Case Study
Powering Renewable Energy Finance: Urban Grid’s Strategic Shift to OneStream
Urban Grid Holdings LLC is a leading renewable energy project developer specializing in utility-scale solar power plants. With more than a decade of expertise, the company has helped move solar and energy storage projects through the full development lifecycle, including site acquisition, interconnection, permitting, and commercialization.
Serving clients across the United States, Urban Grid has built a strong reputation for advancing renewable energy solutions. As the business expanded, however, it needed a more robust and scalable system for financial planning, analytics, consolidation, and reporting. MindStream Analytics partnered with Urban Grid to implement OneStream as the company’s new finance platform.
The result was a more connected, compliant, and analysis-ready environment that supported both complex reporting requirements and future growth.
The Challenge:
Urban Grid faced a range of operational and financial management challenges that made a more advanced solution necessary. The company had recently implemented NetSuite as its ERP system, frequently added new dimension members, and still relied on Excel-only consolidations that created inefficiencies and risk.
On top of that, Urban Grid’s complex ownership structures, detailed cash flows, and reporting obligations as a subsidiary of Brookfield Renewables required a higher level of sophistication, control, and visibility than the prior approach could provide.
The Solution
MindStream Analytics implemented OneStream as Urban Grid’s new financial planning, analytics, consolidation, and reporting solution. The project included a NetSuite ERP integration built around an API call from a saved search, enabling smoother data flow and more automated updates when new dimension members were introduced.
To handle ownership complexity, the implementation included an “org by period” feature that allowed Urban Grid to consolidate entities under the parent company only during designated periods. MindStream also added non-consolidating interest calculations for both the Income Statement and Balance Sheet, including a Retained Earnings Rollforward, to improve accuracy for all stakeholders.
The solution further automated detailed cash flow reporting using fixed assets, debt, and other key balance sheet items. Custom dashboards, BI Viewer analysis, direct parent-application export capability, and extensive SOX-focused testing and documentation rounded out a comprehensive and future-ready implementation.
Key solution components included:
The Result
The OneStream implementation significantly improved Urban Grid’s financial management processes. The company can now generate quarter-end close reports more effectively, complete planning, budgeting, and forecasting activities within OneStream, and reduce its reliance on Excel-based processes that previously introduced inefficiency and even system crash risk.
Urban Grid also gained custom dashboards, BI Viewer-based analysis, and extensible documentation for quarterly financial reports. Monthly and rolling 12-month cash flow forecasting became clearer and more dependable, while new FP&A operational dashboards with charts, stoplight reporting, and comparative analysis provided faster insight into performance and variance.
With added Item Codes and Project Codes, Urban Grid can now analyze the business at a more granular level. Overall, the project delivered an on-time, high-satisfaction transformation that addressed immediate reporting needs while creating a scalable platform for long-term growth.