Simplifying and accelerating processes while increasing financial management control and visibility on a NetSuite foundation enables InterVest to deliver outstanding customer experiences, power continuous improvement, reassure auditors, and drive growth.
InterVest Capital Partners, a New York City-based investment firm focused on asset-based lending, leasing and other structured finance verticals, took a huge technology leap by implementing Oracle NetSuite as its ERP solution. A team of NetSuite and financial services experts from 5-Star NetSuite Partner Sikich managed the deployment in collaboration with InterVest. Kayla Kasica, Corporate Controller at InterVest, has many years’ experience in finance management as well as with ERP and other software systems. “NetSuite exceeded my expectations,” Kasica says. “It’s probably the best ERP solution I’ve ever used. Within NetSuite, we have all the capabilities we need and are excited to be able to use it as we grow.”
Kasica views the engagement with Sikich as a successful partnership. “Thanks to the thoughtfulness, planning, time management, and professionalism of the Sikich team, our NetSuite project was executed seamlessly,” she notes. “Frequent communications and speedy resolution of any issues we encountered were extremely helpful. I would absolutely recommend Sikich.”
For InterVest, managing corporate finance in NetSuite as delivered by Sikich has resulted in a variety of highly advantageous efficiencies and enabled the finance team to assume a more strategic role in the company. Setting the scene for these outcomes, Sikich finance and NetSuite experts closely reviewed InterVest’s corporate financial management and reporting practices to streamline workflows, eliminate the potential for errors, and provide the insight-enabling transparency the finance team sought. “Everybody here really loves NetSuite,” Kasica says. “It’s driven many efficiencies and helped us strengthen our internal controls.”
Managing and mentoring a team of onsite and remote finance managers, Kasica is responsible for InterVest’s corporate finance management. She frequently interfaces with the company’s middle office, which manages more than 120 funds with committed capital of over $15 billion. After a spin-out from Wafra in 2021, InterVest became an independent company and began looking for its own ERP solution. In doing so, InterVest prioritized sophisticated financial management features together with comprehensive business management capabilities.
Once InterVest leadership determined that NetSuite was the best-fit solution for what it needed, the fund business was the first to deploy the ERP system with assistance from NetSuite consultants. At the time, efficiently providing accurate reporting to auditors and fund investors was a top priority. When it was time for corporate operations to deploy its own instance of NetSuite, InterVest decided to find a capable collaborator.
“We wanted to connect with a top-tier partner to implement NetSuite and assume the major share of the project workload,” Kasica explains. “The finance team had many ideas and goals for using ERP to create efficiencies, provide reporting and information in a more timely manner, and drive our long-term strategy. We knew that the right expertise could be invaluable for accomplishing this.” Kasica developed an RFP for the consulting engagement and included Sikich because of a recommendation.
The Sikich team made a favorable first impression because of its thoroughness and expertise. Kasica says, “The Sikich discovery process, spurred by thoughtful questions, was very helpful in preparing the project. We appreciated that Sikich team members had experience in finance management as well as a strong technical background. They were familiar with our business model and understood how we generate revenue, bill for expenses, and allocate fees among entities. They saw how onerous some of our current processes were and how we could simplify them.”
Sikich agreed that InterVest made a sound decision in choosing NetSuite. “Most of the functionalities we were looking for were out-of-the-box features in NetSuite,” Kasica adds. “We could realize them without customizations and the long-term management complexities that can be associated with them.”
Kasica and her team thoroughly documented their operations, processes, and concerns, which greatly accelerated the discovery and allowed InterVest to maintain ownership of the implementation and its outcomes. The first and critically important step Sikich took was a comprehensive business process assessment (BPA) to help InterVest and Sikich align on how to transition the company’s corporate finance management into NetSuite and simplify its processes. Sikich went on to deploy and configure NetSuite, facilitated a weeklong thorough training, completed the implementation, and made experienced consultants available in standing meetings until the InterVest finance group was completely comfortable using its new ERP system. The entire process took under five months.
Sikich consultants provided several options for streamlining transaction reporting, a key concern for the InterVest finance team. “Instead of taking several hours to enter our management fees for large transactions, we can now do so in a few minutes,” Kasica notes.
