formerly FinancialForce
formerly FinancialForce
One source of project truth
50% faster invoicing
More than 50% faster month-end closes
Clearsulting is a consultancy operating across North America and Europe whose mission is to help finance become a better partner to the business. With innovative thinking and a digital-first approach, the firm develops sustainable solutions that allow teams to drive results and work better, together.
In just six years, Clearsulting has rapidly grown from three people to nearly 200. With continued growth on the horizon, the company quickly realized it was hamstrung by manual processes and disjointed systems. The process to create and approve project proposals was time consuming and team members struggled to understand proposal status. Moreover, team members found it painful aggregating data across subsidiaries and systems–some of which required several instances to handle multiple currencies–to close out financials each month. The company needed a unified system to enable better processes from start to finish for its consulting projects.
Working with Certinia partner VFP Consulting, Clearsulting found this end-to-end solution with Certinia Professional Services (PS) Cloud, Certinia ERP Cloud, and Services CPQ–all of which are purpose-built on the Salesforce platform.
End-to-end integration across the Certinia solutions drives incredible efficiencies. Consultants now easily submit timesheets and expense reports, and the numbers flow smoothly into finance. As a result, Clearsulting’s billing cycle is six days shorter, leading to faster revenue recognition and better cash flow. The finance team can recognize revenue with just the click of a button, and has reduced timing to get month-end financial results by more than 50%, from 12 days to five.
Instead of pricing projects on a spreadsheet and posting it to Microsoft Teams for review and approval, Clearsulting uses Services CPQ to estimate projects directly within the sales-to-service flow. Stakeholders can easily see the opportunity and approval workflow, which is packaged up and shared with the client.
Rather than waiting days and weeks for data to be compiled, leaders have access to dashboards. Project teams save an average of three hours a week because they are freed from gathering data to report project margin and other financial metrics. At the same time, leadership is empowered with accurate, real-time data, enabling them to easily see the sales pipeline paired with projected project data and make informed decisions. They can even determine project margin with the click of a button. Individual team members also have access to real time dashboards that reflect personal metrics, such as timecard compliance, expense report compliance, PTO taken, and utilization.
Within just three months of going live with Certinia solutions, Clearsulting has realized tremendous efficiencies. Building on this success, Clearsulting is excited to explore additional ways it can improve its business processes. Moreover, it expects to increase project margins now that it can closely track that data. As the company continues expanding into new geographies, it will take advantage of Certinia’s multi-entity, multi-currency functionality and overall system agility to continue on its impressive growth path.
Certinia was a natural choice for Clearsulting because of the breadth of the product and the seamless integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud. At the same time, Clearsulting is the perfect customer for Certinia because they are rapidly growing and evolving, and focused on an agile, ‘cloud-first’ digital transformation strategy.
Marshall King, Managing Consultant
