processes that were previously performed manually, Cerebral Therapeutics streamlined day-to-day operations and saved significant bandwidth.

ProcureDesk provided solutions for each challenge Cerebral Therapeutics faced as a growing company, from automating day-to-day business accounting processes, right up to long-term planning and financial analysis.

Quick Implementation With Ongoing Support

For Cerebral Therapeutics, making the decision to automate its financial processes with procurement software has paid dividends.

Streamlined, Error-Free Ordering And Reconciliation

Relying on Word documents for POs and Excel spreadsheets for order tracking left a lot of room for error in Cerebral Therapeutics’ processes. With reliable procurement software, Cerebral Therapeutics didn’t have to worry about potential administrative issues like double payments if an invoice came in more than once, or late payments due to inefficient reconciliation processes.

Significant Cost Savings Due To Avoiding The Need For Additional Administrative Staff

To continue with manual purchasing and invoicing processes as Cerebral Therapeutics scaled, the company out of necessity would have needed to hire additional administrative personnel. Alternatively, the burden could have been spread among existing employees, resulting in friction and potential office morale issues. Instead, Cerebral Therapeutics was able to eliminate manual purchasing and invoicing processes. By instead replacing these processes with ProcureDesk’s automated systems, Cerebral Therapeutics saw a significant financial saving by reducing the amount of time and personnel dedicated to these tasks.

Detailed Spend Analysis Reporting For Forecasting

or life sciences companies like Cerebral Therapeutics, it’s essential for management to know the cost of various stages of drug or device development, and the overall cost of bringing a treatment to the clinical trial phase. This allows for forward planning, forecasting, and budgeting for the next drug, device, or indication.

With Cerebral Therapeutics’ initial manual system, this type of analytical information was not readily available. Now with ProcureDesk, Cerebral Therapeutics can analyze spend on a vendor level, or analyze the costs of each stage of drug/device development. The data generated from these reports can be utilized for everything from vendor negotiation to forward planning and forecasting.

If you would like to experience a struggle-free purchasing & invoicing process, click on the link below to schedule a demo with one of our product specialists.

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