How BASE’s CFO eliminated hours of financial reporting work each month

What do you do when your business is adding more and more entities, the types of customer payments you accept are increasing, as is volume and complexity, and the amount of time you spend reconciling accounts is growing from chunks of a day to an entire day? You rise up to and meet the changes success is bringing your company with a means of driving growth well into the future.

And how? One word – automation.

This is how Maria Gunter, Chief Financial Officer (CFO) at BASE transformed their business. Scaling volume and reducing complexity with an easy-to-use agile Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution was the only option. BASE is a fast-growing Austin, Texas based private investment firm that builds assets. Their expanding line of brands includes MOVE Bumpers, Espresso Parts, NORTH Lights, and WAGONMASTER.

Let’s hear about this transformation in her own words:

“We’re always looking for more automation.”

When eCommerce website changes were introducing risk to their revenue recognition, Maria knew they had to “make a change and do things differently.” On top of this, UPS changed their billing where they would not bill until the product was delivered.

“It shifted from getting information too early to getting information too late,” noted Gunter. The need for real-time data and full-scale workflow automation was beyond what QuickBooks could handle, so they began looking for a QuickBooks alternative.

“I was like, I don’t want to have to hire a person.”

The BASE Sales team had become accustomed to relying on real-time data to see how they are tracking toward their quota. Additional incentives at BASE meant they needed to see their sales dollars to see how they were tracking toward earning these incentives. And with the aforementioned changes, unless Maria’s team spent a majority of their time manually reconciling the accounts, the Sales team would not see their dollars until the end of the month, basically when it was too late to dig in and impact their numbers.

By moving from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct, BASE has been able to absorb the changes and confidently meet the challenges of growth by automating workflows and revenue recognition, and by bringing all of their data into a central location. Now with Sage Intacct, the BASE Sales team can access their real-time sales data on their dashboards any time they want. And Maria and her team, well, they are able to handle increased volume without having to hire.

“Sage Intacct just made it a lot faster.”

Maria knew she also had to automate revenue recognition to include the revenue in their Shopify eCommerce channel. Sage Intacct Marketplace Partner APIWORX worked with BASE on each business scenario to integrate and automate the entire business process and remove all manual data entry work with a seamless integration between Shopify and Sage Intacct.

By bringing the data into Sage Intacct, BASE created a single source of truth for a comprehensive real-time view of revenue while also automating revenue recognition all within a secure financial framework with anytime anywhere access.

“As we go through the month, we know where we are with regard to our revenue target. We don’t have to wait a week for accounting to get all the UPS bills and go through all the Shopify data and verify everything,” commented Gunter.

“The more real-time we can get, the more meaningful our data becomes.”

One of BASE’s entities, MOVE Bumpers, tends to have a high number of order changes. Gunter noted: “On the customer service side, they were just doing what was right for the customer and we never gave a thought about how that information might flow through a system because it wasn’t flowing through a system before. We had to create some business rules and change our internal process to provide more clarity on what was happening then flow the changes through with the APIWORX integration to be reflected in both Shopify and ShipStation.”

The integration further flows the data into their Sage Intacct order and inventory management processes and maintains the data integrity needed for accurate and timely reporting.

“We’ve eliminated about 100 hours of reporting work each month…”

“We keep asking, how could we be using this better,” commented Gunter. “Every 30-minute task you eliminate adds up over time. Financial reporting was a big one we were spending a lot of time on. We’ve got all these entities and we’re a pretty small team so we’re big on automation.”

For example, now to see spend-by-vendor across all companies, rather than cobbling 22 reports together, their former QuickBooks method, it takes around five minutes to gain a single pane view of the data. “We’ve eliminated about 100 hours each month by automating many 30-minute tasks across the team and eliminating the need to manually consolidate data,” she added.

As CFO, Maria is positioning BASE for continued success by building the framework with Sage Intacct to confidently be able to scale for growth, remain agile for change, and keep costs low with efficiency and automation.