November 13, 2019 – Alder Partners, an independent franchisee of Planet Fitness, operates 20+ gyms and serves over 147,000 members across Massachusetts and Georgia. Once Alder Partners reached six clubs in 2014 and set a goal for continued 30-40 percent annual growth, its owners realized they needed to centralize financial management in order to scale efficiently.
Alder Partners leveraged Sage Intacct to avoid $100,000 annually in additional salary costs, improve confidence in cash forecasting and budget accuracy by 10%, and shift 50% of their finance team’s time into forward-looking analytics. Sage Intacct has also given Alder Partners insight into each franchise location’s profitability, ensuring that the organization has the borrowing capacity to achieve its five-year growth objectives.
Prior to Sage Intacct, Alder Partners had each location set up as a separate business running independent financial processes, which resulted in a lack of comprehensive consolidations and real-time visibility across all gyms. They needed to centralize financials and implement a robust system that could support an audit-ready, multi-entity financial close.
“We looked at Microsoft Dynamics GP and Oracle NetSuite, but chose Sage Intacct because it had everything we needed in one, easy-to-scale solution,” remembers John Kalinowski, Alder Partners’ controller. “We were impressed with its ability to handle many different entities and location groups with streamlined inter-company transactions and consolidations.”
After implementing Sage Intacct, Alder Partners’ finance team realized significant benefits, including:
- Increased budget accuracy: By using Sage Intacct’s dashboards, John estimates the company’s budgets are at least 10% more accurate and its cash flow forecasting has improved, because he can easily track actuals-to-budget for specific entities and re-forecast every six months.
- Avoided $100,000 in salaries: By using the software to automate previously manual financial processes – like managing inter-company reconciliations, recording hundreds of daily cash transactions, entering payroll, and allocating invoices across locations – the finance team saved at least 1.5 full-time employee equivalents they would’ve needed to manage 29 different entities.
- Cut monthly close time by 50%: Despite tripling in size, Sage Intacct helped cut the monthly close process in half, allowing John to free 50% of his time from day-to-day accounting tasks for more forward-looking business analysis.
“Before we adopted Sage Intacct, we were running blind since it just wasn’t possible to do any kind of real-time analysis,” Kalinowski says. “Now, we’re constantly measuring and optimizing year-over-year same store sales, various marketing campaigns, each of our five main revenue categories, and the ramp cycle for new gyms – the visibility we have with Sage Intacct is like night and day compared to QuickBooks.”
For more information on how Alder Partners uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study.