Planet Fitness of Eastern North Carolina, based in Raleigh, NC, is a franchise with 14 current gym locations. The finance team worked with Massey Consulting, now Dean Dorton, to evaluate and implement Sage Intacct’s cloud-based ERP solution to replace QuickBooks.
Dean Dorton spoke with Brett Lucius, the Controller at Planet Fitness of Eastern North Carolina to understand the challenges the franchise faced with QuickBooks and the top benefits they are seeing after switching to Sage Intacct.
THE CHALLENGE
Planet Fitness of Eastern NC was growing at a rapid pace, quickly surpassing the capabilities of their current accounting system, QuickBooks. Because each separate fitness club entity had its own data files, the finance team was constantly checking to ensure that the same bills and information were not entered multiple times in different files. It was extremely challenging to understand the growth and financial data for each separate gym location.
Additionally, the reporting limitations inside of QuickBooks required manual processes using Excel and numerous error-prone spreadsheets. Instead of being able to focus on growing the business, the finance leaders experienced cumbersome workarounds, resulting in loss of productive time.
Another challenge that Planet Fitness faced with QuickBooks was the system’s lack of ability to integrate with third-party systems, including the main Point-of-Sale system that the business relies on. As a result, business owners had to analyze financial data out of multiple systems.
The Solution
The finance team worked with Dean Dorton’s team to evaluate and implement Sage Intacct, the leading, only AICPA-preferred financial management solution on the market.
“Dean Dorton helped guide our team through the entire ERP purchasing process.”
— BRETT LUCIUS, CONTROLLER, PLANET FITNESS OF EASTERN NC
With Sage Intacct’s dimensional reporting capabilities, Planet Fitness will have more robust and flexible reporting, allowing staff members to quickly generate reports directly from the system. With state-of-the-art multi-entity management for franchises, Sage Intacct allows for Planet Fitness to have real-time visibility into all 14 entities, ensuring there will not be billing duplications placed into the system and shrinking their chart of accounts.
Results with Sage Intacct
Planet Fitness of Eastern NC will experience a multitude of benefits with the implementation of Sage Intacct. With a cloud-based solution that can be accessed from anywhere at any time and allows real-time insight into business financials, business owners will be able to focus more time on strategic activities and their goal of growing to 25+ clubs.
Sage Intacct will facilitate the management of transactions between the 14 entities and multiple locations, allowing the finance team to easily pull financial data and reports from any entity. This will reduce the current time spent re-checking daily activities and eliminates the need for any spreadsheets or manual entry. Additionally, Sage Intacct’s customizable dashboards is an immense business benefit, granting the business to track key performance indicators and specific data in real-time.