“Sage Intacct project activity dashboards let our managers monitor their projects as time is entered versus waiting until the end of the month for any insight. As a result, they now forecast new projects more accurately and catch potential overages earlier in the month. This visibility prompts revenue-producing conversations and fosters increased trust with our customers, because we can warn clients before they go above their contracted service hours instead of after the overage occurs.”
– Quaero
Gaining Flexibility to Manage Business Transition
Quaero provides a turnkey software-as-a-service Customer Data Platform (CDP) that manages and analyzes companies’ customer data to maximize customer engagement and growth. The business was initially founded in 1999, acquired by a larger company in 2008, and re-launched following its spin off in 2014. As part of the public company, Quaero’s finance team had used Oracle as its system of record, but needed a more nimble, modern financial management solution in order to quickly re-establish itself as an independent entity. They went in search of cloud-based software that could support robust approval flows and efficient, repeatable day-to-day and monthly financial processes.
“Back when we were on QuickBooks and later Oracle, we wasted too much time exporting records from our project system, tediously matching up people’s hours with their standard rates, allocating that to projects, and manually preparing roll-up reports in Excel,” said Robert Bales, CFO at Quaero. “Once we had a clean slate, we wanted an ERP system with flexible reporting and the ability to manage our project costing needs. Sage Intacct was exactly what we were looking for – all the accounting bells and whistles of an enterprise system like Oracle, in the most intuitive, holistic, and scalable cloud solution on the market.”
Bales continued, “We had only a short time for our transition, and Sage Intacct’s time-to-deployment was impressive. We were able to easily configure the software to our precise time keeping, expense reporting, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and general ledger needs and start invoicing out of the system less than four weeks after we signed the contract.”
Real-Time Dashboards Improve Financial and Operational Transparency
By moving all project time and expense tracking into Sage Intacct, Quaero’s project managers have gained real-time insight into project profitability and delivery margins. Thanks to Sage Intacct’s ability to tag individual transactions with dimension details such as the applicable project, customer, department, or employee, Quaero can now track its costs at a granular level, drill down into details as needed, and make better estimates and decisions.
Quaero’s finance team also uses Sage Intacct to track the business’ key performance indicators, including revenue by customer or project, costs by department, employee utilization, and operational metrics like license counts. With flexible reporting in Sage Intacct, they can easily combine all of this insight with standard financials to quickly produce valuable monthly board reports featuring the metrics that matter most. In addition, Quaero leverages custom Sage Intacct dashboards that compare trends in revenue, EBITA, and client allocation to forecasts in order to show the big picture at a glance via simple visualizations.
Robust Accounting in the Cloud Boosts Productivity and Accuracy
In addition to this powerful visibility, Quaero has gained significant productivity benefits from making the switch to Sage Intacct. By automating all month-end journal entries and cutting nearly a full day of accounting work from its fixed asset and prepaid expense processes, the finance team reduced its monthly close from seven days to just one. Sage Intacct also saves at least 1.5 days they used to spend exporting data and putting together the monthly financial package. After building a month-end dashboard once in Sage Intacct, the system now auto-populates these reports instantaneously every month. Intacct Project Accounting also saves a full day of time that was previously spent manually producing monthly project costing reports across 60 professional services employees – all of which is now available with a push of a button.
The efficiencies provided by Sage Intacct allowed the company to shift its accounting support resources to Bangalore, India. A less-experienced staff now handles all payables, billing, and account reconciliations easily in Sage Intacct, providing a cost savings of $50,000 per year. In addition, the finance team streamlined payroll entries by setting up simple uploads of payroll data from its professional employer organization (PEO). Sage Intacct ensures peace of mind across all of these workflows through robust financial controls, automated purchasing approvals and currency conversions, and clear audit trails for better visibility into possible errors.
“Now that we’ve been able to automate so many processes in Sage Intacct, I can spend less time on the nuts and bolts of finance and more time overseeing other key responsibilities, like legal, IT, and HR,” noted Bales. “More importantly, we now enjoy timely, trusted financial and operational information that has a direct impact on how we run the business.”
About Quaero
Quaero provides digitally focused companies with a turnkey Customer Data Platform that manages and analyzes their customer data to increase engagement. Its customers have reported triple digit ROI from their ad sales efforts as well as significant double-digit increases in overall advertising and paid product or subscription revenue.