As part of the divestiture, we had to carve out and establish our own accounting system. To complicate things, we had to time it before our previous parent company completed their own accounting system upgrade. Otherwise, we would have had to go through two major accounting system changes in quick succession. By the time we started this process, we had also acquired two other companies. So we had an enormous task of combining 3 ERP into a new instance of Netsuite, on an extremely aggressive 12 week timeline. But we were able to complete our MVP (Minimum Viable Product) on time and under budget in October 2021. And we didn’t stop there and immediately pivoted to our phase 2 projects.

As we started growing, despite being US service based, we found interesting adjacencies in other countries. So our first venture was into the German market. We had fortunate timing that we were implementing new CRM and ERP, so that allowed us to establish multi-currency from the ground up. So for finance we implemented Netsuite One World. And that allowed us to more easily integrate our UK companies into the system later.

Combining and streamlining multiple ad how and manual processes and tools was a huge struggle. And there has been huge risk associated with how these changes are perceived by our clients. Mergers and acquisitions always carry risk of alienating clients if the communication paths become a maze and internal changes give the appearance of being disorganized. So the initial goal has been to consolidate and automate with a customer payment portal. And we are having to quickly adapt this to better internal processes, and better client communication. Implementing Versapay was one big step in this direction, but we continue to monitor and improve this work in progress.

Managing expenses had been a very manual process, and accounting was struggling to get the receipts and details they needed. And from the other side, employees struggled with submitting their expenses. So we implemented a modern expense tool called Fyle, which was similar to tools like Concur. It greatly improves the process, enhancing productivity and efficiency all around. The initial phase was for internal business expenses and corporate card charges. And phase two is to manage connecting those expenses to our projects and client invoices, which is currently going through disparate systems or manual processes. As we continue to work through this, we are taking the post go live opportunity to gain adoption and continued efficiencies.

Our project management tools tended to be siloed along our service lines. And one was split within one service line along lines related to our merger. Both sides had been doing this service for over twenty years and was established in their old ways of doing things. But even worse is that most of the systems were home grown, and some were extremely old and clunky. And trying to navigate the growth from the Small Medium Business (SMB) space to an Enterprise level, it was clear the old systems and business processes need to level up. This is a current work in progress…