Triple Crown Sports

Location:    Fort Collins, Colorado

Industry:    Event Services

About:  Triple Crown’s mission is to build a better tournament experience and run professional and organized youth and college sports events.

Challenge: The finance team spent excessive time on manual data entry and spreadsheet management, hindering their ability to perform strategic analysis.

Solution: Limelight

Key Results:  

• 98% time savings per report
• Improved accuracy
• Enhanced collaboration
• Strategic focus

The Challenge: Time Wasted, Not Invested

Triple Crown's finance team found themselves trapped in a cycle of manual data entry and spreadsheet maintenance, hindering their ability to provide timely and accurate financial insights. The laborious process of extracting data from their accounting system - Sage Intacct, manually inputting it into spreadsheets, and constantly fixing broken formulas left little room for strategic analysis and decision-making. The team knew they needed a solution that would empower them to focus on value-added activities, not just data wrangling.

Alyssa recalls printing out spreadsheets from their accounting system, and then using a ruler to match numbers from the GL to the completed events. Once she found the match, she would manually input the numbers back into her spreadsheet. Their other issue was in the lack of flexibility offered in Excel. Basic things like renaming an event or adding a GL account put a lot of stress on the rest of the templates. Given the way spreadsheets roll up, if they made a change on one, it had to be manually changed on all the others. If not, there was a risk that formulas would break, and the numbers wouldn’t roll up accurately.

The Solution

Ease of report creation was a leading factor to choosing Limelight as their solution. This feature has helped with creating reports for college coach coordinators who are responsible for just two line-items in each event. “Creating reports specifically for those people without them having to go into every single budget is huge and a really big value add to their productivity and time,” said Alyssa.

Triple Crown can now present better analysis to the board without having to manually create the reports each year. Their CFO commented that in the past reports often didn't match some GL items because of the manual way reports were created. Now, Limelight has ensured that they provide consistent, accurate information to their board every time.

This in part also comes from the increased level of collaboration between management and event directors, made possible with Limelight. Alyssa says the combination of the event directors’ knowledge of their territory and customers, with the input of the CEO and CFO to make sure that the company is growing, helps them get the most accurate budgets presented to the board.

By pulling all their information into one platform, Alyssa says that the team can now see the correlation between their different financial KPIs and business performance. She hopes to expand on this capability in the future to start implementing more efficient practices within the company. By getting more done in less time, they can continue to focus on areas that will allow the company to grow in the future.

The Impact

Limelight's impact on Triple Crown extends far beyond just saving time. It's about empowering the finance team to become strategic partners, providing the insights and analysis needed to drive the company's growth. 

Alyssa sums it up best: "The thought of forecasting forward or doing any analytics wasn't even an option before. Now, I'm no longer worried about breaking anything or making sure the formulas are right. Limelight has been a game-changer for our productivity and trust."