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sage intacct case study

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise to Sage Intacct Construction: Upgrading to Cloud Accounting Software

Learn how a construction company turned basic bookkeepers into business managers with Sage Intacct

The Problem: As New West Building Company’s (NWBC) expansion surged, the team realized their existing accounting system, QuickBooks, was no longer a suitable match for its current processes – let alone future prospects. As more entities were added, workflows became inefficient and challenging to manage at larger scales. They needed a system that would support their growth and redirect employees from doing manual entries to higher-value tasks.

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THE NWBC STORY

The Decision to Upgrade from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct

Thomas Cochran, CFO at New West Building Company, has seen massive growth in the company since he started eight years ago. In those eight years, NWBC grew rapidly - from four employees to nearly two hundred with similar rapid growth in revenue and pipeline. Their one office expanded to five, and the one company grew to more than 13 divisions and entities. However, New West Building Company was missing an essential part —software that could support its growth.

New West Building Company noticed its old ERP system, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, was becoming increasingly more time-consuming and limited in functionality. Cochran described the workflow with QuickBooks as a spiderweb: “We’d add a company and that company would have to get reintegrated to every single one of our softwares. And it became exponentially more difficult to scale.”

Cochran laughed, recalling NWBC's original attempts to integrate data from 13 different places in Quickbooks:

“At one point, we had an employee who was working full time only reconciling inter-entity transactions between our different QuickBooks instances . . . he would spend probably 20 hours a month just waiting for QuickBooks to load as he swapped between entities,”

NWBC knew it was time for a change.

I felt confident that Sage would deliver more investment to the construction software industry than NetSuite over time.

Thomas cochran| CFO, New West Building Company

The Decision Making Process

The decision-making process began. NWBC needed a system to support and facilitate growth, and it identified key criteria for its new solution:

Cloud-based
Multi-entity
Construction and real estate focus

This criteria allowed NWBC to narrow the decision down to two vendors: Sage Intacct and NetSuite. After a six-month sales process with the Sage Intacct leadership team, NWBC chose to upgrade its software to Sage Intacct through Sockeye.

“Sage is already known as the leader in construction software. I wanted to ensure that we had the best possible construction accounting features available to us since general contracting is our core business. I felt confident that Sage would deliver more investment to the construction software industry than NetSuite over time.” - Thomas Cochran, CFO at New West Building Company.

Where does Sockeye come in?

Early in the Sage Intacct sales process, New West Building Company shared a few goals for the software upgrade:

To catch project-related budgeting issues earlier
To communicate with clients and vendors in real time to address any issues that pop up

Sage Intacct realized that New West Building Company was going to need a partner that would help customize solutions and ensure optimal use of the software. That was when “Sage passed the software to Sockeye Consulting, who we were told was the leader in the construction partner space,” Cochran commented.

Even before implementation, two characteristics stood out to NWBC:

Sockeye’s expertise in the construction space
Sockeye’s all-inclusive monthly retainer fixed pricing model

I really enjoy working with Sockeye. They’ve been extremely invested in our success since the beginning. They attack problems with the same level of detail and energy as if they were our own company’s employees.

- thomas cochran, cfo at New West Building COmpany

THE IMPLEMENTATION

Sage Intacct Construction + Sockeye

The core implementation took around a year, and the company was driven by what Cochran had shared with his team:

“The goal isn’t to reduce our staffing. The goal is to elevate our staff from bookkeepers to business managers—to help us operate at a higher level as a company.”

Though it made a huge impact on how they operate, Mark Kemper, IT and ERP director at New West Building Company, commented on the initial learning curve: “A challenge for us was helping all our employees understand they have access to this new software. They weren’t exactly sure what they could or couldn’t do with it. But Sockeye did a great job helping us understand the system, enough for us to try and make our own decisions. Had we not adapted, we would’ve been much worse off.”

Being heavily involved through the implementation, selection of vendors, and extension integration, Cochran left a word for those who are considering a similar transition:

“I would recommend Sage Intacct to companies that are rapidly growing and have many entities that they’re struggling to deal with— for companies in the construction space that want to have the best-in-class technology, for companies that want to push the boundaries of real-time integration, for companies that want to be able to provide data to their operational leaders in real-time, and for companies that want to elevate their accounting and project management staff.”

Procore and Sage Intacct: the ideal integration for construction companies.

