Tiber Ventures, a streaming video services provider at the time of implementation, is charting a new course with Sage Intacct, eliminating the high costs and billing limitations it experienced with Oracle NetSuite.
Before the recent sale of our operating assets to a larger firm, the Boston-based company was a broadcaster and cable TV platform with customers across more than 50 countries, had used an enterprise-level NetSuite system for a decade.
Problem was, Tiber Ventures no longer needed enterprise functionality such as hardware manufacturing and warehousing as it shifted to digital offerings.
“The business had pivoted away from supplying hardware and we reduced our physical footprint after Covid,” says Mark Szynkowski, who joined Tiber Ventures as its CFO in early 2023. “NetSuite was unwilling to move us off the enterprise system.”
Tiber Ventures identified Sage Intacct as a more affordable solution with a full set of capabilities in working with RSM, an IT and business consultancy and five-time Sage Intacct partner award winner.
“Sage Intacct checked all the boxes,” Szynkowski says. “There wasn’t much reason to look elsewhere with the price efficiencies, all the functionality we needed, and having a strong partner in RSM.”
New billing efficiency and flexibility
Soon after an RSM-led implementation of Sage Intacct and its Contracts module, Tiber Ventures dramatically improved billing processes that had required labor-intensive manual spreadsheet work along additional input and invoicing with NetSuite.
“We have really improved our billing efficiencies with Sage Intacct,” says Mark Maney, North American revenue manager. “We could not generate billing schedules in NetSuite and we struggled with that. We were creating manual spreadsheets and it just got too difficult to find what could be billed and what couldn’t be.”
Plus, Sage Intacct flexibility lets Tiber Ventures modify billing schedules, templates, and milestones more quickly and easily than could be done in NetSuite.
“It’s relatively easy to shift milestones so bills are produced ahead of schedule or delayed to later with Sage Intacct,” Szynkowski says. “In NetSuite, it was clunky to get invoices generated when things changed.”
‘Simpler, smarter, and tidier’
The shift from Sage Intacct and the Contracts module paid off with greater visibility into cash flow and other key metrics.
“Because we were better able to manage billings from the contract level, we were able to see and manage our contracts, and therefore drill down further and assess our cash flow from there,” says the Director of Shared Services and EMEA Accounts.
As usage deepens, Tiber Ventures expects to further improve accounting efficiency, accelerate the financial close, and deliver better information faster to support data-driven business decisions.
In a next step, Tiber Ventures plans to roll out dashboards for managers, offering key metrics and drill-down to detail.
“Our implementation was successful, on time and on budget, which has allowed us to be simpler, smarter, and tidier,” Szynkowski says. “We operate on reality, instead of operating on feel.”
A scalable best-of-breed tech stack
With Sage Intacct as its financial foundation, Tiber Ventures is scaling up a best-of-breed tech stack including Bill.com and now Ramp for accounts payable, Ramp also for credit cards and expenses, Avalara for sales tax automation, and Workday Adaptive Planning for planning and analytics.
“The integrations and APIs with Bill.com and Ramp are pretty seamless and the connectivity is instant,” Maney says. “We’re seeing transactions almost instantly when we push the button on those tools.”
Tiber Ventures leaders credit RSM for helping it improve financial management with Sage Intacct.
“The RSM implementation team was outstanding,” says Szynkowski. “The expertise of RSM has been very helpful in guiding us through building our tech stack with Sage Intacct.”
Investor grade SaaS metrics
Having one SaaS revenue lifecycle led to several critical SaaS finance process evolutions to support this scale:
- Automation of new billing models
- Automated tracking of milestone billing and invoice creation
- Automation and visibility of tracking revenue recognition
Having one system of record in their revenue lifecycle led Mark and the leadership team to having the key metrics they need to guide the growth of the company, with deep dimensional reporting for public markets with KPIs for investors, leveraging Sage’s SaaS Intelligence.
They now have access to tracking capabilities of 30+ revenue categories, across 40+ real-time reports, showing 50+ key SaaS industry KPIs, with views for seven different leaders, including:
- CFO
- Controller
- CEO
- Billing
- Customer Success
- Audit
- Treasury
- and Product.
Learn more
Tiber Ventures is one of a growing number of SaaS/software companies to adopt Sage Intacct, making us the #1 solution of choice for SaaS companies outgrowing QuickBooks or migrating from a legacy system, according to a study by The SaaS CFO.
Learn more about what Sage Intacct can do for your software and services company here
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