Case Study: Boston Red Sox achieves $1M in expense savings and faster forecasting with Planful

Red Sox manage expenses and grow profitability despite a volatile industry

The Boston Red Sox finance team faced highly volatile revenue streams—ticket sales that rise and fall with team performance, complex playoff revenue sharing, and outsourced concessions—while relying on a cumbersome Excel-based budgeting process (about 100 different templates linked into one “mothership” workbook). The manual approach made forecasting slow and error-prone, limiting formal forecasts to twice a year and forcing managers to plan for worst-case outcomes.

In 2011 the club adopted Planful’s cloud-based FP&A platform, giving 57 users secure, collaborative access and replacing Excel with centralized, on-demand reporting. Reporting time dropped from weeks to minutes, forecasts moved to a monthly cadence, and the team saved an estimated $0.5–$1.0 million in avoidable expenses. The platform also enabled richer trend analysis and smarter, evidence-backed spending decisions (for example, facilities could upload photos to justify budget needs), with plans to further empower managers to run independent what-if scenarios.

Boston Red Sox

Ryan Scafidi

Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis