The Company
DirectBooks is a fintech company and market leading platform for communication in primary markets, specializing in structured deal data, documentation, and information exchange. The DirectBooks platform offers transformative automation and standardization across global investment grade, high yield, and emerging markets fixed income products.
The company’s finance team was preparing itself for major changes and growth in the company’s operations that were going to significantly impact existing processes.
The Challenge
DirectBooks was experiencing many changes, including the introduction of new revenue streams, a larger client base with significantly more customer data to manage, as well as the potential for many new subscriptions to manage and track, which included varying subscription periods and pricing models. All of this on top of a multi-entity, multi-currency financial structure.
The company’s invoicing process and revenue recognition had room for improvement; its subscription invoices and revenue recognition were both manual processes before making the switch to NetSuite. Additionally, the company’s existing system was not equipped with the tools to carry out accounting processes for multi-subsidiary consolidation, and the company needed to supplement those functions by using other third-party consolidation and reporting tools for eliminations and FX translation. This was the only way for them to see consolidated financials and reports, which did not allow for the flexibility of real-time reporting.
The Solution
After much research and due diligence, DirectBooks decided to make the shift to NetSuite in order to be prepared to scale with the company’s growth and expand the capabilities of their finance tech-stack.
The team chose Caravel as its implementation partner due to its structured approach, robust resources, and hands-on process. Caravel’s experience, knowledge, and segmented approach to implementation made them feel at ease. “I felt like the pacing was perfect, and I never had too much on my plate at a given time,” said Ben Karpas, Finance Associate at DirectBooks.
Initial sessions with Caravel began with them learning about the DirectBooks business, current finance tech-stack, and processes so they could tailor NetSuite to their needs. They had clear communication throughout the implementation and beyond, and weekly check-ins were very helpful to keep expectations, deliverables, and the overall product on track and on budget.
Caravel assisted with customizations such as custom workflows, CSV imports, custom fields and reporting, and custom client-facing PDF invoice formats. Caravel also helped the DirectBooks team make efficient use of time when it came to data migration by providing standardized templates and giving guidance on what was necessary and what was “nice-to-have”, as well as providing experiences from other customers on how to best carry out not only the migration, but the go-forward use and administration.
To read about the significant results DirectBooks experienced, please download the full case study below.
