Keaton Trager, CPA, CMA, CFE, wouldn't call accounting for financial advisory and insurance businesses "overly complex," but he certainly wouldn't call it "simple" either.

Trager is the chief financial officer for FEFA Financial, a large financial planning and retirement strategy company that's been operating in the St. Louis suburbs for over a decade, with clients nationwide. He also leads the finance and accounting teams for FEFA Advisors, which offers insurance products and services, and several other entities under EV Capital, FEFA’s holding company.

"Part of the complexity in reporting is bringing all of that together while keeping [the businesses] separate for regulatory reasons," Trager says, "but still wanting the aggregate data for certain high-level decisions."

As FEFA Financial grew, Trager searched for a robust solution that could provide the complex dimensional reporting and automation the business required. He also wanted to equip the sales and marketing teams with customer acquisition, retention, and monetization tools.

Trager ultimately turned to Intuit Enterprise Suite, a configurable AI-powered business platform. His team was already a fan of Intuit products, and the new solution brings together financial, payroll, HR, cash flow tools, and marketing by Mailchimp. With FEFA Financial laser-focused on overall growth, switching to Intuit Enterprise Suite was the right move—a seamless one, too.

A more robust solution without a complex migration

Trager runs a lean finance department of three, and the professional services company had declared ambitious new goals for growth.

He considered moving his team from Intuit's QuickBooks Online Plus to a more robust solution. The accounting staff needed more automation to save time. Trager needed to view sales segmented by new and recurring products or customers to monitor the company's pipeline for growth.

He looked into NetSuite and Sage Intacct, which he had worked with in the past. But Trager dreaded a migration to either enterprise resource planning (ERP) tool. The migration would mean hiring an expensive consultant to get the system in place, then shelling out more for someone to teach the team how to use it. 

Plus, Trager would be his staff's only expert on NetSuite or Sage Intacct. “It felt like a lot to jump into something like that,” he says.

Trager notes that his controller and bookkeeper already loved Intuit products. So when Trager found out about Intuit Enterprise Suite’s multi-entity capabilities and dimensions for deeper reporting insights, he realized his team didn't need to go with the oversized and overpriced ERP.

"[Intuit Enterprise Suite] is simple to use" compared to NetSuite and Sage Intacct, says Trager, who has quickly become a power user. "I can get somebody else to understand it, train them on it, and operate within it much quicker and much easier [than NetSuite and Sage Intacct].”

To transition to Intuit Enterprise Suite from QuickBooks Online, Trager says, "a switch was turned and it was working, which was very, very exciting, especially [because] I was expecting a full migration, like a NetSuite kind of ordeal."

Embracing the full suite benefits finance, marketing, and operations

Saving 10+ hours a month during financial close

Intuit Enterprise Suite proved to be FEFA Financial's right-fit solution for their advanced reporting and accounting needs. With an intuitive design familiar to QuickBooks users, Trager and his team were quickly up to speed on the new platform.

Keeping his team lean and efficient is a priority for Trager. They saw benefits from the switch to Intuit Enterprise Suite right away, starting with intercompany journal entries.

"The multi-entity journal entry functionality was just an immediate cost-saver off the bat. It's a lot of small minutes that add up. It reduces the mental load, too." Trager estimates his accounting staff saves two hours a week, and for his own responsibilities related to financial close, he estimates “10-plus hours a month, at least.”

Aside from month-end reporting, staying close to operational metrics and cash flow forecasts has become easier. In the past, Trager would pull reports from the company's different entities and put them into a spreadsheet to get a full view of cash flow. The process was painfully manual and required iterations as the data would become stale. Now Trager is able to use the cash flow forecast directly in Intuit Enterprise Suite to identify if there are numbers he needs to investigate, and subsequently advise the company on how to course-correct. 

"Being able to aggregate and pull immediate information [in the dashboards] has been nice, just to see how our trends are over time," he says.

Using dimensional reporting to optimize sales and marketing

"Being able to dig into data at the entity level and across our different entities and be able to get that information into our marketing staff's and sales staff's hands has been really valuable, letting us know where we should target our spend more efficiently and where we're driving the most revenue from," Trager says.

By using dimensions to provide richer reporting insights, he's been able to assess their product mix, view profitability by product type, advise which sales staff to meet with specific types of clients, and dig for potential issues or gains to be made.

"Our marketing team's obsessed with it. The sales team's obsessed with it. I'm looking at other categories we can add to give some more insight into different departments," Trager says, adding that the reporting enabled by dimensions "gamifies it for them and gives them something to shoot for."

For its email marketing, including event communications, follow-up with warm leads, nurturing clients, and growing revenue, FEFA Financial relies on Mailchimp—an integral part of Intuit Enterprise Suite.

"We know that in the platform overall, the IP addresses of the servers are all really well-maintained for deliverability, and the reputation of email coming from Mailchimp makes it much more likely that those emails will hit our clients' inboxes," Sergio Pantoja, FEFA Financial’s CTO and owner, explains.

Mailchimp allows Pantoja to lead his marketing team efficiently. "Another reason why we like Mailchimp is because it is really easy to pass off and have somebody else work that system. Our compliance department can have pre-approved templates," Pantoja says, as an example. "If somebody needs to send a campaign to our clients or to prospective clients, they can use a design that already includes the proper disclosure that's approved from compliance at the bottom."

Trager plans to assess how well the marketing emails drive revenue per client segment that have been set up in Intuit Enterprise Suite.

"Being able to tie some of that back to financials will be great," Trager says. "We do record all of the revenue by these individual clients. So saying, 'When we increase what we're sending out to [our more engaged clients] or sending out these reports, are we seeing additional revenue? Or are they our higher-balance clients? Is there some other kind of financial segmentation?' That's important."

This CFO's advisory note: Try Intuit Enterprise Suite

As FEFA Financial set aggressive growth and marketing goals, Trager and his accounting team have been able to keep up and drive company-wide savings and success through Intuit Enterprise Suite. It's an easy set-up, it's intuitively designed, and it has a powerful feature set.

"Intuit Enterprise Suite is definitely worth diving into as an option to see if it's able to fill your needs," Trager says, recommending other CFOs consider the solution "based on the idea that you're going to have to spend a lot less time migrating things over, and you will be very surprised, I think, at the level of functionality that's still there for you."