Success Story: Plexxi reaches new heights with Sage Intacct

“With Sage Intacct, we’ve gained a world-class product in an easy to- use package without the huge expense of a traditional ERP system like Oracle or SAP. It’s a great solution for managing a complex, high-growth business model like ours – providing visibility and process improvements that will help us further accelerate our growth.”

Laurie Riedel
VP, Finance & Administration, Plexxi

Company overview

Plexxi created the industry’s first affinity-driven networking solution. Plexxi’s products – Plexxi Control and the Plexxi Switch – create an optimised network that dynamically helps applications perform better.

Executive summary

Previous software:
• QuickBooks

Results with Sage Intacct
• Eliminated nearly 200 person-hours of data entry.
• Improved visibility into financial and operational metrics.
• Achieved cost savings from delayed finance staffing needs.

The need for new financial software to support future growth

An emerging star in the rapidly growing software-defined networking market, affinity-driven networking provider Plexxi has raised nearly $50 million in venture financing. As the company moved out of its development stage, it was clear that Plexxi’s small finance team would no longer be able to keep up with tasks like purchasing, disbursements, and expense classifications using its previous combination of QuickBooks and cumbersome spreadsheets.

“We went looking for a financial management system that could scale with us from zero to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and Sage Intacct was the clear choice,” said Laurie Riedel, vice president of finance and administration at Plexxi. “Sage Intacct provides comprehensive and easy to-use accounting functionality, extensive consolidations and reporting capabilities, and the flexibility to integrate with our Salesforce CRM software and any other business application we implement down the road,” said Laurie.

Process improvements drive cost savings

Working with Sage Intacct’s implementation team, Plexxi’s in-house resources easily configured Sage Intacct’s purchasing, cash management, inventory, order entry, expense management, and reporting capabilities to support the company’s specific needs. It quickly transitioned all of these complex financial workflows to the system’s automated processes, eliminating massive amounts of data entry and minimising the company’s reliance on Excel spreadsheets.

“Using Sage Intacct’s transaction definitions and approval rules around capital, expense, and inventory procurement, we’ve dramatically streamlined our purchase-to-pay process,” said Kenny Mitchell, Plexxi’s controller. “We would have needed an additional full-time person just to keep up with our rapidly growing purchasing volumes if we were still using QuickBooks, but now this disbursement-heavy accounting happens systematically as we receive goods and invoices,” said Kenny.

The finance team also reduced the amount of time it spent on classifying and entering expense reports from five to just one day per month. And despite a huge increase in the volume of data they were managing, the team was able to keep Plexxi’s monthly close process to the five days it achieved when it was a much smaller company.

Integration flexibility delivers additional time savings and customer insight

Plexxi is also benefiting from Sage Intacct’s convenient, pre-built integrations with other best-in-class applications like Avalara’s AvaTax for Sage Intacct and Salesforce CRM. As its bookings have grown, the company’s quote-to-cash cycle has greatly benefited from Sage Intacct’s transaction definitions and automated approval workflows for standard sales orders, as well as rentals, trials, and returns.

Plexxi also used Sage Intacct to build Salesforce triggers that help its service organisation keep track of assets, service contracts, and entitlements associated with specific customers and product serial numbers – a configuration that with any other system would have cost the company around $50,000 in consulting fees. As a result, Plexxi’s service reps can better manage the installed base, monitor renewals, and keep track of open service cases.

Improving business visibility with Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct’s reporting and dashboard capabilities help Plexxi’s management monitor the health of the business day-to-day, with real-time transparency around budgets, cash, expenses, and inventory. The company’s dashboards for budget to actual and for employee expenses have prompted engaging discussions among the executive team about spending on headcount, inventory and travel in relation to evolving revenue trends.

Sage Intacct’s flex-dimensional general ledger also enables Plexxi to track the business context of all its financial transaction data with increased accuracy and completeness. The finance team can easily tag transactions for advanced reporting using dimensions like location, project, employee, or any custom category important to the business.