TerSera Therapeutics Turns Finance into an Acquisition Engine with Planful AI

TerSera Therapeutics is a biopharmaceutical company with a focus on oncology and rare disease, and its growth is powered by acquisitions. That makes finance the engine room of the company. Every potential deal needs responsive scenario modeling, trustworthy numbers, and answers that leadership can quickly act on before the opportunity moves on.

“We’re very acquisitive, so we are constantly looking for deal opportunities,” says Avra Mouzakis, Associate Director of Enterprise Financial Performance Management. “It’s very important to be able to look at different scenarios and be agile in that way.”

With Planful in place, TerSera Therapeutics has:

• Reduced overall planning cycle time by 30%
• Shortened balance sheet planning by 67%
• Run six scenarios in the same time it previously took to build one
• Expanded to 50 users, with 80–85% of users outside finance
• Identified risks earlier and improved forecast confidence using Planful AI
• Automated reporting and refresh across the management pack, KPI, and lender reporting
• Shifted leadership conversations from validating numbers to shaping strategy

TerSera’s growth strategy is fueled by acquisitions, which means finance can’t afford to move slowly. Fast scenario modeling, reliable numbers, and the ability to answer complex questions keep the business moving forward.

Running scenarios and trusting the results wasn’t possible with layered spreadsheets. Too much time went into keeping models intact and data trustworthy. Analysis took a back seat to validation, and leadership conversations centered on whether the numbers were right, not what they meant for the business.

That is a real constraint when every deal depends on quickly understanding how the business performs under different conditions.

“It was slow. There wasn’t much ability to adjust on the fly,” says Avra. “It quickly became clear that in order to scale, we needed a financial planning tool.”

TerSera needed a platform that could centralize planning, automate reporting, and support the kind of fast, flexible scenario modeling an acquisitive company depends on.

Several capabilities played an important role in that decision:

• An Excel-connected experience built for finance. Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365 delivers highly formatted reports that refresh automatically, so analysts work in the tool they already know.
• Analyses that carry forward instead of starting over. Models, reports, and scenarios refresh against new data rather than getting rebuilt from scratch.
• Planful AI for Finance, a five-layer model built for how finance works. Signals, Projections, Planful Help, Analyst Assistant, and Planner Assistant give a lean team in-the-moment analysis and forward-looking planning, no extra headcount required.
• A user experience built for the whole business, not just power users. Budget owners and business leaders plan directly in Planful, with dimension security so each user sees only what’s relevant.

What followed was a transformation that reached well beyond the finance team.

• Automated reporting and real-time refresh: TerSera builds management reports, KPI dashboards, and lender financials through Planful Spotlight for Microsoft 365, an Excel add-in that pulls live data directly from Planful and refreshes automatically. “We can create reports and have that be completely refreshable from the Planful environment,” Avra says.
• Business-wide collaboration: TerSera has 50 Planful users, with 80 to 85% coming from outside finance. Budget owners input their own plans directly into structured templates, while finance acts as a facilitator. “It’s a collaborative venture, and having a platform where that collaboration is very easy means that the business makes better strategic decisions,” Avra says.
• A platform safe for non-finance users: Avra credits the user experience itself for making business-wide adoption possible. “The user experience that Planful has designed is pretty non-finance proof,” she says. Dimension security adds another layer of guardrails, so each user only sees the accounts and views relevant to them.
• Faster planning cycles: The team’s overall planning cycle is now about 30% faster, and balance sheet planning is 67% faster.
• Scenario planning at scale: In the most recent planning cycle, the team ran six scenarios in the same time it previously took to build one, giving leadership a clearer view of potential outcomes before making decisions. “We were thinking about so many different levers in that same amount of time, which would not have been possible if we didn’t have Planful,” Avra says.
• Set-once, refresh-forever analyses: In 2024, Avra built a historical spend analysis going back to TerSera’s inception, using substitution variables in Spotlight so the years could update themselves. When the same request came in from leadership in  2025, instead of rebuilding from scratch, Avra simply hit refresh, and the entire analysis updated to the new current year. The time she would have spent reconstructing the file went into deeper strategic analysis instead.

The TerSera team uses Planful AI for Finance across the planning cycle, with each layer contributing at a different moment:

• Looking back with Analyst Assistant. Before close reviews, Avra uses Analyst Assistant to summarize key variance drivers, so meetings open on decisions instead of explanations. “I’m not looking at every single variance. I can see what’s important,” she says.
• Looking forward with Planner Assistant. When a commercial GM raised concerns about travel and expense trends, Avra used Planner Assistant to project T&E for that specific business unit and brought concrete numbers into the conversation early enough to course-correct before year-end.
• Catching what would have been missed, with Signals and Projections. When a sales organization underbudgeted a contract during planning, Avra ran Projections, saw the line was extremely low against the expected range Signals provided, and added a separate Finance Adjustment line rather than overwriting the team’s entry. Months later, when the actual cost came in much higher, the team was covered. “I went back to it, and I said, I caught this one. I got you,” she recalls. “The signals flagged that it was strange.”

Trust was the prerequisite

Before the team brought Planful AI on board, they pressure-tested it with TerSera’s Chief Data Officer. The bar was high.

“Planful AI has created their tool in a very ethically responsible and careful way,” Avra says. “I think that can’t be said for all large language models out there. It’s something that I really value and was very critical to us when we were even considering bringing Planful AI on board at TerSera.”

By adopting Planful, TerSera’s finance team gained the speed and capacity to plan at the pace of the business.

While time saved has made a measurable impact in TerSera’s day-to-day operations, the most meaningful shift has been in how finance shows up for the business.

“The conversations that we have with leadership have changed from what is the number to what does that number mean for our future,” Avra says.

With access to trusted, real-time data, the team can weigh in earlier on acquisition decisions, bringing clarity to leadership before opportunities move forward. Budget owners are more engaged because they built the plan themselves, and 80 to 85% of the people working in Planful sit outside finance. Accountability is embedded at every step of the process. Finance has moved from maintaining the numbers to helping the business decide what to do with them.

For a company that depends on speed and agility to stay ahead of acquisition opportunities, Planful makes that shift possible.

“It’s hard to imagine our lives without Planful,” Avra says, “and I really don’t want to.”