Optimum employer solutions eliminates up to 50 hours a month in manual accounting work

When Jenafer Elin, the director of finance at Optimum Employer Solutions, proposed upgrading from QuickBooks back in 2019, the company’s founder and CEO was skeptical. Optimum was too busy to take on the project, the CEO felt. As a nine-year member of the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing companies, Optimum was busy expanding and serving small to mid-sized clients in 47 states as a professional employer organization (PEO).

“I thought, ‘If we don’t move now, it’s going to get worse later,’” Elin said. “The way we’re growing, it’s always going to be busy, we’re always going to have issues — too much to do and not enough time to do it.”

Elin secured the CEO’s go-ahead to explore new solutions, and by January 2020 Optimum went live on Sage Intacct as its new financial management system, as outlined in our new Optimum Employer Solutions success story.

Case Study – Optimum Employer Solutions

Read how Optimum Employer Solutions improved efficiency in closing the books 3x with Sage Intacct.

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The move to the Sage Intacct cloud let Optimum’s five-person accounting team easily transition to remote work when COVID-19 struck just three months later. It also delivered huge gains in financial management efficiency and insights that weren’t possible with QuickBooks and Excel.

“Our CEO loves Sage Intacct now — he’s a big believer in it,” Elin said. In fact, the company issued a press release later in 2020 on how its adoption of Sage Intacct was helping it better manage its financials and serve clients with its HR, benefits, payroll, and workers’ comp services.

Close Efficiency Rises 3x with Seamless Multi-Entity Accounting

With Sage Intacct, Optimum has eliminated the time-consuming obstacles in multi-entity accounting it faced with QuickBooks, which only stood to increase as Optimum planned to add a third business entity. The 15-year-old company, based in Orange County, Calif., has increased its efficiency in closing the monthly books by 3x and:

• Eliminated up to 32 hours a month of Excel work in creating weekly financial consolidations
• Cut up to eight hours a month in intercompany accounting, and three hours in prepaid expenses management
• Saved eight hours a month in looking up data and creating custom Excel reports for the CEO
• Improved business insights for informed decisions and enhanced client service

“Our move to Sage Intacct has been just stellar,” Elin said. “It’s given us the ability to see information more quickly in better ways, and we’re able to scale and grow with the software. We’re accomplishing a lot more in less time in terms of accounting and finance.”

Now, Optimum’s CEO has a personalized dashboard, as do sales reps and accounting staff. That’s giving the company timely insights into key metrics, with the ability to drill down into detail, without Elin’s team spending hours piecing together information in Excel.

“Our boss would email us and say, ‘Can you run me a report on this or that?’” Elin said. “Now he just logs in to his dashboard and can filter information by client or any way he likes. That’s one of his favorite things, because sales information is super important to him.”

With dimensional reporting in Sage Intacct, Optimum gained new ability to track profitability and other dynamics at the client and location level. Real-time data and slice-and-dice reporting help drive decisions on which types of clients or client industries Optimum can focus on, and it’s also improving client service.

“The real impact is being able to make better business decisions in terms of cost, and what kind of clients are a good business decision,” Elin said. “We’re also able to answer any client questions more quickly now that we’re so much more efficient on the finance side.”

A ‘Fabulous’ In-House Implementation Under Budget

Optimum turned to Sage Intacct based on a recommendation from another PEO firm running the solution. After a brief look at competing solutions, Elin knew that Sage Intacct would be ideal for her firm’s needs.

“So many things in Sage Intacct appealed to me,” Elin said. “There didn’t seem to any other solution out there that could compete with Sage Intacct.”

Optimum got a jumpstart to success with an in-house implementation that Elin handled herself with help from a Sage Intacct support specialist.

“Implementation was a fabulous experience and I came in way under budget,” Elin said. “My trainer was phenomenal in tailoring Sage Intacct to exactly what I needed, and letting me set my own pace.”

Interoperability between Sage Intacct and third-party applications including a PEO industry platform, MasterTax, and Bill.com is further streamlining accounting while eliminating difficult uploads to QuickBooks.

And Elin’s team could easily transition to home-based work when COVID-19 struck not long after Optimum went live. Using the multi-factor authentication option in Sage Intacct gave Elin additional confidence in appropriate access and security in the remote environment.

“Sage Intacct being cloud-based really helped in moving accounting to home-based work without a hiccup,” Elin said. “The multi-factor authentication gives us assurance that our data is safe and secure without having to worry about a data breach or other problems.”

See our Optimum Employer Solutions success story to learn more about how the fast-growing firm has transformed financial management with its upgrade to Sage Intacct.

Case Study – Optimum Employer Solutions

Read how Optimum Employer Solutions improved efficiency in closing the books 3x with Sage Intacct.

Download