Best Of

We’ve reached a meaningful new milestone in Board Community: 9,000 members!

Whether you joined recently or have been part of the Board Community through every phase of our growth, we’re genuinely so glad you’re here. This milestone reflects the collective knowledge, curiosity, collaboration, and engagement of Board customers, partners, experts, and team members around the world.

Community is built for you, the Board ecosystem. It is your place to ask questions, find practical resources, learn from experts, explore what’s new, and connect with others who are planning, building, and transforming with Board every day.

As we celebrate this benchmark, we also want to recognize the momentum happening across Community. We’ve been listening to your feedback and continuing to improve how you find the information, guidance, and inspiration you need to succeed.

Here are a few of my personal favorite updates:

Customer Success Hub: Your dedicated place for practical Board guidance—led by @Danylo Pleshkov. From short videos and quick wins to release highlights, office hours, recordings, and curated resources, this space is designed to help you find the right support faster.

Whether you’re looking for best practices, ways to optimize your current solution, or guidance that helps your team get more value from Board, the Customer Success Hub brings together resources that support your ongoing success.

Board 15: Bringing new capabilities and enhancements to help customers plan with more intelligence, flexibility, and impact.

With AI capabilities, the new Board for Microsoft 365 Add-in, Operational Forecasting, Presentation authoring management configurations, Flex Grid enhancements, and more, Board 15 represents another step forward in helping organizations make better decisions, faster. Community is the place to learn more, explore release resources, and stay connected to what’s new.

Build Along with Board: Extends our growing collection of Best Practices and How-to Guides with practical, hands-on learning experiences. These resources are designed to help members follow along, apply concepts in real time, and build confidence using Board capabilities in realistic scenarios.

Whether you’re learning something new, reinforcing an existing skill, or looking for step-by-step guidance to support your team, Build Along with Board gives you another way to turn Community knowledge into action. (Watch for this content to expand throughout the year👀)

Recordings & Replays: We know that timing matters. You may not always be able to attend a webinar, event, product update, or Community session live, which is why Recordings & Replays are now easier to find in one centralized location.

This resource brings together published recordings from Board webinars, events, Community Captains videos, company and product updates, and more, helping you catch up, revisit key takeaways, and share valuable content with your team.

And, of course, I love to highlight our Community Captains, Advocates, and blog authors!

Thank you for being part of the Board Community. YOU make Board Community what it is. Continue to:

• Ask thoughtful questions.
• Share real-life experiences.
• Offer ideas.
• Learn from each other.
• Create a stronger ecosystem for everyone.

Let’s keep planning, achieving, and transforming together!

Featuring: Lucas Charello, Senior Board Consultant at Kiwika and Community Captain.

One phrase comes up often in Board EPM sales conversations: “You can build anything you want.” It reflects one of Board’s greatest strengths, but without the right discipline, that same flexibility can become a source of complexity.

Board enables customers to design custom workflows, model unique planning processes, and reflect on the way their business truly operates. That flexibility is a major reason the platform is trusted by leading multinational organizations and has been recognized as a Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader for the fourth consecutive year.

Experienced customers and consultants also recognize that this flexibility delivers the greatest value when it is guided by clear priorities and strong implementation expertise. As one customer put it, “The flexibility of Board is impressive, but it can also be dangerous because it encourages us to build every minor detail into the planning process.” Another customer recently noted selecting the right consultants for the first project is one of the most important moments in a Board digital transformation: “Once we find the right people, we keep them.”

These perspectives come from satisfied customers, and they point to an important implementation principle: Board’s greatest strengths create the most value when they are paired with focus, governance, and experienced guidance.

From Unlimited Flexibility to Purposeful Design

Flexibility transfers a specific burden onto the project team—the burden of knowing what not to build. More opinionated EPM tools protect customers from themselves by imposing constraints — frustrating during implementation but disciplining over time. Board imposes remarkably few constraints. Every department can have its custom allocation logic, its bespoke workflow, and its own reporting template. Each individual request may be reasonable on its own, but, without clear prioritization, their combined effect can turn an application into a labyrinth. Over time, that complexity can extend timelines, increase costs, and make it harder for customers to realize value quickly.

