The strong efficiencies and visibility we gain with Sage Intacct easily recoup the cost of the software in just over three months every year. In particular, we’ve implemented powerful automation for revenue recognition, collections, and payment entries that have freed up three full-time accounting employees – at an annual savings of around $160,000.
–Heather Norum, Director of Accounting VelocityEHS
Robust, Cloud-Based ERP Supports Ongoing Growth
After a series of multi-national acquisitions, the combined businesses that make up VelocityEHS have become the leading provider of cloud environment, health, safety (EHS), and sustainability software. An Actua (Nasdaq: ACTA) company, VelocityEHS continues to grow rapidly and is held to the high reporting and compliance standards of a publicly held business. Given this environment, it became more challenging to continue running the business on QuickBooks, and the organization’s finance team went in search of full-featured financial management software.
“We recognized that we needed a robust, cloud-based ERP solution to effectively handle the exponential growth of our customer base and transaction volume,” said Heather Norum, director of accounting at VelocityEHS. “Having previous experience with NetSuite, my CFO and I considered that option, but in the end selected Sage Intacct for its more flexible dimension-based reporting, as well as its ability to greatly improve our revenue recognition and seamlessly handle multiple foreign currencies.”
Automated Revenue Recognition & Consolidations Boost Productivity
By implementing Sage Intacct, VelocityEHS completely modernized its tedious revenue recognition process. Rather than spending a full day working through revenue calculations in a 20,000-line, error-prone spreadsheet at the end of each month, everything is streamlined in Sage Intacct. As a result, the company has full visibility into each step of its order-to-cash process, and has sped its monthly close by three days.
VelocityEHS easily plugged its homegrown order management system into Sage Intacct using a simple application programming interface (API). Now, all sales orders are pushed to the financial system, which saves around two weeks of person-hours per month that had been spent keying in order after order – no small task for a company with around 1,500 new transactions every month. The Sage Intacct Collections modules also automates dunning letters to shorten the cash cycle and avoid at least one full-time collector the team would have needed to send out emails and run accounts receivable reports. Finally, an add-on tool uploads hundreds of daily lockbox payment entries to Sage Intacct, so that staff accountants no longer need to manually enter checks one-by-one.
In addition, Sage Intacct’s multi-entity, multi-currency features greatly eased the company’s recent Canadian merger. According to Norum, “At first, our CFO was spending five painful days each month doing currency exchange calculations because no one else had bandwidth. But now, our global consolidations can be completed across five different currencies in a few short minutes with the push of a button in Sage Intacct.”
Financial Transparency Eases Reporting & SOX Compliance
Sage Intacct’s ability to tag transactions with category dimensions – such as a project, customer, vendor, or employee – allows VelocityEHS to filter, group, and organize its data for more granular reporting. This flexible general ledger approach lets the team report month-to-date, quarter-to-date, and year-to-date financials in a variety of ways, including breaking out expenses and revenues by location, business unit, department, or entity.
“I love that Sage Intacct gives us a 3-D view of our financials, so that on any given P&L report we can look at our revenue by product, followed by a detailed breakout of departments for planning and budget analysis. Without having to bolt on to our chart of accounts, we can easily understand how we are actually spending our money, versus just how we have to show our books for GAAP or tax purposes,” said Norum.
VelocityEHS’ CFO uses an at-a-glance Sage Intacct dashboard where he can view cash balances, net income, and operating expenses by department or location – all alongside handy data points like the parent company’s stock ticker. And for the first time, the team was able to build a custom report that analyzes its accounts aging by product line, which helps the company refine service processes, e.g. perhaps by holding delivery on projects prior to receiving customer payment. All of this helps VelocityEHS more closely monitor its current revenue reserves and re-forecast throughout the year as needed, so the business can make smarter, more timely hiring and other spending decisions.
For added benefit, the company also leverages Floqast from the Sage Intacct Marketplace to support compliance documentation related to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX). “Sage Intacct keeps SOX compliance from being a time eater and makes it easy to meet any requirements that come our way,” commented Norum. “Our auditors love Sage Intacct’s permissions-based user access, expense and journal entry approvals, vendor change logs, revenue-by-customer reporting, and paperless audit trail – all of which save them tremendous amounts of time.”
About VelocityEHS
In 2015, MSDSonline and KMI, two EHS industry leaders, joined forces to form VelocityEHS, which aims to make enterprise-level EHS functionality accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes. More than 12,000 customers worldwide trust VelocityEHS and its solutions to improve EHS performance.
Results with Sage Intacct:
- Software paid for itself in ~3 months
- Financial automation saved 3+ weeks/month of manual work
- Avoided $160,000 in annual headcount costs
- Scaled easily with company’s 30% growth
