Like many in finance, Jacob Quartier, vice president of finance at Showpad (opens in new tab), wanted to spend less time closing the books and more time providing actionable insight into business performance.
So, when the time came for the Belgium-based sales enablement software company to move on from an outsourced accounting arrangement to a full accounting solution, finding a platform that could automate many of the cumbersome, manual processes was paramount.
Previously, closing the monthly books could take 20 days.
“When I asked people in finance what they were doing, they always said ‘we’re closing the books,’” Quartier said.
Financial reporting was another key requirement. Status reports that were created one time per year could take upwards of three months.
And, as a software as a service (SaaS) company, being in the cloud was a must, particularly given Showpad’s international presence and ambitions. Based in Belgium, it has subsidiaries in the UK and US.
“We’re going to conquer the world,” Quartier said. “Global consolidation and multi-currency capabilities were vital.”
After a careful evaluation, Showpad chose Oracle NetSuite. In addition to the flexibility and scalability of the solution, NetSuite’s growing presence in the Benelux region reassured the company.
Even better, NetSuite was able to get Showpad live in just three months, half the time it used to take the company to assemble a status report. Financial reports that took 20 days now take five. Auditors that came in for two days before, can now come in, access NetSuite and complete their work in just two hours. Overall, visibility has improved significantly, giving finance a seat at the table.
“Now we can act as a business partner rather than just financial reporting,” Quartier said. “It’s easy to give a breakdown of expenses and identify the cost center. That’s helped us to do some analysis -- the cost of acquiring customers, calculate the magic number for SaaS, tell business how much team costs, or how much ARR we contributed – that’s been great.”
For a company with 1,000 customers that has grown from 50 employees two years ago to more than 200 today and has doubled revenue three years in a row with plans to continue that growth, NetSuite’s scalability is also a key factor.
Showpad plans to extend its use of NetSuite with the financial planning module and ultimately extend to new regions with NetSuite OneWorld’s support for 190 currencies, 20 languages, automated tax calculation and reporting in more than 100 countries, and customer transactions in more than 200 countries.
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