At NetSuite, we’re proud of our Alliance Partner Network and the great work that partners do for many of our 40,000 global customers. Customers appreciate how Alliance Partners tailor NetSuite to their unique needs while helping ensure fast and smooth implementations with deep platform knowledge and proven methodologies. To commemorate achievements and success, our annual Alliance Partner Spotlight Awards highlight top NetSuite implementations that help power efficiency, innovation, and growth.
This is the second post in a series showcasing 2024 Alliance Partner Spotlight Award winners in the general business category, including customers in the hospitality, logistics and transportation, nonprofit, professional sports, real estate, and sustainability industries.
Customer: Premiere Building Maintenance
Hospitality Spotlight Award Winner: Vursor
Premiere Building Maintenance has grown swiftly since 1996 to provide janitorial, facilities management, and contracting services at 500 client sites in its home state of Tennessee and five neighboring states. While Premiere’s 500-person workforce helps ensure that properties are clean and functional, the company saw room to clean up how it managed financials and operations.
Premiere spent too much time on manual data entry due to multiple QuickBooks instances and lacked accurate audit trails. Using spreadsheets to manage the financial close and order-to-cash cycles and track sales opportunities undermined performance, while reporting limitations deprived Premiere of valuable insights.
A NetSuite implementation by Vursor (opens in new tab) gave Premiere a framework for efficiency, visibility, and growth. The company has reduced its accounts receivable processing time by 70% and accelerated its monthly close by automating formerly manual processes in NetSuite. Custom reports devised by Vursor let Premiere track profitability by job site while monitoring key industry metrics. These are the insights that will aid Premiere's planned expansion into Canada.
“NetSuite and Vursor were definitely the right decision for us as we look to expand internationally,” said Premiere Accounting Manager Jessica Klovensky. “The automation and reporting capabilities that we've received are night and day versus what we had with QuickBooks.”
Customer: Carlile Transportation
Logistics and Transportation Spotlight Award Winner: Appficiency
Carlile Transportation is an Alaska-based shipping and logistics company serving the Alaskan retail, oil and gas, mining, construction, and commercial fishing industries. Founded in 1980, Carlile is “dedicated to connecting the world to Alaska”—but the company had issues connecting across its fragmented tech stack.
Carlile struggled with third-party systems for inventory, transportation management (TMS), logistics, brokerage, and budgeting that were not all integrated. That made budgeting, financial reporting, and multientity consolidations a challenge and limited scalability. Carlile decided to shift into high gear with a move to NetSuite, implemented by Appficiency (opens in new tab).
Carlile Transportation chose Appficiency as its implementation partner to integrate its TruckMate TMS with NetSuite, addressing critical gaps in financial reporting. While TruckMate remains central to the business’s transport operations, its limitations in handling multisubsidiary and multicurrency functions were a challenge. Appficiency's expertise enabled a seamless integration so Carlile could harness NetSuite's powerful financial reporting capabilities for more accurate and comprehensive financial management across its operations.
Customer: Global Communities
Nonprofit Spotlight Award Winner: Grant Thornton
Global Communities operates at the intersection of humanitarian assistance, sustainable development, and financial inclusion to save lives, advance equity, and secure strong futures. Founded in 1952 and based outside Washington, D.C., this nonprofit aids thousands of communities in nearly 30 countries through project-based initiatives that help create a more resilient and equitable world.
A legacy Solomon ERP—a precursor to Microsoft Dynamics SL—couldn’t keep pace with Global Communities’ increasingly complex and sophisticated operations, resulting in inefficiencies and operational bottlenecks. The organization faced challenges managing extensive operational data due to limited visibility and manual reporting. However, with a NetSuite implementation led by Grant Thornton (opens in new tab), Global Communities is making strides toward improving efficiency and gaining better insights into project accounting.
While Global Communities has made progress, it still needs to make further enhancements to reporting capabilities to fully eliminate manual data entry. Ultimately, the goal is to streamline program budgeting and reporting within NetSuite, enhancing efficiency and allowing greater focus on the organization’s mission.
As a next step, Global Communities is replacing QuickBooks for day-to-day bookkeeping in its country offices worldwide. Grant Thornton has already assisted with the rollout to an initial pilot group of countries.
Customer: Storage Asset Management
Real Estate Spotlight Award Winner: We Are Outpost
Storage Asset Management (SAM) is a property management company that specializes in self-storage and commercial properties. The third-largest third-party self-storage management company in the US, it provides storage facility owners with services such as accounting, HR, marketing, property maintenance, and more. Founded in 2010 and based in York, Pennsylvania, SAM manages 600 storage facilities in 37 states and has about 1000 employees.
SAM ran more than 150 QuickBooks instances across multiple business entities, resulting in disjointed processes and extensive spreadsheet-based reporting that required workarounds. SAM needed a better way to deliver financial reports to its clients covering areas such as cash flow, budget versus actuals, and bank reconciliations, as well as operational reports on maintenance, staff, and local markets.
SAM has consolidated workflows and reporting with NetSuite, which We Are Outpost (opens in new tab) implemented. Outpost also worked with SAM to incorporate workflows and automations designed for companies with similar business models. This has simplified processes across SAM’s complex multientity business structure, and the customizations by Outpost equip SAM to quickly deliver reports tailored to the needs of individual clients.
