Bringing Underground Engineering Financials to the Cloud

GeoTechnologies Inc. is a geotechnical engineering firm whose services include preliminary site assessments, subsurface investigations, and construction materials testing on projects across various market sectors. As the company has matured over the past 25 years it outgrew its on-premises software and decided to adopt more robust reporting to help project managers better analyze revenue and profitability in real-time.

Previously, the finance team at GeoTechnologies spent excessive amounts of time exporting data to Excel and manipulating manual reports to answer queries about revenues for specific clients or projects.

“After twelve years on Microsoft Dynamics GP, we were ready for better financial and managerial reporting and moving it to the cloud was an extra selling point,” shared Debora Hester, GeoTechnologies’ controller. “Sage Intacct was our company’s first big step, and after seeing how well it worked, we’ve moved our entire IT portfolio to the cloud. Sage Intacct has delivered significant cost savings by allowing us to eliminate SQL servers and smaller custom systems for things like time sheets, invoices, and other workflows. It also allows our employees who spend a majority of their work week away from the office to input their time and expenses from anywhere, anytime.”

GeoTechnologies migrated from Microsoft Dynamics GP to Sage Intacct. They configured the new solution to fit their specific needs, such as integration with their in-house project management software. Since the implementation, GeoTechnologies has automated several finance processes on Sage Intacct, including its monthly close, multi-entity accounts payable and allocations, accounts receivable, and most notably, reporting.

 

Gaining Visibility Through Real-Time Dashboards

Sage Intacct provided GeoTechnologies with full visibility into financials across a variety of operational dimensions that allow business users to filter, group, and organize data across specific projects, clients, departments, or employees for granular reporting and analysis. The finance team built custom dashboards for each project manager, as well as separate dashboards that display financial data and collections data for executives.

One of the greatest advantages of Sage Intacct is that the company can view its market and client mix in real time, allowing them to make better business decisions. This helps the business maintain a healthy blend of work and limit exposure in more volatile market segments such as single-family homes and subdivisions.

“Our engineers are given the latitude to accept or reject projects when contacted directly by a client, and that freedom to operate independently and ‘do their own thing’ can be a challenge. Sage Intacct helps by giving us transparency into what types of projects they are taking on and the value add to the company,” said Hester. “As a result, we can see if we’re working too much for one client or client type, on small or large projects, etc., and make adjustments as needed.” In addition, Sage Intacct helps GeoTechnologies monitor important trends, such as the number of new and repeat clients, accounts receivable turnover, services utilized, and more. Now, each executive can get a quick look at relevant metrics and dissect the most important details.

 

Saving Time with Streamlined Reporting

“One of the things I love most about Sage Intacct is how simple it is to run managerial reports. For example, each year, when our company insurance policies come up for renewal, our professional liability carrier requires a lot of revenue detail in order to underwrite the policy,” commented Hester. “Before, retrieving revenue information broken out by client types and everchanging insurance industry project categories for these reports was a very manual, multi-week effort in Excel. With Sage Intacct, I just point and click to get everything we need, and I can regroup the data easily based on the latest requirements.”

Sage Intacct Dimensions have enabled a variety of project and client-related reports to be produced that were not possible in the old system. This saves the finance team at least 4-5 hours each month from tedious work such as compiling invoice data to report on revenue by state, market sector, and client type. In addition, by using custom fields in Sage Intacct, GeoTechnologies is able to track and quickly report on key project information, including contract details and job-specific insurance requirements, to name a few.

For vendors that bill the company’s multiple entities, the finance team previously had to input separate payable entries for each entity and print multiple checks, or allocate manually. With Sage Intacct’s inter-company transaction capabilities, they can now simply enter top-level expenses and tag them to the appropriate entity and any other desired dimensions. The system then automatically makes journal entries behind the scenes allowing the team to print one check per vendor.

 

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