The rise of the data-driven business has solved many problems but introduced some new ones too — while companies now have access to more information than ever before, they now struggle with things like disconnected and siloed data, disparate financial processes and lack of reliable decision-making tools in the modern business environment. OneStream Software, based in Birmingham, Michigan, aims to address these problems through a unified finance platform, with the ultimate goal of replacing the variety of legacy corporate performance management applications, cloud point solutions and spreadsheets with a single source of truth for stakeholders.
In 2012, OneStream was founded by veterans from the CPM solutions market who saw an opportunity to create a unified platform that could address a broad range of business challenges and replace multiple applications to reduce complexity and streamline the finance function. It has spent over a decade growing and improving its product while expanding its offices across the U.S., Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In 2019 it reached unicorn status with funding from KKR Investment, which pushed its valuation past $1 billion.
CEO Tom Shea discussed OneStream's recent victories as well as its future goals with Accounting Today.
How would you best describe what your company does?
Shea: OneStream Software provides a market-leading intelligent finance platform, built to enable confident decision-making and maximize business impact. We empower both finance and operations teams with actionable insights every day. Our corporate performance management platform unifies data management, financial close and consolidation, planning, reporting, analytics and machine learning to help today's businesses compete in a dynamic landscape.
What is in your product line, and what is your flagship product?
Shea: Our flagship product is the OneStream platform, which empowers customers by unifying finance processes and data and offering actionable financial signals, forecasts and analytics. This eliminates silos and establishes a single source of truth for all stakeholders by replacing multiple legacy CPM applications, cloud point solutions and spreadsheets.
As a complement to the platform, we also have the OneStream Solution Exchange, which helps customers extend their investment with more than 75 pre-built solutions built by OneStream, our partners and customers that are ready to be downloaded, configured and deployed to quickly address new requirements. These range from business to productivity to operations solutions.
One new solution we're excited about is Sensible Machine Learning, an Auto ML solution that enhances the speed and accuracy of demand planning and forecasting and creates a better understanding of key business drivers. Sensible ML seamlessly integrates into current planning processes to enhance forecast accuracy and efficiency. By providing greater transparency and trust to users, these capabilities boost agility, time to value, and enterprise value related to operational planning processes. This solution caters to the growing demand among OneStream customers to align financial planning with operational planning processes like sales planning, demand planning, and sales and operations planning. Customers can incorporate Sensible ML effortlessly into their planning, reporting and dashboard processes, enabling improved insights and more confident decision-making. With Sensible ML, organizations can transform their enterprise planning processes by making ML forecasting accessible and intuitive for FP&A teams and operational analysts.
What product of yours do you think should be better known among accountants?
Shea: While OneStream has expanded our customer base and market recognition in recent years, we're not as well known as the mega-vendors we compete with, so are always striving to expand market awareness of our company and platform. But one of the specific solutions that we offer that could really benefit more accountants is our Account Reconciliations MarketPlace solution. Many of our customers have downloaded and evaluated the solution, then deployed it to replace spreadsheets and point solutions they may have been using. This has saved their companies real money and streamlines the financial close process by aligning account reconciliations with the rest of the financial close, consolidation and reporting process.
What was the last big initiative or project your company completed?
Shea: As I mentioned earlier, OneStream recently introduced the Solution Exchange, which someone recently described as an "app store for CFOs." It is an innovative capability that enhances the development experience for OneStream's ecosystem by incorporating partner-built and community shared solutions alongside our existing OneStream-created MarketPlace solutions. Our Solution Exchange is designed to expedite the creation and implementation of new solutions for our customers, thereby maximizing the returns on their platform investments. There are three distinct solution portals: MarketPlace, PartnerPlace and OpenPlace. These portals provide a range of resources and offerings to cater to the diverse needs of users and foster collaborative growth within the OneStream community.
What is the most exciting new thing you're working on?
Shea: OneStream has been investing heavily in the past few years in incorporating AI and ML capabilities into our platform, in order to break down the barriers to adoption of these advanced technologies and to make them more easily accessible and adoptable by finance and accounting teams. Our initial work in this area resulted in the creation of our Sensible ML solution for demand planning and forecasting. Most recently we have been working with generative AI, creating a solution we are initially calling Sensible GPT. In fact, at our recent OneStream Splash user conference we demonstrated several use cases for the technology.
One of these use cases involved having the tool consume OneStream documentation, white papers, books and other content and using it to provide technical and application assistance to users entering questions via a chat interface. Another use case was based on the tool consuming corporate information, then answering questions about legal contracts, sales forecasts and the impact of investments in advertising on the P&L. We are early in the lifecycle of large language models such as ChatGPT, and the technology is evolving quickly — but the potential is clearly compelling.
What differentiates your company from others similar to it? What makes you different? Unique, even?
Shea: What makes OneStream different from other vendors in the CPM market is that we provide the only truly unified platform that can integrate financial and operational data to support not just monthly reporting and planning cycles, but also provide daily and weekly operational insights to managers across the enterprise to support decisions that can impact the month-end results. We call this concept CPM+. Another key differentiator is that you can write software on our software platform — so we are able to offer a Solution Exchange that includes over 75 OneStream and partner-developed solutions that customers can download, configure and deploy into the platform to quickly address new requirements in finance and beyond.
What is the biggest tech challenge facing accountants today?
Shea: With all of the buzz in the market about AI and automation, many accounting and finance professionals may fear for their jobs being replaced by these tools, but we don't see it this way. At OneStream, we see these technologies as providing an opportunity to free up accounting staff from mundane tasks and make them more productive so they can focus on more value-added analysis and decision support for the enterprise. We are approaching our R&D around these technologies to support this concept.
What is the biggest challenge with selling to this market? Of being a company whose customers are primarily accountants?
Shea: Given many of our employees are ex-accountants ourselves (including me), we see the challenges and pressures they face and are always looking to make life easier and more productive for accounting and finance professionals. We also recognize that accountants are often risk-averse to change and will hold onto legacy systems and processes well past their useful life. We try to make the transition process as seamless as possible for them so they can embrace change and look at the opportunity new technologies can provide to reduce costs, streamline processes, increase productivity and enhance the value accountants can deliver to the business.
OneStream at a glance:
North American Headquarters Office: 191 N. Chester St., Birmingham, Michigan 48009
Employees: 1,300
Customers: 1200
Implementation partners: 230
Website:
This has been part of our regular Vendor Spotlight series. To see previous Vendor Spotlights,
