How Sequoia Riverlands turned five spreadsheets into one automated cost calculator

Phil Daubenspeck is the Chief Investments and Partnerships Officer at Sequoia Riverlands Trust. He's a Rippling power user who uses the product to tackle hard business problems.

At Sequoia Riverlands Trust, we do a lot of billing out to our funders or people that we're providing services to. To bill accurately, we need a fully loaded pay rate for each employee — one that includes not just their salary, but taxes, benefits, insurance, overhead, training, time off, and more.

The problem: Scattered data across multiple spreadsheets

Every time we wanted to look at our true employee costs or project out billing rates, our team had to pull data from multiple spreadsheets and do the calculations manually.

It wasn't that we didn't have the data. We did. But stitching it together every time was incredibly time-consuming. And because the information was scattered, it was easy for things to get out of sync.

We needed a way to centralize all of that information so it would be easily accessible and automatically updated when things changed.

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The solution: An employee cost calculator app

Working with Rippling's Forward-Deployed Engineering team, we built an app that gave us the centralization we needed. Here's how we built it.

Step 1: Map out the data we need

Before meeting with the team, I had spent some time mapping out the information we'd need. When I got there, we sat down and figured out specifically where those pieces were going to land in the app. Within 20 to 30 minutes, we started building.

Step 2: Organize the data structure

Part of the challenge was figuring out how to store and organize the data so it would be easily accessible. Making it easy to update was really important to us. We talked through different approaches — if we do it this way, here are some limitations; if we do it that way, here are others.

Some of those limitations I knew about. Some I didn't. Being able to ask questions like "What if a number needs to become a currency?" or "How do we make this field work?" was really helpful.

The Rippling team was extremely knowledgeable, very friendly, and very curious about our business and the work we're doing on the ground. They were guiding the conversation and not trying to catch up with me, which was great.

Step 3: Build the app to pull and display costs

The app now holds all our data inside Rippling. For every employee, it pulls their base salary, taxes, benefits, time off, insurance, overhead (like real estate and business software expenses per spread per employee), training, and all the other costs that go into their true employment cost. 

By combining internal Rippling data with external overhead data, the app calculates a complete picture of what each employee costs us — individually and with a fully loaded pay rate. And because so much of the data already lives in Rippling, it auto-updates without us having to manage multiple spreadsheets. 

The impact

This app has completely changed how our finance and billing teams work.

Instant access to billing rates

We can now pull information virtually instantly whenever we have a question about costs. Before, our team had to pull data together and do the calculations every single time.

Better cost recovery and planning

Our app allows us to project out what billing rates will be in the future. We have a much better idea of what it costs us to operate our departments and what it costs us to employ specific people. This will help us recover more funds that are spent on the projects we're working on.

Time savings and better morale

This will make a pretty incredible impact on the time it takes for us to bill our clients. And spending less time in spreadsheets? That's for sure going to help morale around the office.