Drivetrain’s new Conversations feature takes collaboration to a whole new level

Financial planning doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Strong collaboration between stakeholders across different departments is essential to the planning process and facilitates better decision-making.

Today, Drivetrain is launching its new Conversations feature, which:

• Provides in-platform contextual discussion to reduce communication loops
• Breaks down silos to make collaboration across departments easy
• Gives users the ability control who participates in conversations and they are shared
• Integrates with Slack to notify users instantly when their conversations are updated

Read on to learn more about Conversations in Drivetrain and how you can leverage them to make your work easier.

About Conversations in Drivetrain

Conversations is a new way to communicate privately with other members of your team or larger organization through threaded comments directly within the Drivetrain platform. Now, you can selectively share your dashboards, models, and data points with just those who need to see them. And when you’re ready, you can make them publicly available to the entire organization if needed.

At first glance, it looks like adding comments to a spreadsheet. But, it’s much more powerful than that. We’ve added some unique capabilities that go well beyond anything you can do within a spreadsheet. 

Streamlined collaboration

Drivetrain’s Conversations feature builds on the concept of threaded comments, taking them and your ability to collaborate to a new level. We combined several unique capabilities into a simple, intuitive UI so you and your team can work together in real time to run your models, crunch your numbers, and develop your reports. 

So, let’s take a look at some of the key capabilities in Conversations and how you can use them to make collaborating directly within the platform easier. 

1. Have your conversations in real time within the platform

Now, users can have multiple conversations without having to jump in and out of the platform to discuss their data. You can start a conversation on dashboards, models, or specific data points in Drivetrain. No more taking screenshots and emailing them to your team to show them what you’re looking at. Each notification takes you right to where the conversation is happening within Drivetrain.

And those conversations can happen in real time. Need to discuss the results of your model with your team? Just start a conversation and invite them in. Comments and responses appear instantly, just as if you were sitting around a table discussing it. When you’re done, you can resolve the entire conversation or retain it for later reference.

2. Have multiple conversations with different people or teams on the same data point

With the ability to have different conversations on the same data point, different discussions don’t get mixed up in a single thread like they would in a spreadsheet application. A single thread for each conversation makes them much easier to follow. Each person that clicks on the existing conversations option will see only those conversations they’re participating in, so your conversations stay private when they need to be.

3. You get to control who’s participating in your conversations

For example, let’s say you’ve spotted what looks like a possible error in your team’s calculations. How do you verify that? If you’re still using spreadsheets, you could just attach a comment directly to the cell containing the potential error. The problem is, everyone with access to that spreadsheet will see it. Do you really want to call attention to something that may or may not be a real issue? Probably not.

With Conversations in Drivetrain, this problem doesn’t exist. While Drivetrain provides easy access to key information for anyone in the organization, it also gives users very granular control over who they communicate with inside the platform. You can share your conversations with specific users or the whole organization, either from the start or mid-stream through the discussion. You get to choose.

4. Never miss an important discussion

You never have to worry about missing anything because Conversations is integrated with Slack. When you’re not working within the platform, you’ll instantly be notified when a comment is added to one of your conversations or when you’re added to a new conversation. Within the Drivetrain platform, you’ll now have a central comments section where you can quickly find notifications for all the conversations you’re involved in. In addition, users can edit/delete their own comments to ensure their responses are always up to date. 

Let’s start a conversation!

Drivetrain is a strategic finance platform designed to help finance teams make faster, confident decisions, identify bottlenecks, and course-correct more quickly. With Drivetrain’s new Conversations feature, we’re redefining how FP&A teams communicate and collaborate to make their work easier, faster, and more reliable. If you’re a current Drivetrain user, log in today to see everything you can do with Conversations. And, if you’re not using Drivetrain yet, let’s start a conversation today. We’d love to show you how easy FP&A can be!