Case Study
Helping OnMessage Inc. Optimize and Improve
Founded in 2006, OnMessage is a Virginia based team of creative professionals with 30+ employees and clients in 18 states. As a strategy firm they focus primarily on political campaigns, they also provide a wide array of marketing and advertising services including TV, web and radio spots, campaign graphics, polling, online presence, social media and fundraising.
The Challenge
They had advanced revenue management features enabled, which were intended to streamline their financial processes. However, these advanced features led to complications with the regular accounting functionality (revenue recognition and general ledger impacts). Added to the complexity they needed to accurately manage service resale transactions. The customer faced significant challenges in connecting their bank feeds with their main bank. The bank feeds were connected to both Sandbox and Production environments, which impacted the expected performance and caused ongoing issues with bank reconciliation.
The Solution
After thorough discovery sessions, our team delivered a comprehensive optimization plan that addressed key pain points:
- Direct Posting for Revenue Recognition: we enabled direct posting, ensuring that revenue hits the books immediately. This approach smoothed out revenue over time as it was consumed, providing a more accurate financial picture
- Simplified Invoicing and Billing Process: We refined the invoicing and billing process by differentiating between billable expenses and billable items, ensuring that all amounts were accurately reflected in the general ledger and financial statements.
- Enhanced General Ledger Impact Tracking: We demonstrated how bills, invoices, and general ledger entries should be tracked to ensure transparency and accuracy, including mapping transactions to the correct income and expense accounts, which improved the reliability of financial reporting
We conducted a detailed review of the current system setup and identified all existing issues:
- Optimized Bank Feeds Configuration and optimization, by adjusting configuration settings, parsers, and profiles, we successfully connected NetSuite to the bank via bank feeds, OnMessage can now exert more control over their NetSuite investment, ensuring efficient and accurate financial operations.
- Improved Financial Clarity and Efficiency, by streamlining the revenue recognition process and clarifying billing practices, the team at OnMessage gained greater confidence in their financial data.
The adjustments made to the invoicing and billing processes reduced the administrative burden and improved the accuracy of financial records, all the enhancements made in tracking general ledger impacts allowed for more precise and transparent financial reporting, aiding in better decision-making.
Bonus Value
Vurbane took over an issue that another firm spent over a year trying to resolve and implemented a solution in a 30-minute call. We leveraged existing features and licensing that OnMessage was already paying for but was not properly advised on how to use.
During the process of resolving the Revenue Recognition issue, we found that certain features in NetSuite, which are typically unalterable, were adding complexity. With effective advisement and coordination between OnMessage and NetSuite, we successfully facilitated disabling these features, saving the client $50,000, equivalent to significant time and effort that would have been required for reimplementation.
The Result
“Vurbane is an amazing team of extremely knowledgeable NetSuite experts!
After going live with NetSuite, we had some major hurdles to overcome. The company we previously hired for implementation did not follow through with the expected first month training, nor were they helpful in the issues we continued to have after going live. We worked with that team for more than 18 months to get our reporting, banking, and other processes to work correctly. We were extremely frustrated, we knew NetSuite had the capability to do what we needed, but we kept hitting roadblocks.
After a few discussions with the Vurbane team, we asked them to do a deep dive into our system to see if they could help us. Within a few days they discovered two major issues: Both ARM and Multibook were turned on, causing errors in our Accounts and Reports.
Neither of these two functions should have been turned on for our US-based, cash-based, group of companies. Vurbane created a working process with the native functionality of NetSuite, as well as working with us and NetSuite to remove or shut off Multibook and ARM.
They further helped us with our bank feed. We worked with the previous company for more than a year and were told the bank feed would not work with our bank. Vurbane had it working for us in 30 minutes!
It has been so refreshing to work with a group of professionals who are very talented, enjoy what they do, and follow through with their promises. We will continue to work with the Vurbane team as we fine tune our system.”
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