Most spreadsheets are trying to hold more dimensions than they have. Customers by month is two dimensions, and a spreadsheet is great at it. Customers by month and subscription plan is three, so you make a tab per plan. Add industry and you've got a block per industry inside every tab, plus a summary tab of SUMIFS to put it all back together. Add cohort and country and quarter (someone will always ask to see your model by quarter) and now there are thousands of copies of your churn formula and you're fairly sure all of them match. Or mostly sure.
We like spreadsheets. We just want one that holds every dimension.
There's another kind of tool for this. It comes with a cube, a consultant, a six-month implementation, and a nightly batch, and when it's done the model is correct and nobody on your team can read it. It will cost about the same as a used Buick. The second year it will cost more than a brand new Buick. There will be no third year (God willing.) Calcbird isn't that. You write Profit = Revenue - Cost once, and Calcbird works out profit for every breakdown in the model, by month, by subscription, by industry, by shoe size, by whatever.
10 million cells recalculate in about 12 milliseconds. (Which is how fast a hummingbird flaps its wings once.) You don't have to hit a Run button, or wait for a refresh. You change a number and the whole model re-runs. You change a formula, and it re-runs just as fast. You upload 8 million rows to your model and it re-runs in about 34 milliseconds now, but that's still not bad. That's like only 3 hummingbird wing flaps.
Somebody always wants to see the numbers a different way: by country, by plan, just the big customers. In a spreadsheet that's your afternoon, and afterward you're not totally sure you didn't break something. Often times you're pretty sure you did break something. In Calcbird you pick the column to group by and you're looking at it milliseconds later, and you didn't have to touch anything you've already built.
When you click a number, Calcbird highlights the other numbers it was calculated from. You can click one of those other numbers to see where those came from, and keep going back as far as you want. We built this part because it is wildly annoying to be asked "Where exactly do these numbers come from?" and not have a good way to just point to where exactly those numbers did come from.
We'd be lying to you if we said you can't have errors in Calcbird. Of course you can. Calcbird can't stop you from making mistakes, but we can make sure they aren't painful. When you end up fat-fingering a SUM or dividing by zero, the errors point back to where they came from, just like the numbers.
Everything (and we'll just say that this is going to make more sense if you know what Git is) is versioned. You make changes in a draft, and nobody else sees them until you commit. When you commit, Calcbird shows you what you changed and which numbers moved. Before you commit, you can compare your draft to the current model to see what your changes do. The whole point of this is that, yes, you can be reasonably sure you didn't break anything, but we also want you to be very sure your changes are working correctly.
Sign up with the form below. You can also email us and tell us what you wanna use Calcbird for, and we'll probably give it to you for free for a couple months.