Red Sox finance team speeds budgeting, planning and reporting

Major League Baseball’s Boston Red Sox have chosen a cloud-based enterprise performance management (EPM) solution in the front office to streamline budgeting and cut costs.

The Red Sox organization has deployed Host Analytics’ EPM solution to speed and centralize the budgeting, planning and reporting process. The Red Sox finance team manages budgets and planning year-round for concessions, travel, merchandise sales, players and staff salaries, ticket sales and more. Like many corporate finance departments, the team was overwhelmed with Excel spreadsheets that were prone to error and filled out by multiple managers. Despite a desire to analyze the data and get as much from the numbers as they could, the finance team found reporting so labor-intensive that they did it just twice a year.

Ryan Scafidi, senior director of financial planning and operations for the Boston Red Sox, says, “Host Analytics allows us to be more collaborative and efficient. Because we’re able to be more proactive and forecast over the course of a year, we have been able to save an additional half-million to $1 million in expenses that otherwise would have been water under the bridge in the old, Excel-driven world.”

With the new solution, the finance team works more collaboratively with each department for planning and analysis, and reporting time is minutes versus weeks, Host Analytics reports. The team can develop monthly forecasts and provide on-demand financial reports.

In addition, the team has time to dig into data-driven planning. For example, finance regularly reviews data from the team’s ticketing database and Host Analytics to create projections from historical analysis. They use those insights to make adjustments that can ultimately make a big impact on the bottom line.

“We can look at whether we’re on plan and how current performance compares to last year,” Scafidi says, “and if we’re trending in the wrong direction, we can raise the red flag and course correct.”

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