Four Areas Where Focus Protects Flexibility

1. Scope growth that feels like progress: In a Board implementation, adding complexity looks like using the platform correctly. When a new workflow can be configured in one day, asking for three more is easy to justify. The cumulative effect — more dimensions, more calculation rules, more custom screens — is a system no one fully understands and few can maintain. EPM experts consistently flag this: Builds containing far too many exceptions and particular cases generate models that are complex and difficult to maintain instead of streamlined and improved. It often happens when builders try to replicate existing Excel models exactly.
2. The "garbage in, garbage out" problem, amplified: Board's flexibility means more places to introduce logical errors, more calculation layers to debug, and more custom structures to validate. When account codes are inconsistent across business units or consolidation rules aren't standardized before go-live, the result is inaccurate reports produced by a system too complex to audit. The richer the build, the higher the data quality bar required to make it reliable.
3. Administration complexity that outlasts the project team: Consultants build the application, then move on. Because every Board environment is genuinely unique, there is no generic documentation that describes yours. Internal administrators inherit something they cannot fully reconstruct, or at least not easily.
4. The gap between developers and end users: Board’s flexibility can be especially powerful for the people designing the solution, but the experience of end users still needs to remain central. When the interface feels counterintuitive, users may create workarounds such as shadow spreadsheets, manual reconciliations, or data exports that are manipulated outside the platform. The cruel irony: months of implementation effort can produce a system that users actively avoid, returning the organization to the fragmented processes Board was meant to replace.

What Good Board Implementations Have in Common

Successful Board implementations tend to share six disciplines: clear objectives, simplified processes, strong collaboration between functional experts and builders, maintainable design, change management, and phased rollout.

• They define success before they define the build. Measurable objectives drive every architectural decision, and new requirements are tested against the question "Does this serve the objective?" rather than "Can we build it?".
• They resist replicating legacy processes, treating Board as an opportunity to redesign planning rather than perpetuating existing inefficiency.
• They establish a good synergy between Board builder and functional expert, where the latter express the core business needs effectively and the former brings up options, always advising the customer away from low added value with high time-consuming builds.
• They build for maintainability from day one, documenting as they go, adding comments everywhere in the code and designing for the administrator who will manage the system without the original developer's help.
• They invest in change management, recognizing that the most sophisticated environment fails if end users don't adopt it.
• They phase the rollout, proving value in one process or business unit before expanding. Compounding mistakes across an entire enterprise is far harder to recover from than a contained and correctable pilot.

Turning Flexibility into Lasting Value

Board EPM is an exceptional platform, and its recognition across Gartner, BARC, and peer review communities is well-deserved. But exceptional platforms demand exceptional discipline. Board's flexibility is a genuine strength, not a challenge. The challenge lays in the absence of a governance framework to guide it.

Most of the time, when the project team builds an overly complex or disjointed application, the customer ends up paying for it twice — the first time to build it and the second to simplify it. User adoption drops as well as the team’s credibility. Steering the customer toward lean, high-value builds is a consultant’s core responsibility. That includes challenging requests that would create more complexity than value.

The goal in enterprise planning is never to build the most sophisticated system. It is to build one that people trust, use, and rely on to make better decisions. A successful Board implementation should simplify planning, strengthen alignment, and give teams greater confidence in their data and processes.

Consultants who understand this become more than implementers. They become decision architects, bridging the gap between technology and business impact. With the right discipline, Board’s flexibility becomes a powerful foundation for better planning, stronger adoption, and more confident decision-making.

More from this author
The importance of documentation for long-term success: Deployment documentation
Three favorite Board features to improve your build

Featuring: Karry Schupp, Senior Financial Analyst for DH Pace Company and Community Captain.

ERP transitions often create reporting challenges, especially when critical data exists in both legacy and new systems. During our transition to a new ERP platform, Board helped us bridge that gap by consolidating data from both environments into one unified reporting view. This eliminated the need for users to pull information from multiple systems and perform manual Excel analysis, while giving teams easier access to the financial insights they need for day-to-day decision-making.

While most Board users were able to access the information they needed through existing reports, one manager required a consolidated view of sales figures across multiple departments. The requirement was to present this information as a single aggregated value that could be refreshed and accessed daily.

Initially, we considered creating a new report and directing the user to access it within Board. However, this approach did not fully address the need for daily visibility. In our Board configuration, the month is defined as the lowest time segment, so daily-level granularity is not retained; values are reflected as month-to-date totals. To address this limitation, we developed a custom presentation to capture the required data and used the Send To feature to automate daily email delivery to the manager.

Board Community Best Practices explains that the Send To feature allows you to automatically send a presentation to one or multiple Board users via email. You can create as many recipient lists as you need, each with its own configuration and settings.

Setting up a presentation Send To is a simple configuration process that comes standard with every Board instance, providing organizations with a cost-effective solution for automated data delivery. Detailed Send To information and instructions can be found here.

Planner view

The "Send To" feature sends a Presentation to one or multiple Board users via email. The user creates as many Send To jobs as needed, each with its own recipient list, configuration, and scheduling options.

