Industry: Financial Services - Private Equity

Location: Greater New York

Technology: NetSuite

Results at a Glance: A real estate investment firm replaced their outdated financial management system to prepare for growth.

A prominent real estate private equity investment firm headquartered in New York City needed to replace their outdated Dynamics GP financial management application. Citrin Cooperman helped them find a suitable replacement that would maintain their stringent accounting controls yet provide them with modern features and efficiencies to streamline their processes, provide greater flexibility for users, and deliver up-to-the-minute metrics on their huge portfolio of development properties. Further, with a highly-mobile workforce, a rapidly-expanding portfolio of projects and properties, and little to no internal information technology (IT) resources, it no longer made sense to deploy a traditional on-premise solution.

Challenges

The client needed real-time access to essential financial data in order to serve their existing investment portfolio while also being able to scale for growth. An outdated financial management system and a lack of in-house IT resources made it challenging to continue to do business in the existing environment. A big part of the success of this project hinged on the resources and implementation services provided by Citrin Cooperman’s team. With little to no client resources available for the project, the real estate investment trust (REIT)’s management team turned to Citrin Cooperman to manage all aspects of the migration, including business process workflow planning, devising a new chart of accounts (COA) structure to match reporting objectives, extraction of historical data from the Dynamics Great Plains (GP) structured query language (SQL) database, data conversion mapping, general ledger (GL) COA translation, and historical transaction files integration.

With tight project timelines and the amount of data that needed to be migrated, staying connected and closely managing the project was essential to success. The client’s management team needed to be able to make quick decisions about any issues with the implementation. Weekly project conference calls and status reports allowed the client stay up-to-date on all aspects of the project and address issues in a timely manner.

Results

Citrin Cooperman recommended NetSuite, a cloud solution that provides not only core financial management capabilities, such as accounts payable, expense report management, accounts receivable and general ledger, but has built-in financial reporting features. These enabled the investment firm to “slice” sub-ledger transactions and financial reports by an unlimited number of dimensions, such as project, department, and group, providing the ability for the management team to stay on top of project costs from any device at any time.

After all data was migrated, Citrin Cooperman provided testing, data validation, user training, and go-live support services. Despite aggressive timelines and being tasked with additional data migrations, the project was completed on time and on budget. When learning about the rapid success of the financial management system, the operations team asked Citrin Cooperman to implement NetSuite’s built-in CRM system to help manage and maintain the complex web of entity structures, contacts, contracts, and financial reporting requirements for the various partnership entities involved in these projects.

Key Benefits

• With a built-in capability to manage in-field expenses, the client’s investment professionals now have an easy way to record expenses, charge them to the appropriate project, and bill those expenses back to clients, all from their mobile devices and without any third-party add-on solutions or integrations.
• With Citrin Cooperman’s years of business process outsourcing experience and the robust CRM capabilities of NetSuite, our team was able to quickly model a framework that would enable the REIT to efficiently manage these complexities without needing to integrate a solution like Dynamics CRM or Salesforce.