MotionPoint streamlines billing and revenue recognition while eliminating $420k worth of manual work 

Once upon a time, a team of four accountants needed three long weeks to do monthly invoicing at MotionPoint, a website translation provider used by global brands including Aetna, WebMD, Scotiabank and JetBlue. 

It was painstaking manual work with Excel and QuickBooks that slowed cash flow, dragged out the monthly close, and consumed staff time that could have been spent on more strategic and analytic work. 

“The thought process was that we needed to make billing faster, easier, better,” says Amanda Fishman, VP and controller at MotionPoint. “Sage Intacct and its Contracts module was exactly what we needed.” 

She adds: “We’ve gone from three weeks for invoicing with four people down to a two-day turnaround with just two people. Most of our invoices auto-renew through Sage Intacct, so we don’t need to touch them.” 

A 3x faster close and $2.5m in cash flow acceleration 

That’s a huge transformational gain at MotionPoint, which provides technology and services to translate and localize website text, audio/video, images, and other content in more than 40 languages. 

The breakthrough efficiency allowed the Florida-based company to leave two full-time employee accounting vacancies unfilled.  

Now with just two people accomplishing in two business days what used to take four people about 18 business days, MotionPoint is saving in the range of $420,000 in allocated costs a year. 

Cost savings are just one benefit of MotionPoint’s upgrade to Sage Intacct billing and revenue recognition software. The company has also: 

• Reduced the monthly close from three weeks to six days 
• Cut revenue recognition time from three weeks to push-button immediacy 
• Reduced days sales outstanding by 20% 
• Accelerated $2.5m in operating cash flow 
• Gained deep new insights to optimize profitability 

‘Super simple’ rev rec eliminates spreadsheet toil 

Automation throughout the order-to-cash cycle is driving new productivity for MotionPoint.  

Data is moved from a proprietary MotionPoint system to Sage Intacct, where Amanda’s team examines it for any variances that warrant a closer look. 

“Rev rec is super simple,” she says. “We just click on the contract schedule to recognize revenue without having to touch it, without having to keep another Excel spreadsheet with all the deferred revenue on it.” 

Monthly journal entries to the general ledgetr are specific to each customer and done automatically, without the manual work of the past.  

Now, Amanda and her team have newfound time, data, and tools for incisive reporting that generates insights for data-driven business decisions. 

‘Data nerd’ reporting delivers critical insights 

With Sage Intacct, Amanda can run slice-and-dice analytics on profitability by industry, services licensed, and individual customers, as well as connect revenue to expenses.  

Plus, Sage Intacct dashboards are eliminating the need for specialized business intelligence (BI) tools. 

“We can run margins on just a single customer, which we couldn’t do before,” says Amanda.  

“There are so many different insights that we’re getting because we added the Sage Intacct Contracts module. I’m a data nerd, and it is so cool to run reports this way and quickly get our information.” 

Sage Intacct is helping the MotionPoint executive team track margins by subscriptions versus services, as well as the important DSO metric.  

Shifting staff attention from manual work to collections has helped reduce DSO while accelerating cash flow. 

MotionPoint is using Sage Intacct to create ideal customer profiles, or ICPs, to better understand different types of customers and tailor solutions to their needs.  

With those insights, the sales team can better highlight MotionPoint’s broad offerings, ranging from both AI and human translations to support, ticketing, and quality assurance. 

A Clear Favorite Among Financial Management Platforms 

Remarkable results at MotionPoint have helped make Sage Intacct Fishman’s clear-cut favorite among financial management platforms. 

“I really love Sage Intacct,” Fishman says. “I’ve worked with Microsoft Dynamics GP, QuickBooks, Peachtree, and AS/400 back in the day, but I’ve enjoyed Sage Intacct the most out of all the systems I’ve used.” 

“Visually the Sage Intacct front end is much better, and you can build out and customize what you want,” she adds. “You have the ability to make it what you want it to be.” 

To explore why Sage Intacct is the platform of choice for companies like MotionPoint, visit us at www.sage.com/en-us/industry/subscription-saas/.