This case study looks at how PAYSTRAX moved its strategy management off spreadsheets and onto a dedicated platform – and what changed as a result.
Overview
Since opening PAYSTRAX first offices in Vilnius and Reykjavik in 2018, the company has grown to over 170 specialists across five international offices. That kind of growth brings a familiar challenge: keeping strategy, performance tracking, and decision-making aligned across a fast-expanding, multi-office organisation.
The Challenge
Like many growing companies, PAYSTRAX had been managing its strategic planning through Excel – a workable approach in the early days, but one that becomes harder to sustain as headcount, offices, and the sheer number of initiatives being tracked all increase. Spreadsheets scattered across teams make it difficult to get a single, reliable view of what’s actually happening across the business, and they tend to invite exactly the kind of gut-feel, emotion-based decision-making that a data-driven company wants to move away from.
As Donatas Voveris, Group Strategy Director at PAYSTRAX, puts it:
“Being a progressive company, we decided we needed a proper tool for strategy.”
That decision led PAYSTRAX to Cascade, a strategy execution platform, as a replacement for its spreadsheet-based approach.
The Transition
Adopting a new platform across an organisation is often where good intentions stall – tools get rolled out, and usage quietly fades. That hasn’t been the pattern at PAYSTRAX. Monthly adoption among employees with platform access has reached 95%, and as of 2026, every employee at the company has access to Cascade.
Part of what’s made the rollout stick is that teams haven’t been handed a generic template and left to figure it out. Instead, individual teams maintain their own reports tailored to what they actually need to track, with some monitoring between 30 and 50 KPIs each. Strategic initiatives sit alongside those KPIs, with monthly reviews keeping both connected to the bigger picture rather than tracked in isolation.
PAYSTRAX also connected Cascade to its existing Snowflake data warehouse, meaning the KPIs teams see aren’t manually updated numbers pulled together before a meeting, but figures drawn directly from the company’s live data. Real-time dashboards now run on office screens, displaying the company’s main KPIs for anyone walking past to see – a small detail, but one that signals how central performance tracking has become to daily operations, rather than something confined to a quarterly review deck.
The Results
The clearest shift PAYSTRAX has seen is cultural as much as technical: management discussions that once leaned on instinct and emotion now start from data. Teams that previously tracked zero KPIs at all now maintain comprehensive dashboards – a meaningful jump for parts of the business that had no formal measurement in place before.
That shift has also surfaced things PAYSTRAX didn’t know it was missing. Connecting KPIs and initiatives in one place has revealed correlations in the data that weren’t visible when everything lived in disconnected spreadsheets – insights that have gone on to shape how teams plan going forward. Alongside this, PAYSTRAX has raised its own bar for data quality, introducing “clean data” requirements that ensure what teams are looking at is trustworthy rather than just available.
As Donatas sums up the shift in how the data itself gets used across the company:
“Now they use them to understand how we’re performing and where to focus.”
Why It Matters
For a company built on precision – acquiring is, after all, a business where accuracy and reliability aren’t optional – it makes sense that PAYSTRAX would eventually apply the same standard to how it manages its own strategy internally. Moving from Excel to a connected, real-time platform hasn’t just made reporting easier; it’s changed what teams across the business actually do with the numbers in front of them, turning KPIs from a monthly checkbox into a daily reference point for where to focus next.
Read the full case study here.