A configuration wizard guides the user through the creation of each new job: for example, to choose the attached Presentation format (PDF, MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint), adjust the sending scheduling, the e-mail text, and more.

By leveraging the Send To feature, the manager was able to access daily sales figures while preserving the required data granularity. In the event of an absence, historical daily sales data remained accessible via previously delivered emails.

Board offers a robust notification system that keeps users informed of relevant application events, while also enabling the distribution of information to a wider audience beyond the platform. The manager benefited from the consistency of receiving the values at the same time each day. Additionally, the email format allowed for straightforward distribution to any recipient, regardless of their Board access. The daily communications also served as an automatic record, providing a reliable archive of historical data

Learn more about the Broadcast and Notification tools here.

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5 Tips for a Successful Board Setup
My Board-ology Process
Overcoming Common Challenges

Featuring: Kristine Young is a Customer Success Manager and Community Captain at Board.

Challenges happen. This month, Kristine is back—sharing personal insights on driving user adoption across an organization through:

• Power users and champions
• Training and enablement
• User experience reviews
• Direct business outcomes

Listen and learn more from a true Board customer champion.

Let us know what you think in the comments!

More from Board Community Captains
Strengthening Long-Term Success with Board
128-Bit Sparsity in Board: When it Matters
3 Q's with Amy Holmes, Board Academy Director

Featuring: Community Captain Leone Scaburri, Solution Architect—internal Center of Excellence for Professional Services, Board

If you have ever reviewed a Board cube and felt uneasy after seeing 128-bit sparsity, you are not alone. For many architects and modelers, 64-bit sparsity is perceived as the “safe zone,” while 128-bit triggers immediate concerns about performance, memory usage, and design quality. The instinctive reaction is usually the same: “How do we get this back to 64-bit?” However, that reaction, while understandable, is not always justified.

To truly understand whether 128-bit sparsity is a problem, we need to step back and reconsider what sparsity is meant to achieve in the first place—and what actually drives performance in Board.

Sparsity is a Consequence, Not a Goal

Sparsity is not a feature to be “optimized” in isolation. It is the natural outcome of dimensional design choices.

Every cube reflects a balance between:

• The number of dimensions involved.
• Their cardinality.
• The number of combinations that make sense from a business perspective.

When this balance is handled correctly—by identifying which entities should be dense and which should be sparse—the cube starts to resemble reality more closely. In some cases, that realistic representation naturally exceeds what can be addressed with a 64-bit pointer. When that happens, Board simply scales to 128-bit sparsity.

This is not a failure of the engine, nor an indication of instability. It is a supported and expected behavior.

What Really Changes Between 64-Bit and 128-Bit

A common fear is that 128-bit sparsity will dramatically slow down procedures, calculations, or screen interactions. In practice, this fear is often misplaced. The core engine logic does not change when moving from 64-bit to 128-bit sparsity. What changes is primarily the width of the internal pointer, which has an impact on memory footprint and, consequently, on pure runtime execution.

However, what truly affects performance is not the pointer size, but:

• How many combinations are actually stored.
• How many of those combinations are meaningful.
• How much unnecessary data the cube is carrying.

A cube with fewer, well-defined combinations, even if managed with 128-bit sparsity, will often perform better than a bloated cube artificially constrained to 64-bit.

The Hidden Risk of “Forcing” 64-Bit Sparsity

Trying to stay within 64-bit sparsity at all costs can be counterproductive. Common strategies—such as keeping high-cardinality entities dense “just in case”, avoiding sparse structures where they are logically required, and preserving combinations that never occur in real data—may may help remain under the 64-bit threshold, but they do so by inflating the cube with meaningless combinations. This leads to higher memory consumption, heavier size on disk, and ultimately worse performance.

In other words, forcing a cube to remain 64-bit can be far more damaging than allowing it to move naturally to 128-bit.

How to Design Cubes for Correct Sparsity

A healthier design mindset is to treat 64-bit sparsity as a preference, not a constraint.

The recommended approach is simple in principle:

1. Start from the business reality and identify meaningful combinations.
2. Apply sparsity consistently to entities that do not interact fully with others.
3. Reduce unnecessary dimensions and unused entities.
4. Observe the resulting cube size and data density.

If this process results in 64-bit sparsity, that is ideal. If it results in 128-bit sparsity, that is still acceptable, if the cube is smaller, cleaner, and more representative of actual data.

When 128-Bit Sparsity Is a Warning Sign

There are cases where 128-bit sparsity should raise questions, but the questions should be about modelling choices, not about the engine.

It is worth reviewing the design if:

• Many dimensions are rarely used or completely unused.
• Sparse entities were added without validating real data interactions.
• The cube stores a large number of empty or meaningless combinations.

