“Intacct has rich functionality, great reporting and it’s tremendously flexible. As a cloud based solution, Intacct lets us focus on our business without having to worry about keeping our financial software maintained and updated. We’ve also been able to strategically redeploy some of our staff — which will ultimately save the company more than $100,000 annually in additional salary.”

– Mike Mullane, CEO ASPGS

CHALLENGES

• Fast growing SaaS company needed a robust financial management solution to improve financial controls
• Wanted to automate time-consuming manual processes and eliminate the need to export to Excel
• Looking for reporting and dashboard capabilities that provide greater visibility into financial data

PREVIOUS SOLUTION

In-house developed solution

RESULTS WITH INTACCT

• Cloud financial management solution modernizes and streamlines finance department
• Automated financial processes and improved financial controls reduce monthly close process from 15 days to just minutes
• Rich, flexible reporting provides greater insight into financial operations
• $100,000 in annual savings from reduced finance staffing needs

In Search of a Modern Cloud Financial Management System

ASP Global Services (ASPGS), a leading provider of Warehouse Management Solutions (WMS), was founded in 2001 to help third-party logistics providers to operate and manage multi-client and multi-site warehouse operations by providing warehouse management solutions designed specifically for the way they work. A visionary company, ASPGS delivered its solutions to customers as a web-based service from the very beginning. Today, with the Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud computing delivery models going main stream, ASPGS continues to grow its business rapidly.

Over the years, ASPGS had built a financial system in addition to its web-based supply chain execution solutions. Unfortunately, focusing on its core supply chain execution business meant the financial system lacked key capabilities and wasn’t keeping pace with their growing business needs. Wanting to modernize its financial systems, ASPGS evaluated several leading solutions and ultimately determined a cloud-based system was the way to go. ASPGS chose Intacct because it offered several key items the company was looking for:

• Better financial processes and controls
• A transparent general ledger
• Increased visibility into key metrics through reports and dashboards
• Integration with Salesforce CRM

Working with the Intacct professional services team, ASPGS was up and running on the system in just 60 days.

“When we saw Intacct for the first time we knew instantly we had found the right financial management system for us,” said Mullane. “It’s got rich functionality, great reporting and it’s tremendously flexible. Even better, because it is cloud based, Intacct lets us focus on our business without having to worry about keeping our financial software maintained and updated.”

Streamlining Business Processes Saves Time and Money

Intacct provides ASPGS with an innovative cloud financial management system that has helped the company streamline business processes and reap significant time and cost savings. Intacct gives ASPGS the ability to securely view, understand and take action in response to changing business conditions – such as defining financial and operational targets, developing business plans and monitoring costs, revenue and performance.

Intacct’s flexible General Ledger provides the foundation to help ASPGS better plan, budget, report and analyze its business. Creating budgets and various business scenarios, for example, no longer requires exporting data into Excel. ASPGS can simply specify budget parameters and input dollar amounts to explore the impact of modifications.

Intacct also streamlines data entry and enables ASPGS to accelerate its financial close process. Previously, it took up to 15 days every month to close the books and ASPGS didn’t have visibility into its income statement until after the books were closed. This made the month-end close process a critical dependency for making strategic business decisions. With Intacct, that dependency is now eliminated as ASPGS can view an up to the minute income statement at any point during the month, and can make key decisions without having to wait for the month to close. In addition, with Intacct’s real-time data and automated processes, ASPGS can now close its books each month in a matter of minutes.

“Intacct is a huge time saver for us,” commented Mullane. “From budget planning to closing the books at the end of each month, everything used to be a time-intensive process. With Intacct, there are a lot of processes you can set up once and then let them run automatically going forward. This allows us to be more effective in managing the company and enables us to spend more time looking forward instead of constantly looking at what has already happened.”

Streamlining Business Processes Saves Time and Money

Intacct provides ASPGS with a powerful tool to gain a more strategic view of its business. The flexibility of Intacct allows the company to tailor reporting for its particular needs without having to use a third-party tool like Excel. This saves a tremendous amount of time and resources, and increases the accuracy of financial reporting to reduce the burden of compliance.

Intacct also allows users to create and share dashboards that contain real-time interactive charts and reports, financial and operational analytics, and Web 2.0 mashups. Because Intacct provides a real-time view of ASPGS’ finances, including accounts receivable, accounts payable and planned expenses, the company has a better understanding of its current and expected cash flow. As a result, the executive team can better manage its finances and isn’t surprised by any unforeseen cash shortages.

“With Intacct’s anytime, anywhere access and easy to use reporting tools, I can literally sit at my kitchen table with a laptop and create the exact style of income statement or other report I want in just a matter of minutes,” said Mullane. “I am starting to use Intacct as my own personal CEO planning tool. Intacct effectively allows me to ‘vet’ my strategic plans against financials — not many companies our size can do that. I compare Intacct to a business intelligence tool, because it helps us work smarter and anticipate what we need to do to be more successful.”

Moving forward ASPGS plans to further integrate Intacct into its business processes by connecting Intacct with its customer relationship management solution from salesforce.com using Intacct MA X for Salesforce CRM.

“The move to Intacct has been a great decision and continues to deliver significant business value,” added Mullane. “With Intacct we’ve been able to strategically redeploy some of our staff from finance functions to customer-facing roles — which will ultimately save the company more than $100,000 annually in additional salary. Our next step is to integrate Intacct and Salesforce CRM to drive even more ROI.”