Nation Safe Drivers

30 hours a month spent on manual work

With 13 subsidiaries—and only one of them paying 99% of their expenses—Nation Safe Drivers faced a time-consuming intercompany cost allocation process. Each month, they had to deal with:

• A heavy manual workload: Allocating costs across 13 subsidiaries required extensive manual work. The accounting team had to calculate the allocations and create multiple lines on journal entries and vendor bills, generating around 3,000 journal entries. Then, they had to reconcile between subsidiaries, ensuring the amount netted out to zero.  
• Time-consuming work: This manual process took the team about 30 hours each month. “It was just a lot of work done by a lot of people, taking a lot of time,” notes Louis Mikos, Corporate Accountant and Financial Systems Analyst at Nation Safe Drivers.  
• Risk of error: The manual approach also increased the risk of allocation errors, which the team had no time to investigate. "There were definitely mistakes in the allocation process, but it would be almost impossible to go through every one of them,” Louis shares.
• Employee frustration: The tedious nature of the task led to low morale when it came to the allocation process. “Nobody wanted to do that work,” Louis shares. “We all dreaded it.”  

An automation solution made for NetSuite

In January 2023, Louis and his team went live on NetSuite. As a growing company making multiple acquisitions, they were looking for the right enterprise resource planning platform (ERP) for their business, and NetSuite was the perfect fit.  

But when it came to allocations, they were planning to use a complex workaround to properly allocate expenses across subsidiaries.  

Luckily, a consultant told them about an ideal solution that required no manual work or tricky workarounds: Shared Transactions by Netgain.  

“We saw a demo, and we were on board within the first four minutes,” Louis recalls.  

What convinced them?

• Natively embedded in NetSuite: Having just completed their NetSuite implementation, Louis thought it was the perfect timing to add a solution that would keep all the data in their ERP. “Once we saw that, it was too good to give up,” Louis recalls.
• Automated allocations: Shared Transactions eliminated the need for manual line-item entries. “All you have to do is select an allocation template and let the system do the rest,” Louis explains.
• Improved audit trails: The platform provided comprehensive transaction tracking, enabling Louis and his team to trace expenses back to the original bill, a critical feature for audit compliance. “We can tell what each expense was, how it was shared, where it went, where it came from. It's pretty cool,” Louis adds.  
• User-friendly experience: The Nation Safe Drivers team quickly adopted the platform, benefiting from a familiar interface in NetSuite and intuitive allocation templates. Plus, the guided implementation gave them flexibility to tailor the solution for their team.  

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