CloudCheckr is a comprehensive platform that helps organizations manage security, utilization and cost across public clouds, such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
Having a portfolio of over 500 customers, ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, from managed service providers to government agencies such as NASA, Intel, and Lockheed Martin, CloudCheckr technology delivers visibility and governance to all of them.
CloudCheckr unifies IT, security and finance teams around the cloud and provides total visibility, deep insight, cloud automation and governance. But, managing such immense amounts of data using combination of QuickBooks and Excel spreadsheets made it difficult for CloudCheckr to operate efficiently.
Multi-entity consolidations across the U.S. base and U.K. subsidiary were consuming over a half-day of the finance team’s time every month. Furthermore, an entire day’s manual work went into managing deferred revenue while they still lacked the needed financial visibility.
Being a SaaS company pointed to some very specific requirements for a new system to help operations.
“To resolve our accounting and financial issues, we knew we needed a more robust and modern system that could track not only financial information, but also our contractual information,” says Sandy Burns, VP of Finance, CloudCheckr.
Sage Intacct was a good fit partner because its subscription-centric solution was better geared for a SaaS company like CloudCheckr. “Its Contracts module enables us to manage and automate billing, revenue recognition, forecast and set metrics across diverse SaaS pricing models. Additionally, Sage Intacct’s financial tools would be able to handle the increased volume and growth in our customer base and revenues,” Burns adds.
CloudCheckr has a wide range of pricing rates that are customized for individual customers. Since most of them involved billing usage, the team of Sage needed to create a diverse list of billing prices in Sage Intacct. On the flip side, CloudCheckr had several customers that were billed an annual fixed fee, but revenue was recognized based on monthly usage.
During the design phase, the implementation team at AcctTwo, a Sage Intacct partner, spent extra time on detailed discussions about how their pricing levels worked. They mapped out the right billing price list entries and revenue recognition schedules plus thorough testing before going live.
While working with the CloudCheckr team, the AcctTwo reviewed their internal workflows and discussed the time sinks. They also had a brief discussion about what steps they can take to eliminate the streamlined workflow and reporting in Sage Intacct. “The entire CloudCheckr accounting team was thoroughly committed to the process and hands-on, from Sandy Burns, VP Finance, down to the accounting clerk,” says Greg Ekker, VP of Professional Services, Sage Intacct.
With the (at the time) latest release of the automated Active Contract Processing in Sage Intacct, the team used it for CloudCheckr’s historical contracts and produced a very close reconciliation to their manual deferred revenue Excel calculations. As per Greg Ekker, “Being able to use the automated ACP function in Sage Intacct saved a lot of time prior to going live, and allowed the team to spend more time on their complex billing needs.”
After successfully implementing Sage’s cloud financial management system, Cloudcheckr has reduced its monthly close time from 10 days to five—a 50% faster monthly close with strengthened controls. Sage Intacct automation also enabled CloudCheckr to eliminate painful manual workaround multi-entity consolidation, currency conversions, journal entries and deferred revenue management.
According to Sandy Burns, “Our finance team can now track A/R collections daily, reducing the days’ sales outstanding (DSO) and giving better visibility into and accelerating cash flow during the pandemic.
Additionally, the rich multidimensional reporting and dashboards in Sage Intacct provided us with data-driven insights that helped us fine-tune our business and adapt to the COVID-19 crisis. We can better navigate these uncertain times with real-time visibility into cash flow, costs and various customer segments’ revenue.”
Vishal Muktewar is a Senior Correspondent at On Dot Media. He reports news that focuses on the latest trends and innovations happening in the B2B industry. An IT engineer by profession, Vishal has worked at Insights Success before joining Ondot. His love for stories has driven him to take up a career in enterprise journalism. He effectively uses his knowledge of technology and flair for writing, for crafting features, articles and interactions for technology enterprise media platforms.
