First Water Finance Accelerates FP&A Data Transformation with CData Sync and Microsoft Fabric

The challenge: Managing disparate environments for mid-market FP&A Teams without IT help

First Water Finance helps mid-market companies modernize their FP&A processes by streamlining data integration across their business systems as a managed service or through one-time improvement projects. Through Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake, they establish a central source of truth that improves data quality and accelerates time-to-insight for their clients’ analytics needs.

However, significant skillset gaps and data infrastructure exist in current accounting and finance teams, particularly in technology/system experience, workflow automation, artificial intelligence (AI) use, and FP&A skills. As First Water Finance CEO Ben Lehrer explains, “Finance teams need to become more technical to spend less time being technical. This paradox is particularly challenging for emerging and mid-market businesses facing resource constraints.” Finance teams also bear the burden of managing system and data fragmentation as a ‘way of life’ in fast-paced organizations pursuing growth, acquisitions, and/or technology advancements. First Water helps these companies by building out the technology infrastructure needed to connect and manage their financial data.

As a partner to many high-growth and investor-backed companies, First Water consistently observes acute data fragmentation challenges and process gaps that must be solved to enable proactive, high-impact dialogue and meet stakeholder demands for information. Clients use various accounting and ERP platforms, including NetSuite, Intacct, Dynamics, QuickBooks, and a number of other operational systems. This fragmentation creates a web of data sources that need to be centralized and prepped for end-user needs.

First Water’s clients often rely on manual processes to keep their financial data in sync across systems, creating bottlenecks, increasing redundant updates across systems, and reducing time available for analysis. With multiple systems to maintain and increasing demands for faster insights, teams struggle to keep pace while preparing for growing data infrastructure and analytics needs.

The solution: Unified data integration with Cdata Sync and Microsoft Fabric

First Water implemented CData Sync for clients as their primary data integration platform, creating a standardized FP&A data layer through structured replication into Microsoft Fabric through Sync’s OneLake connector. This solution transformed their approach to data management and integration across multiple systems.

The implementation enabled automated data pipelines from various enterprise resource planning (ERP) or accounting systems (NetSuite, Intacct, Dynamics, QuickBooks, etc.) into Microsoft Fabric. This structured replication approach also included pre-modeled data from customer relationship management (CRM) platforms like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Pipedrive, establishing a centralized data management system with medallion architecture – progressively improving the structure and quality of data as it flows through each layer of the architecture (from Bronze to Silver to Gold layer tables). This architecture provided streamlined schema management and data transformation capabilities ensuring seamless integration with Microsoft’s Power Platform.

The solution’s flexibility proved particularly valuable for organizations anticipating future system changes. As Lehrer notes, “CData Sync checked all the boxes, even launching its dedicated OneLake connector as we started assessing partners. CData offers the connector set, underlying source data availability, structured replication engine, and flexibility we sought in seeking a cost-effective ‘pure play’ solution that delivers maximum return on investment (ROI) for our partner companies.”

“The combination of CData Sync and OneLake offers organizations an effective and achievable way to centralize, organize, and automate the data underpinning critical FP&A processes. As finance teams take more responsibility in managing the bridge from data capture to end-user consumption and continuously improving time-to-value, these tools and capabilities are powerful enablers to increase finance’s impact across organizations.”

—Ben Lehrer, CEO, First Water Finance

The result: Accelerated time-to-value and enhanced financial visibility

The implementation of CData Sync has delivered transformative results across various client scenarios. For one healthcare customer, CData Sync and OneLake eliminated redundant manual updates across systems, reducing update effort by as much as 88 percent and ensuring one-click, consistent data access for all team members. By removing manual extraction requirements, centralizing access points, and delivering data ready for individual process needs, the finance team automated recurring processes, eliminated process pain associated with multiple refreshes, delivered outputs earlier, and freed up team members to invest more time in critical thinking, bringing more value to performance review and planning dialogues.

Customers also experienced a dramatic shift from monthly to daily reporting capabilities. This enhancement enabled near real-time sales visibility through Power BI dashboards, fundamentally changing how the organization manages ongoing sales performance dialogues and helping sales leaders pivot activities proactively.

CData Sync automated data flows for another one of First Water’s clients (a public affairs firm) from their accounting system into OneLake, enabling daily sales reporting through Power BI instead of monthly manual updates. This real-time visibility helped teams make faster, more informed decisions about business performance. The solution’s expanded data capabilities allowed the organization to analyze ledger progression patterns, identifying opportunities for accounting process improvements and enabling more accurate flash reporting prior to completion of month-end close.

The overall business impact has been substantial across all implementations:

• Significantly reduced implementation time for new FP&A processes
• Enhanced data control and future flexibility through owned data repositories, with access to much more granular data as compared to the native reporting modules offered by accounting and ERP tools
• Improved scalability of central sources of truth
• Enabled new value-added analyses through structured dataset replication
• Increased finance team resilience to future system changes
• Created a foundation for future AI testing and integration

Looking forward

First Water continues to expand its use of CData Sync and Microsoft Fabric, helping more clients advance their data maturity and FP&A capabilities. The solution’s scalability and connection-based pricing model provide predictability and cost-effectiveness as client data volumes and tech stacks grow and evolve.

Experience the power of CData Sync

Transform your organization’s FP&A operations with CData Sync. Whether managing complex system environments, supporting rapid growth, or preparing for future system changes, CData Sync provides the reliability and flexibility you need. Contact us today to learn more about how CData can accelerate your Microsoft Fabric implementation.