Customer: 4AIR
Sustainability Spotlight Award Winner: Beyond Cloud
4AIR is an aviation pioneer offering sustainability solutions to large airlines, private charter services, airports, and other industry stakeholders. Founded in 2020, 4AIR’s groundbreaking framework helps aviation leaders reduce carbon emissions, access carbon markets, use sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), track metrics, and gain regulatory compliance. The company is pursuing a bold vision for aviation sustainability, and it sought to improve its own financial management practices.
The finance team struggled with tedious manual work that was time-consuming and error-prone in Microsoft Dynamics GP. Invoicing through GP was painstakingly difficult, while bank reconciliations required exhaustive cross-referencing. Generating reports was similarly labor-intensive, as it required pulling in data from a homegrown system. Seeking to reroute its journey, 4AIR partnered with Beyond Cloud Consulting (opens in new tab) to implement NetSuite.
With Beyond Cloud and NetSuite, 4AIR has dramatically improved efficiency across financial management and gained greater confidence in the accuracy and reliability of its financial data. NetSuite’s intuitive interface has simplified what were complicated tasks in Dynamics GP, while problematic invoicing and bank reconciliations are now speedy and straightforward. Enhanced reporting capabilities in NetSuite let the finance team generate more insightful reports in less time, providing business leaders with critical information to help guide 4AIR's growth.
Customer: Sunlight Financial
Competitive Spotlight Award Winner: Grant Thornton
Sunlight Financial partners with contractors nationwide to offer homeowners loans to install residential solar systems and make other home improvements. The New York-based company helps make lending a frictionless process for contractors and homeowners.
Founded in 2014, Sunlight faced challenges with time-consuming manual spreadsheet work and its outdated Microsoft Dynamics GP platform. Data was frequently out of sync, and Sunlight lacked reporting visibility into spend and budgets at a departmental level. Partnering with Grant Thornton (opens in new tab) to implement NetSuite has given Sunlight the efficiency and flexibility it lacked with its on-premises ERP.
With a NetSuite customization built by Grant Thornton, Sunlight has dramatically improved efficiency by automating accounts payable and journal approvals. Integrations between NetSuite and Salesforce CRM and Kyriba treasury management has simplified processes and provided deeper reporting insights for more data-driven decisions. Sunlight has strengthened controls, reduced costs, and gained the scalability it needs for sustained growth and success.
“Previously we relied heavily on emails and Excel worksheets to keep track of invoices recorded, approval status, and payment status," said Karin Ramponi, Sunlight accounting manager. “Switching to NetSuite allowed us to build automatic workflows from entering invoices to payments. It has been a huge time-saver for the whole team.”
Customer: Celink
Competitive Spotlight Award Winner: Bryant Park Consulting
Celink has been the nation's leading subservicer of reverse mortgages for nearly 20 years, helping eligible homeowners who are at least 62 years old borrow money against the equity in their homes. Founded in 1969 with locations in Michigan and Texas, Celink is licensed to service reverse mortgages in all 50 states and holds a critical contract with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).
Despite its success, Celink faced challenges in producing accurate financial reports for its executive team as it used Workday for corporate accounting and HR and Microsoft Dynamics GP for custodial accounting. Implementation difficulties with Workday, along with the system’s complexity and cost, prompted Celink to turn to NetSuite and Bryant Park Consulting (opens in new tab).
With NetSuite, Celink has consolidated accounting data in a single location for real-time reporting. Bryant Park ensured sound migration of legacy data covering multiple subsidiaries and also set up custom reports to monitor loan information and transactional data.
Celink has reduced costs, strengthened compliance and risk management, improved productivity, and gained trusted data for informed decision-making since moving to NetSuite.
Customer: DirectBooks
Insurance Spotlight Award Winner: Caravel, BPM Technology Solutions
DirectBooks is a fintech company with a market-leading platform for communication in primary markets, specializing in structured deal data, documentation, and information exchange. The DirectBooks platform provides transformative automation and standardization for the new issue process of global investment grade, high yield, and emerging market fixed income products.
The company’s finance team was preparing for major changes and growth that would significantly impact existing processes. After much research and due diligence, DirectBooks decided to make the shift to NetSuite because it could scale with the company’s growth and expand the capabilities of its finance tech stack. The team chose Caravel as its implementation partner due to its structured approach, robust resources, and hands-on process. Caravel’s experience, knowledge, and segmented approach to implementation made DirectBooks feel at ease.
The shift to NetSuite has helped address many of the company’s pain points when it came to reporting, the month-end close process (including consolidations), live bank feeds (eliminating manual statement imports), reconciliations, revenue recognition, and sales and other tax calculations.
Now, the company no longer needs a third-party system for consolidated financials across its entities and is able to see consolidated P&L by department, which it could not do in its former accounting system. DirectBooks also now has real-time bank reconciliation and AR aging, with more accurate and timely reporting. The company has more effective and detailed customer data tracking, as well as better audit trails and controls around invoice approvals and month-end close processes with NetSuite. Revenue recognition for its subscription clients and sales tax calculations for all services the business provides is now automated.
Overall, DirectBooks’ finance team is committed to adopting more capabilities available through NetSuite. So far, processes have become more efficient and they have better checks, controls, and automations in place to ensure those processes are properly carried out.
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