In these situations, the issue lies in dimensional design, not in the sparsity level itself.

Final Thoughts

The concern around 128-bit sparsity often comes from treating it as a warning sign rather than what it actually is: a natural consequence of dimensional design. When sparsity is applied correctly, cubes stop storing artificial combinations and start representing real business structures. In many cases, this makes the model significantly more efficient, even if it moves beyond the traditional 64-bit range.

From a modeling perspective, this is the right trade-off. The real danger is not reaching 128-bit sparsity. The real danger is distorting a model just to avoid it, keeping unnecessary combinations or avoiding proper sparse structures. 128-bit sparsity is not something to be afraid of. It is not an error, a limitation, or a performance sentence. The real goal is not to “stay at 64-bit,” but to store only what truly matters.

So, the next time you see 128-bit sparsity, resist the instinct to panic. Instead, ask a simpler question: Does the cube reflect the business correctly? If the answer is yes, then the model is doing exactly what it should.

More from Board Captains
3 Q's with Amy Holmes, Board Academy Director
Integrating Board and Scribe: A Smarter Approach to Planning and Documentation
Board Impact Analysis: A Powerful Developer Tool

📚New Courses launched this month:

Solutions Overview
About this course:

This course introduces Board’s Solutions strategy and explains why it is critical to delivering faster, more consistent customer value. You learned how Board has evolved from a flexible platform to a solutions-driven approach, how Engineering, Platform, and Solutions work together to drive innovation, and how Solutions help Board teams engage customers around business outcomes rather than technology alone.

👥Target audience: Internal Employees and Partners.

Presales Fundamentals
About this course:

This new learning program is designed to strengthen presales capabilities across our teams and partners through two focused learning paths — Presales Foundations and Presales Soft Skills. Together, these paths build the core knowledge and interpersonal skills required to succeed in today’s sales and presales environment, ensuring participants are confident, prepared, and aligned to deliver high-impact customer engagements and effectively support opportunities throughout the sales cycle.

👥Target audience: New and existing employees and partners are encouraged to explore these courses.

Demo Portal Resources
About this course:

Your central hub for accessing demo materials, curated assets, and active demo environments designed to support your success. This space brings together everything you need to confidently prepare, customize, and deliver impactful demonstrations, all in one convenient location. Whether you’re exploring available environments, downloading the latest assets, or looking for guidance to enhance your demo experience, the Demo Portal Resources provide streamlined access to the tools and information that helps you stay ready and aligned for every opportunity.

👥Target audience: New and existing employees and partners are encouraged to explore these courses.

Instructor-led Training
About these offerings:

Whether you're beginning your journey or looking to sharpen advanced skills, we provide learning opportunities designed to help you grow and succeed in your role.

Our programs are delivered in flexible formats to suit your needs, including self-paced eLearning and engaging instructor-led sessions — available in-person or virtually through Board Academy – Live Trainings. Explore the available courses and enrol in a format that works best for you to continue building your expertise and accelerating your professional growth.

👥Target audience: New and existing employees and partners.

Click the below button to explore live trainings on Academy:

COMING SOON!

Introduction to Board: Analysis and Reporting
About this course:

This new course covers the same material as the Level 100: Foundations of Building in Board and is designed for new Board developers, power users, and anyone eager to explore Board’s front-end design. The content has been updated to be even more effective and engaging for learners from the original written video lessons in the Level 100 course and now features a fictional company, Northwind Traders, and its numerous fictional employees. This self-paced training will allow the audience to truly immerse themselves as they participate in hands-on learning where they will replicate each step in a virtual machine. No technical background is needed—just curiosity and a willingness to explore. 
This course is currently in UAT (User Acceptance Testing) and will be available soon with translation features.

Target audience: Board developers, power users, and anyone eager to explore Board’s front-end design.

Support Training Course
About this course:

A learning path designed to onboard internal Support employees that features introductions to support roles and responsibilities, guidance on the troubleshooting process, and walkthroughs of internal tools such as Salesforce Service Cloud.

Target audience: Internal Board employees on the support team.

We have more things coming your way from the Academy. Explore more enablement and learning resources at Board Academy.

March already? Time flies when you're busy building!
My mission for the next months is to:

• start finding even more intuitive ways to showcase the 'All-in-One' power of Board to our clients,
• stop over-complicating project scopes where a simpler, more elegant solution is more effective
• continue delivering the seamless Board experiences our customers have come to rely on!

We’re feeling very good about our Q1 targets. It's all about refinement right now rather than a full pivot, ensuring we're perfectly set up for a busy Q2.