I recently spoke to a client with a very interesting story worth sharing. Rose Financial Services is a finance and accounting outsourcing firm that recently became a customer of NetSuite’s services resource planning (SRP) solution. SRP customers use NetSuite SRP for financials, resource and project management, and time and expense tracking, enabling them to have a 360 degree view of their business.
NetSuite SRP is the professional services industry’s first end-to-end services resource planning (SRP) solution and is designed specifically to meet the unique needs of services businesses, like Rose Financial’s. Including customer relationship management (CRM), professional services automation (PSA), and accounting/enterprise resource planning (ERP), NetSuite SRP supports the complete services lifecycle from bid to bill, enabling services organizations to realize benefits such as faster project completion, more accurate and efficient invoice generations, lower accounts receivable cycles, and greater profitability,
Rose Financial’s story is particularly intriguing for several reasons. Ranked the world’s #1 finance and accounting outsourcing firm in a customer satisfaction survey conducted by Datamonitor, Rose Financial:
1) Reaps the benefits of a fully integrated solution in driving the success of their services business
2) Handles accounting for hundreds of organizations, gaining a unique perspective on effective financial management
3) Has upgraded hundreds of accounting and ERP systems over the past 17 years and has a great overview of the financial systems world
4) Documented their implementation and use of NetSuite both via a blog and a Twitter feed for their first 90 to 120 days.
Because Ted Rose, President and CEO of Rose Financial, shared his experiences regularly as he proceeded through the implementation process, you can see how his firm decided to break the project into phases and also read about specific steps they took. I encourage you to take a look at the Rose Financial blog and read their tweets on the project http://twitter.com/rosefinancial.
Prior to their NetSuite SRP implementation, Rose Financial had about 10 separate applications. As the company was growing rapidly, they wanted a financial and accounting system that would facilitate that success. After a market assessment, they decided that cloud-based NetSuite ERP and PSA integrated solutions would best meet their needs. Here are some of the main benefits they realized:
- Ability to connect how they sell their services with how they budget, record time and invoice, with a single project format from the lead/opportunity stage through to cash collection
- Better decision-making as everyone in the firm has access to the right information at the right time via dashboards; the firm also eliminated many meetings that were previously needed to understand variances
- Reduced time for proposal generation from three to five days to a few hours
- Faster sales cycle and a 75% to 90% faster close rate through the use of templates and better ability to estimate and scope projects, as well as provide more granular proposals that help prospects to make decisions quickly
- Speedier billing by three to four business days
- Rapid shifting of resources if someone gets hung up on a task, reducing the amount of overage on projects and preventing employees from spinning their wheels on tasks not valued by clients, thereby increasing employee morale
- Reduction in service value allowance (which directly impacts profit margin) from 10% to 2% in about six months
- Savings of $100,000 or more per year in reduced labor for billing and project management.
While Ted told me that implementing NetSuite ERP was as easy as implementing QuickBooks, I smiled when he gave the warning similar to “don’t try this at home” for the NetSuite ERP / OpenAir integration. While Rose Financial managed their own integration due to their expertise as accounting system implementers, Ted recommends using NetSuite’s professional services organization or a partner for a sophisticated SRP implementation like theirs.
I thought this was a compelling story of SRP benefits and an interesting first-hand account of an accounting implementation. Don’t take my word for it though. Take Rose Financial’s!
Ed Marshall - General Manager, Services Vertical
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