“Intacct provides all the functionality a growing company needs to efficiently manage global financials. Our close and consolidation process across our four entities now takes only days versus weeks.”

– Keith Adams, CFO Dimension Data Solutions

PREVIOUS SOLUTION

NetSuite

RESULTS WITH INTACCT

• Shortened the close and consolidation process from weeks to days
• Automated the revenue recognition process for greater efficiency
• Streamlined processes through tight ERP/CRM integration

A member of the NTT Group, Dimension Data Solutions (DDS) accelerates its clients’ ambitions through digital infrastructure. The company’s Cloud Solutions Business Unit, formerly OpSource, adinitially used NetSuite as its core financial system. However, due to the application’s single-entity set-up, the finance team struggled with how to effectively track and manage its expanding international operations. Furthermore, with no integration between NetSuite and its Salesforce CRM system, inefficiencies around contract management and the timely payment of invoices caused additional headaches.

DDS’ software-as-a-service contracts require complex revenue recognition schedules, and the finance team previously managed much of this work in Excel spreadsheets, which required duplicate data entry and increased the risk for errors. These issues complicated the company’s close and consolidation processes, weakened financial controls, and prevented DDS from having a consolidated view of company financial statements.

All of this forced the team to evaluate other solutions, and after a thorough competitive review, they chose Intacct as their new financial management system. Bryant Tolles, senior director of finance and accounting at DDS, commented, “The way the previous system worked, we were relying on multiple spreadsheets for tracking individual country budgets, and had a lot of highly manual processes. Intacct offered us a way to automate these processes and improve our financial controls.”

“We also wanted a solution that provided enhanced reporting and global visibility, from a vendor that offered comprehensive support,” added Keith Adams, chief financial officer for DDS. “Intacct’s reputation for customer satisfaction is terrific and we have found their team to be both knowledgeable and responsive, and their commitment to our success was unparalleled.”

Improving global business management with cloud-based ERP

Intacct provides DDS with a complete cloud-based ERP system. The multi-entity and multi-currency capabilities ensure the company can independently manage finances on a country-by-country basis, and then automatically create a consolidated view of the entire business. The finance team can quickly analyze data along different dimensions, whether by business entity, region, or country, and evaluate both local and consolidated key performance indicators as needed. In addition, by having all entities in one system, they can automate intercompany transactions and eliminate the need to manually reconcile intercompany balances and book consolidation entries—reducing both time and errors.

Since deploying Intacct, DDS has also gained improved financial controls and better support for revenue recognition processes. Intacct’s contract and revenue management features automate the management of deferred revenue and optimize contract renewals. The system includes built-in reports to help the finance team quickly and easily forecast deferred, recognized, and renewal revenue so they can have instant access to reliable, accurate business forecasts. “Intacct’s advanced contract management functionality allows us to more easily and accurately recognize and forecast revenues. All this has freed up time to allow the finance team to analyze data like we never could before,” said Adams.

Integrating front and back-office systems improves efficiency

DDS has extended Intacct beyond the finance team to enable almost 200 employees to create and submit expense reports, and also took advantage of Intacct’s pre-built integration to Salesforce CRM. The integration gives account managers in the field instant access to customers’ contract and payment status, eliminates a significant amount of duplicate data entry, and ensures the sales and finance teams are always working with the same data.

Intacct enables the finance team to quickly view all the information they need to do their jobs, without writing any code or learning new reporting or business intelligence tools. Ad-hoc reporting capabilities also allow DDS to generate specific financial reports tailored to its business needs. “I’ve been able to create custom reports within Intacct that deliver greater insight into our business, and I’m now working on dashboards that will give company management an instant view into expected revenues and cash flow,” added Tolles.

By automating previously manual processes, Intacct has helped DDS become more agile as a business.

“The improvement Intacct offers us in visibility and automation makes it possible for us to improve the way we run the entire company,” commented Adams. “We believe we’ll be able to grow much larger with the finance staff we have in place and avoid hiring two to three full time people over the next 18 to 24 months, so the hard dollar ROI is very compelling.”