Sage cloud financial management system enables CloudCheckr to eliminate 1-2 days of manual consolidation and deferred revenue recognition work
December 17, 2020 – Founded in 2011, CloudCheckr supplies a comprehensive platform that helps organizations manage security, utilization, and cost across public clouds such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. CloudCheckr delivers visibility and governance for small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, including NASA, Harvard University, Salesforce, Intel, and Lockheed Martin. With Sage Intacct’s cloud financial management system, CloudCheckr was able to reduce its monthly close from 10 days to five, eliminate 1-2 days of manual consolidation and deferred revenue recognition work, improve reporting and forecasting, and is on track to accelerate billing time by 50%.
Prior to Sage Intacct, CloudCheckr’s finance team was struggling to manage the company’s rapid growth using a combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets. Multi-entity consolidations across CloudCheckr’s U.S. base and a U.K. subsidiary used to consume at least a half-day of the finance team’s time each month. In addition, up to a full day of manual work went into managing deferred revenue, and they still lacked the financial visibility needed.
Faced with growing complexity and a lack of clarity in accounting and finance, CloudCheckr knew it needed a more robust and modern financial system. The company ultimately chose Sage Intacct, based in part on capabilities in its Contracts module to manage and automate billing, revenue recognition, forecasting, and metrics across diverse SaaS pricing models.
“We needed a new system that could track not only financial information, but also our contractual information, and calculate the billings because it was very difficult and cumbersome to try to maintain that in Excel,” said Sandy Burns, CloudCheckr’s Vice President Finance. “Our business was growing rapidly, and we needed the financial tools to be able to handle the increased volume and growth in our customer base and revenues.”
Since moving from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct, CloudCheckr has achieved several key benefits:
A 50% faster monthly close with strengthened controls: In its first few months on Sage Intacct, CloudCheckr cut its monthly close time in half, from 10 days to five. Sage Intacct automation has eliminated painful manual work around multi-entity consolidation, currency conversions, journal entries, and deferred revenue management. CloudCheckr has also implemented better processes, such as a monthly balance sheet review compared to inconsistent approaches in the past.
Reduced days sales outstanding (DSO) with better visibility into cash flow: Connecting Sage Intacct with Salesforce CRM enables CloudCheckr to speed the order-to-cash cycle and automate its complex billing. Finance can now track A/R collections on a daily basis, reducing DSO and giving better visibility into cash flow during COVID-19. Burns expects to see a 50% improvement in time to invoice once the integration is fully rolled out, directly synching contracts information in Salesforce to Sage Intacct. That will better align finance with sales operations and minimize reconciliations across disparate data sets, while improving CloudCheckr’s DSO metric and accelerating cash flow.
Data-driven insights to adapt to COVID-19: Rich multidimensional reporting and dashboards in Sage Intacct are providing new data-driven insights that help CloudCheckr fine-tune its business and adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. The company has real-time visibility into cash flow, costs, and revenue by various customer segments to better navigate through uncertain times. In the past, Burns would have to add up figures on salaries, consulting costs, and other line items from about 10 accounts to size up costs by department or expense category. Sage Intacct reports make that task simple.
“With Sage Intacct, I can slice and dice the information faster and in different ways for better business insights,” said Burns. “It used to take me hours to copy financial data from QuickBooks into Excel spreadsheets so I could analyze the information. Now I can drill into the information right within Sage Intacct reports, ensuring I’m using the latest data and speeding up my analysis.”
For more information on the advantages, CloudCheckr gained from their use of Sage Intacct, read the full case study here.
