ATLANTA – April 24, 2019 – Sage (FTSE: SGE), the market leader in cloud business management solutions, today announced that Elemica has implemented Sage Intacct, a solution available in the Sage Business Cloud, to reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) from 90 to 65 days and improve its EBITDA by 10 percent in the next year. The move to a modern, cloud financial system has helped the company deliver $3 million in operational cash flow improvements.
Founded in 2000, Elemica is a leading digital supply network for process manufacturers. Approximately $500B in goods are bought, sold, and moved annually through Elemica. The organization previously relied on a legacy Microsoft Dynamics NAV system with heavy use of Excel for key financial processes, but discovered that the system required tedious work outside the core system. Spreadsheets and an Outlook calendar were used to manage revenue and billings, while accountants wrote paper checks and entered payables data manually into Microsoft Dynamics and Excel. That high manual workload left little to no time for strategic analysis to grow the business.
“Moving to Sage Intacct has established professional level controls for us and gives us a single place to make sure we’re invoicing correctly,” said Anthony Palladino, CFO at Elemica. “Our accounting team has always been staffed by skilled strategists. With Sage Intacct, we now have the time and opportunity to use those skills to grow the business.”
In a matter of months, Elemica reduced its days sales outstanding (DSO) from 90 to 65 days — a 28% improvement that created $3 million in new operational cash flow. These improvements enable Elemica to develop the next version of its platform and ramp up sales. Sage Intacct has also created new opportunities for the accounting team to align with departmental managers on budgeting. Rather than consolidated, high-level information of the past, managers have detailed P&L statements, as well as budget-to-actual reports in as little as 10 days after the month-end close. Elemica realized other significant benefits, including:
- Deeper, more timely insights into costs and revenue: Elemica is on track to improve its EBITDA by 10% within a year — a multimillion-dollar impact to the bottom line.
- Faster, more efficient financial management: Reduced time needed for its monthly close from 16 days to eight days. Paper-based payables that required physical check signing have been automated with Sage Intacct.
- Automated revenue recognition in a single system: Elemica identified $80,000 in overlooked revenue and can now do forecasting based on billings, cash, and revenue.
- Quicker monthly board reporting: After a recent acquisition, Elemica’s board expected detailed financial reports that would have been difficult to assemble in its previous system. Leveraging the integration between Sage Intacct and Adaptive Insights’ budgeting and planning application, Elemica’s finance team can now produce monthly board reports in a matter of hours.
“Board reporting that took us days in Excel now takes a few hours to do through a combination of Adaptive Insights and Sage Intacct” said Kiely Fagan, Director of Financial Operations at Elemica. “We spent most of our time getting ready for monthly board meetings and had no time to really analyze the numbers and make changes based on that. We're definitely in a much better position now that we're system-driven and automated with Sage Intacct. We’re set up for the future, for growth, for acquisitions, much better than we were before.”
For more information on how Elemica uses Sage Intacct, view the full case study.