Learn how Lauren Mellish turned lengthy financial reports into easy-to-digest visualizations for busy board members. This transformation not only saved time but also improved board engagement with company metrics.
Lauren Mellish is the Head of Finance and Operations at Atomic.io, an in-app messaging platform that helps you reach your customers right in your app. As the head of a small team handling finance, operations, and compliance, Lauren is responsible for presenting critical business metrics to both the board and employees.
Atomic’s board members, who typically serve on multiple boards, were struggling to digest lengthy financial reports.
“When you sit on 10 boards, that’s a lot of paperwork to read,” Lauren explains. The traditional board pack, complete with P&L statements and budget reports, wasn’t serving their needs efficiently. The issue was trying to ease their pain by giving them something smaller to digest.”
After experimenting with other platforms, Lauren discovered Databox. What caught her attention was Databox’s ability to create professional-looking visualizations without requiring technical expertise.
“It looked really professional and super pretty,” Lauren shares. “I’m an accountant, not an engineer. For me, Looker Studio was all over the place. I really liked how Databox just made it easy for anyone to be able to use it and come out with something that looked primo.”
As the sole Databox user at Atomic, Lauren quickly implemented the platform, starting with financial dashboards and expanding to other metrics. What began as a solution for financial reporting evolved into a comprehensive reporting system covering product, engineering, sales, and customer success metrics.
The transformation was dramatic. “They were absolutely blown away,” Lauren recalls. The impact was so significant that the director of their VC firm, one of New Zealand’s largest, requested Lauren to train his team so they could implement Databox across their entire portfolio of companies.
The solution delivered multiple benefits:
“Being able to take information which may not ordinarily be understood and present it in a really meaningful way has been really great,” Lauren notes. “The team enjoys it, and it’s been instrumental in providing our board with really great reports.”
For companies facing similar challenges with data visualization and reporting, Lauren’s recommendation is clear: “100% go for it. If you want a professional-looking dashboard that’s easy to build with lots of different visualizations and flexibility, I would go Databox. It’s cost-effective and key to how we make all our business decisions.”