Following a Sikich recommendation, adding data tags to transactions made the relationship between funds and transactions perfectly unambiguous. Says Kasica, “We can run dynamic reports that pivot off income statements or balance sheets and immediately see the earnings of each investment fund.” Sikich also suggested the addition of custom fields linked to customers to highlight the performance of InterVest’s different business groups. “When we assess our profits and losses, we can see what happened in each business group during a particular month,” Kasica explains. “Using NetSuite this way is part of our journey to full-fledged financial planning and analysis.”
Thanks to NetSuite data tags and an income statement that Sikich set up, Kasica can display each business group’s profit and loss by means of a single click. “I can run the P&L function for each business group and get my data within minutes, a task that previously required several hours of data entry and processing in Excel,” she says. “Overall, in our consolidated reporting and creating financial statements, we are saving 10 to 15 working days every month with NetSuite. That means we can close the books and provide executives with consolidated financials much earlier in the month than we used to.”
Preparing accurate accounts payable files, reconciling them with approvals, logging into bank portals, and releasing payments used to take several hours of a finance manager’s time. In NetSuite, this financial management workflow has become simpler and shrunk to roughly one hour.
Vendors are pleased that InterVest now issues payments anytime, not just at the end of each week. “Making payments is seamless,” Kasica says. “We have all necessary information locked down in NetSuite. When we release payments, they run automatically in the background. We don’t have to log into banking portals or perform our tasks on banking sites as frequently as previously. That also strengthens our internal controls.”
Processing chargebacks and expenses applied to hundreds of customers no longer requires two working days. Kasica describes, “It takes only a couple of clicks to prompt the NetSuite module to process and allocate expenses and chargebacks. This is a substantial improvement compared to going through allocations one at a time, recording them in journals, and adding the journal entries to invoices.”
Customers, in turn, receive their invoices faster and with a much reduced likelihood of errors. “At the end of a month or a quarter, we can now run a rapid billing process and report all expenses to customers within one to two weeks,” Kasica says. “With accurate tracking, NetSuite always tells us how much a customer owes across various InterVest entities.”
Newly won efficiencies freed up so much time that the finance team could broaden its scope. “It was a huge win for us that we could take on finance management for close to 70 entities that are outside of the corporate portfolio,” says Kasica. “With our previous way of working we would never have had the time to pay attention to these entities. My team members thus realize an opportunity for professional growth by performing more varied work.”
In addition to accelerating many processes while improving their accuracy, NetSuite automations satisfy the preference of InterVest’s external auditors, who are not in favor of manual, spreadsheet-based finance management. “Producing consolidated financials in NetSuite gives auditors greater confidence in the completeness and accuracy of our process,” Kasica says.
In working with auditors, it also helps that InterVest has implemented more stringent and wider-reaching internal controls. “Auditors can clearly see that we have stringent internal controls with appropriate segregation of duties,” Kasica describes. “We automated our processing of fixed assets and prepaid expenses with amortization and depreciation schedules and thereby avoid clerical errors. Automated workflows for vendor approvals and other functions contribute to strengthening our controls.”
InterVest manages its foreign subsidiaries in NetSuite. Auditors trust automatic conversions of dollar amounts to foreign currencies more than manual calculations. Kasica explains, “Auditors can quickly run a report and verify that the rates we use are reasonable and our financials make sense.”
InterVest is gradually bringing more users and processes into the NetSuite environment. “We want to manage everything in NetSuite,” says Kasica. Instead of asking for invoices and fees to be entered by the corporate finance team, the middle office will be able to record earnings and invoices on its own. Invoice approval, still handled in a separate software tool that integrates with NetSuite, will shift to be handled within the ERP system.
Suggestions from Sikich consultants, such as encouraging the use of SquareWorks technology embedded in NetSuite to print checks, increase the value of the ERP system for InterVest. In this case and other process improvements, Sikich also assists the finance team in implementing changes that require cooperation from InterVest’s banks. Says Kasica, “It was a real win for us to be able to print checks without headaches. Managing this task within NetSuite strengthens our security and minimizes the risk of fraud.”
Sikich continues to assist InterVest in adjusting the NetSuite platform to changing business requirements. With support from trusted consultants, Kasica’s team also delves into the solution’s budgeting and forecasting capabilities to incrementally advance financial planning and analysis. “We are thoroughly impressed with Sikich,” Kasica comments. “Sikich consultants make their expertise accessible, collaborate closely with us to resolve specific issues, and help us strengthen our controls. They also know when to take a step back and stay true to our greater vision for financial management.”