With the help of Sockeye, New West Building Company combined Sage Intacct with other third-party apps, including the project management tool, Procore. The operational benefits of synching Procore and Sage Intacct in a construction company are tremendous and New West Building Company saw these results as well. It provided them with instant field-to-office connectivity, streamlined approval processes and eliminated double entry done when teams are operating in separate project management and accounting silos.

THE RESULTS

Sage Intacct Solutions

Sage Intacct drastically cut down the amount of manual labor NWBC was expending, and NWBC now has simplified payment processing, more efficient vendor management, and 1099 tax forms that are handled more quickly. Most importantly, the team is fulfilling Cochran's goal to elevate the staff. He said, “When I think about saving time for our employees, I like to think about it in terms of elevating our employees to higher-value tasks. And I feel like we have accomplished that goal.”

With Sage Intacct and Sockeye, New West Building Company is no longer held back by limitations, but enjoying many growth-supporting benefits:

Real-time project budget approvals
More control and visibility in its AP and AR processes
Increased workflow in basic operations with 40% of employees using Sage Intacct
Transformed the bank reconciliation process from a 10-day period to real-time daily cash updates
Elevated employees from manual tasks to higher-value tasks

THE OUTCOME

Elevating Employees to Higher-Value Tasks

What happened to the employee that spent full-time on manual transactions? Cochran states, "They are now completely freed up to work on other high-value tasks. We have not had to perform one single inter-entity reconciliation since we started.”

The core implementation took around a year, and New West Building Company was driven by what Cochran had shared with his team: The implementation of Sage Intacct has drastically cut down on the manual labor the company has. New West Building Company is seeing benefits in the form of simplified payment processing, more efficient vendor management, and 1099 tax forms that are handled more quickly. Cochran highlighted some major process improvements here:

Previously with Quickbooks

Running a payment batch would take two hours for one company. This was twenty- six hours of manual work for NWBC.

Vendor record updates did not transfer between entities, lengthening the time to check compliance and insurance accuracy.

Running 1099s would take New West Building Company’s controller on month

With Sage Intacct

Using a linked AP Payment Processor, an entire check can be done in one click and with more accurate results. Allocating more time for compliance-related tasks.

Using a consolidated vendor list, New West Building Company can process faster AP runs, at a higher level while experiencing minimal issues.

New West Building Company now uses the single consolidated 1099 record feature. The expected duration to complete this is now 1-2 days for the controller.

Working with Sockeye

Recapping the core implementation experience, Cochran and Kemper spoke highly of their partnership with Sockeye. They emphasized that Sockeye was eager to meet their “crazy” requests and joked about how composed Sockeye remained when the company felt it was in crisis.

Cochran summarized New West Building Company's outcomes and partnership with Sockeye by saying:

“I really enjoy working with Sockeye. They’ve been extremely invested in our success since the beginning. They attack problems with the same level of detail and energy as if they were our own company’s employees. And it’s been a really collaborative environment, which has allowed us to solve a bunch of really complex problems that many of our vendors, our internal team, and Sockeye thought were impossible . . . We have the best possible system at this point that we can have for the size and resources we have available to devote to our technology stack.”

case study: New West Building Company + Sage intacct

Learn how a real estate development company turned basic bookkeepers into business managers with Sage Intacct.

Download, view, or share the PDF version of Sockeye's case study on New West Building Company's switch from Quickbooks to Sage Intacct Construction.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Company Overview

New West Building Company has decades of collective experience in real estate development and is committed to providing valuable construction-related services to Jackson, Wyoming, and surrounding communities.

New West Building Company tailors its support and management services to the specific needs of each client while ensuring innovative and exceptional results. Learn more about New West Building Company at https://www.newwestbc.com/.

Previous Software

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Results With Sockeye

Real-time project budget approvals.

More control and visibility in its AP and AR processes.

Increased workflow in basic operations with 40% of employees using Sage Intacct.

Transformed the bank reconciliation process from a 10-day period to real-time daily cash updates.

Empowered employees taking on higher-value tasks.

SOCKEYE + SAGE INTACCT CONSTRUCTION

Let us help you upgrade to a cloud accounting system built specifically for the construction industry

Sockeye is the only Sage Intacct Premier Partner that specializes in serving construction companies. We’ve helped hundreds of general contractors, sub-contractors, trades, and real estate companies take control of their project financial management. We’re constantly discovering new ways to streamline our clients’ workflows and sharing those insights across our portfolio.

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