Through a series of acquisitions, the combined businesses that now make up VelocityEHS have become the leading provider of cloud environment, health, safety (EHS), and sustainability software. As an Actua (Nasdaq: ACTA) company, we continue to grow as our own entity while also being held to the high reporting and compliance standards of a publicly held business. Given this environment, it became more challenging to continue running our business on QuickBooks. As a result, I went on a search for a full-featured financial management software solution.

We wanted a robust, cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution that could effectively handle the exponential growth of our customer base and transaction volume. Having previous experience with NetSuite, my CFO and I first considered that as an option. In the end, however, we decided upon Intacct because it provided more flexibility with regards to financial and operational reporting, it offered the ability to greatly improve our revenue recognition process, and the fact that it could seamlessly handle multiple foreign currencies with ease.

Using the capabilities provided by Intacct, we have completely modernized our 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, all of our processes are now streamlined and mostly automated. As a result, we now have full-visibility into each step of our order-to-cash process, and have sped up finalizing our monthly reports by as much as three days.

Another great benefit of Intacct being a cloud solution is that we could easily plug our homegrown order management system into Intacct by using a simple application-programming interface (API). Now, all sales orders are pushed from the order system into Intacct automatically, which ends up saving us upwards of two weeks of work per month that had originally been spent keying in order after order manually. This is no small task for a company with around 1,500 new transactions every month.

Intacct’s multi-entity and multi-currency features have also shortened the time it take for us to process foreign transactions. Previously, our CFO was spending five painful days each month doing currency exchange calculations, because no one else had the bandwidth. But now we can consolidate our finances across all entities, including five different currencies, in a few short minutes with just the push of a button. The global financial management capabilities really shined when we completed our merger with KMI, which was based in Canada, making our merger process much smoother.

Thanks to Intacct’s ability to automate and streamline processes, we can now use the time saved to focus on growing the business even further. We’ve been growing at about 30 percent year over year, and Intacct continues to scale right along with us.  Much the same way humans only use about 10 percent of their brain power, I know there is more we can do with Intacct to improve efficiency even further. I’m looking forward to expanding our use of the system to gain even greater benefits in the years to come!