Automation and return on investment are clear for StorMagic with NetSuite

StorMagic is solving the world’s edge data problems. They help organisations store, protect, and use their data at and from the edge. StorMagic’s Forever Data solutions ensure data is always protected and available, no matter the type or location, to provide value anytime, anywhere.

StorMagic’s storage, surveillance and security products are flexible, robust, easy to use and cost-effective, without sacrificing enterprise-class features, for organisations with one to thousands of sites.

INCREASING COMPLEXITY AND MANUAL PROCESSES

By March 2020, the growth and increasing complexity of the business meant that the finance team at StorMagic were experiencing headaches typical of those that stem from lack of automation and consolidation.

At that point, the team were having to consolidate financial information both for management information and statutory reporting. StorMagic had crossed a threshold meaning there was a legal requirement to file consolidated financial statements. Their existing accounting software at the time – Sage 200 – had reached the edge of its capabilities to support the business’ development.

Maarten Odding, StorMagic’s Director of Finance, explains,

“There were a lot of processes in our business that were preventing us from scaling as quickly as we would have liked to. Processes such as the order to invoice process were very manual – once an order was received it would need to be approved by our sales support team in our CRM (Salesforce). The finance department would then manually create each invoice in Sage, save them as PDF, and attach them to the emails sent to our customers.

Without any integration between the sales and the finance process, five invoices, for example, could take up to an hour of our time, not to mention the time then taken sending statements and chasing payments.”

As an enterprise software business, StorMagic sells software licences and support contracts, which means revenue needs to be deferred and recognised over the length of customer contracts. Undertaking the complex revenue recognition process in Excel, as was the case at that time, was a huge undertaking, and due to its manual process, only done at month-end.

“Month-end would take us up to ten working days. This, on top of all the other daily, weekly and monthly manual tasks, meant we were always looking at the past and were unable to provide the business with real-live insight.”

SELECTING A SOLUTION

Combine the manual processes, the consolidation requirements and the new multi-currency and compliance challenges that came from the international acquisitions, and a systems review became a top priority for StorMagic.

“Once we started researching our options, NetSuite became our front-runner quickly, as it seemed to be the ‘go-to’ system for growing, multi-entity software companies like us. Eureka Solutions were our Sage 200 partner at the time and were upfront with us about its limitations. 

As Eureka Solutions are leading partners for both Sage 200 and NetSuite, they were able to provide us with a clear comparison of the two systems for our future needs.

We have always had a positive relationship with Eureka Solutions, so had no hesitation in continuing that relationship with them and selecting them as our NetSuite partner.”

AUTOMATION AND EFFICIENCIES

 The primary objectives for the new system were around automation and, by definition, increasing efficiencies that would enable the business to continue to grow rapidly – in terms of employees, customers and revenue – without having to add headcount within the finance team, and to free up the team to provide more insight on real-life data.

At the time of writing, StorMagic’s NetSuite system has been live for just over a year, and already those primary objectives are being met. Taking month-end as an example – which used to take ten days – Maarten and the finance team are now effectively all ready to go when they come to closing.

“On working day one after month-end, I’m now able to send out a flash report to the Senior Leadership Team with the KPIs. By this point, we have our cash reconciled, invoices in, debtors recced, credits recced, and our accruals posted.”

This reduction in month-end time from ten days to one or two means that the team can produce quality board-packs quickly and move on to other tasks; previously it would be half-way through the month before he was able to get anyone any information.

“We can do a lot more meaningful reporting and it frees up time to do other things, like help other departments with their data, looking at renewals, all sorts – our value-add is much improved.”

Return on Investment

Return on investment in the new system was also an important consideration, and there have been no regrets in that area either.

“Looking back now, I am confident that we have actually saved money with our move to NetSuite. At our current level of growth, we would have needed additional headcount using the old system,” says Maarten.

Besyncly Integrations for NetSuite

StorMagic has always used Salesforce as their CRM system. It’s used to log pipeline and process orders from a sales perspective, and is where contacts, contracts, purchase orders and the like are stored. Integrating NetSuite with Salesforce was a very important element of the project, and another reason that selecting Eureka Solutions as their partner made sense.

Eureka Solutions – using their integration platform ‘Besyncly’ – has seamlessly connected the two systems, which StorMagic says “helps us massively”. Besyncly brings in all the invoices and dates and the revenue “sorts itself out” with no manual intervention or duplication of effort.  The Besyncly integration between NetSuite and Salesforce is the reason one person is now able to run the AR and AP processes, rather than this requiring two members of staff.

The Besyncly platform was also used to provide an integration between NetSuite and StorMagic’s expenses platform Certify, customised to their requirements.

The package Eureka Solutions were able to offer with NetSuite plus integrations has made a real difference to bottom-line,

“We are now fully functioning as a team; we can do everything we need to and more. We are looking to grow revenue significantly this year and without NetSuite we would need to increase our headcount,” says Maarten.

Additional benefits

An unforeseen benefit of the NetSuite implementation has been the user-friendliness of the system, with StorMagic enjoying the ability to click through on all elements of information to see the detail behind it. The true-cloud nature of the software and it being completely ‘live’ is also a major benefit, as the company explains,

“One click and everything updates where it needs to update. At any point in the month we know exactly where we are. It’s also easier to spot errors compared to when we used to do all our journals once a month and errors could slip through unnoticed.”