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Financial Reporting Transformation through ERP Optimization

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OVERVIEW

It’s fair to say that if you’re a foodie, you’ve been through various ordering platforms; DoorDash, GrubHub, UberEats, and many more. These platforms make ordering food online a seamless and convenient platform for consumers. But what does ordering look like for the restaurants outside of those platforms? That’s where the Client of this project comes in. They’re a provider of integrated point of sale (POS) software solutions for restaurants and other hospitality merchants in the US. The Company’s solutions include POS, online ordering, loyalty, reporting, merchant payment services, and financing. In an already competitive space, SaaS companies liked the Client work to either differentiate through service offerings or acquire thriving companies to continue to survive. As a portfolio company of a private equity, its strategy for growth initiatives is both.
 
Despite merging of two competitors in recent years that were driving increased revenues, the Client was losing profitability. The Client knew that its sales and inventory processes and financials needed addressing. Given a lack of bandwidth and expertise, the Client engaged Bridgepoint Consulting as a strategic partner to complete an overall assessment and provide recommendations to improve profitability, cash flow and its financial reporting and oversee a NetSuite Optimization project.

APPROACH

If your company has ever been through a merger or acquisition, you’re likely well aware of the complications that this presents, and for the Client, this was no exception. With the merger and restructure of two competitors in the industry over a short period, it’s fair to say that there were numerous challenges for the Client to overcome. On the financial side, the Client team had discrepancies and breakdowns in processes that were impacting cash flow. There was also a lack of visibility to the expense drivers, questionable accuracy in historical financial accounting, an inability to create timely financial reports and complete timely financial close (sometimes taking five weeks), and more. On the operations side, the Client also had its concerns over sales, inventory procurement, and shipment, ultimately leading to irregularities in billing, collection and financial reporting. The Bridgepoint Consulting team had plenty of work ahead of them.

  • Two mergers of competitors
  • Discrepancies in breakdowns in processes
  • Lack of visibility into expense drivers
  • Questionable historical financial accounting
  • Inability to create timely reporting
  • Irregularities in billing, collection and financial reporting

Every great solution first starts with a discovery phase fueled by transparency and communication. As a relationship-driven firm, Bridgepoint Consulting worked to understand the business growth challenges, first by collecting all financial documentation, interviewing key stakeholders across various departments before finally outlining a strategic process that would be confirmed by the Client. During this discovery phase, Bridgepoint quickly identified over 60 findings, including more than half, which were considered material.

Bridgepoint Consulting began to optimize many areas of the Client’s NetSuite instance to help set a foundation, automate functions, and get necessary reporting that would ultimately work to utilize the platform better. Bridgepoint Consulting helped reconcile all material accounts and set up processes and recommendations that condensed the close cycle from 4-6 weeks to 1 week for the current year. The team then assisted in going back to the prior year to fix the accounting records and recreate the support for prior yearend account balances, in addition to completing the ASC 606 analysis to help ensure the clean audit opinion required by the lenders.

Bridgepoint Consulting also helped improve the quality of the data needed for reliable profitability analysis and created the templates to complete 13-week cash flow projections that were essential for business planning amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

RESULTS

The Client is now able to benefit in multiple ways from the efforts of Bridgepoint Consulting. They now have a foundation that will allow them to see substantial improvements in financial reporting accuracy, increased efficiencies in reporting (about a week), and reduction in sales tax reporting errors due to proper optimizations of NetSuite.

  • Improvements in financial reporting accuracy
  • Increased efficiencies in reporting
  • Reduction in sales tax reporting errors

SERVICES PROVIDED

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