Amanda Rompola
Sr. Accounting Manager
Frontline Education
Customer
Frontline Education
Industry
Services, Software
Headquarters
Malvern, PA, USA
Products Used
About
Background
The Challenge
This process was completely untenable when considering the Frontline’s business model. As a SaaS company serving education institutions, invoices are renewed on an annual basis to coincide with the beginning of the school year. With over 12,000 customers, Frontline’s finance team was dealing with a massive transaction volume in a small amount of time. Manual cash applications through Excel spreadsheets were simply not keeping up with the pace, nor was it feasible to expand the team.“I didn’t want to waste training on a temporary resource to come in to help us for a month,” Amanda pointed out. “They wouldn’t be helpful and it’s just an expense we shouldn’t have. We should have a program to automate this.”
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“I told my boss that Celigo was worth it at any price point, because it was absolutely required for our business’ high transaction volume.”
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The Solution
Celigo’s Cash Application Manager to NetSuite retrieves payment information from Frontline’s bank, and immediately matches it to customers in NetSuite. With the majority of the process now being automated, Amanda’s team members don’t have to do anything to process the majority of invoices. Before adopting the Cash Application Manager, Frontline used to dedicate an entire staff accountant’s day to performing cash applications. Now, everything from cash applications to bank reconciliations only takes two hours per day. On top of the time savings, eliminating spreadsheets and the ability to more efficiently review outputs substantially cut down on errors. “Celigo was very important to implement so I don’t have the issue of a staff accountant miskeying an Excel upload,” Amanda said. “I, as a manager, can improve and review stuff much easier.”
Although they are non-technical, Amanda’s team is responsible for maintaining their own integrations. Thanks to the quick turnaround and guided support from Celigo’s customer success team, troubleshooting and maintenance are simple endeavors. Amanda described her experience with error handling thusly: “After putting in some help desk tickets with Celigo, I know what’s going on and how to fix it, which is really easy. I’ve only put in a few tickets and they were responded to very quickly. They were always open to answering my questions, even if they weren’t urgent.”
Bottomline
Integrations have not only expedited billing and reconciliations, but actually increased overall job satisfaction within Amanda’s department. In particular, the staff accountants have been more engaged with their work because they have the opportunity to work with more interesting projects, rather than spending their time with manual data entry.