JMI Sports experiences exponential growth with Dean Dorton’s outsourced accounting services

Article

Founded in 2008, JMI Sports is a full-service collegiate marketing firm providing the highest quality management of athletics multimedia rights. Serving clients across the United States, JMI Sports is a highly regarded project manager for the development of collegiate and professional sports facilities.

Dean Dorton spoke with Kate Haywood, Executive Vice President and Chief of Staff at JMI Sports, to take a deep dive into their operational team’s experience with Dean Dorton’s managed accounting and financial outsourcing (Dean Dorton AFO) services.

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THE CHALLENGE

Before using Dean Dorton’s outsourced accounting services, JMI Sports was managing everything internally through QuickBooks with a single employee. One of the biggest barriers the organization faced with QuickBooks was the lack of a broader lens of visibility into their financial data, which hindered the capability to evaluate new business opportunities and initiatives in a timely manner.

Due to having a small team, another challenge JMI Sports faced was the inability to dedicate employees to accounting tasks. This resulted in multiple people constantly jumping in and out of financial activities—which in turn increased the risks of reporting errors and productivity loss.

PIVOTAL MOMENT

As JMI Sports started to see consistent business growth, its financial management processes became more complex. Poised with a significant growth opportunity, but unable to venture down the path of internal expansion, JMI Sports engaged with Dean Dorton’s AFO team through local relationships.

Dean Dorton provides accounting and financial services through intuitive, cloud-based accounting technology that the team at JMI Sports also has access to anytime, anywhere. Aside from 24/7 access to their real-time financial data, JMI Sports benefits from multidimensional dashboards and measurable metrics to track continuous business growth.

“Bringing Dean Dorton on board allowed us to engage with an entirely new industry and grow our company exponentially, rapidly.”

— KATE HAYWOOD, EVP AND CHIEF OF STAFF AT JMI SPORTS
BENEFITS OF AFO SERVICES

The biggest benefit that JMI Sports saw by teaming up with the Dean Dorton AFO team is the ability to grow quickly and contract the manpower, along with associated costs, as they need. The growth and response time necessary for clients was not manageable with just the internal team.

“The Dean Dorton AFO team is incredible at behaving like they are an internal entity in terms of both managing effective/positive work relationships and availing themselves as needed—we never feel like we are part of a juggling act with many clients—while also holding
themselves apart as professionals who treat us as respected clients.”

— KATE HAYWOOD, EVP AND CHIEF OF STAFF AT JMI SPORTS

Additionally, JMI Sports now has monumentally stronger records, models, and financials from the breadth of knowledge and industry experience that Dean Dorton’s team brings to the table. From tax implications, GAAP accounting, bank reconciliation, and multi-entity management, the AFO team is able to provide expertise in each of these areas.

Article

Jess Stonestreet Jackson, founder of Kendall-Jackson Winery, started Stonestreet Thoroughbred Holdings in 2005. Across farm properties in multiple states, Stonestreet breeds, trains, and sells thoroughbred yearlings and weanlings. Today, the operation owns three farms in Kentucky and a training center in Florida.

Stonestreet was using Microsoft Dynamics GP, but was experiencing extreme reporting limitations, so they turned to Dean Dorton to evaluate and implement cloud-based Sage Intacct.

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THE CHALLENGE

The prospect of replacing an established accounting system was daunting, but Dara Purcell, Director of Finance at Stonestreet Farm, immediately recognized the potential payback of Sage Intacct’s multi-dimensional reporting. With their current Microsoft Dynamic GP system, the accounting team spent far too many hours downloading and manipulating data to build the financial reports needed to track and manage three farms, multiple departments, individual horses — as well as the business as a whole.

The Solution

With multiple locations and business units, Stonestreet Farm can now see financial data on the individual parts of the business as well as in aggregate. Cloud-based Sage Intacct delivers role-relevant information to managers and owners through dashboards.

In addition to solving the reporting challenges, Purcell was looking to implement an AP system that wouldn’t require farm managers to come to the main office to review and approve invoices.

Working with their trusted accounting partner, Dean Dorton, Purcell and team carefully evaluated their options, and confidently recommended the investment in Sage Intacct, Bill.com and Expensify for a complete cloud-based solution.

“We have several hundred horses and four different companies, and we needed to be able to look at things from a top-level, but also all the way down into the detail.”

— DARA PURCELL, DIRECTOR OF FINANCE, STONESTREET FARM
Results with Sage Intacct

The Sage Intacct dimension functionality provides flexibility in tracking and reporting individual horse information critical to Stonestreet. Historic information of costs and revenues of each horse — and their offspring — are tracked as they move through career and life stages. “Dean Dorton understands the equine business. They recommended setting up the horses as classes, which works really well,” said Purcell.

Creating reports and invoices for owners of syndicated horses is now automated — replacing the cumbersome, manual processes of the past.

The flexibility of reporting on specific business units support unique dashboards for managers and owners. Role relevant information is available whenever and wherever it’s needed. “Farm managers can see how much money we had earned basically up to the minute. They no longer have to come and ask me how much money they have left in advertising for the year,” said Purcell. “Which then I’d have to manually figure what they had budgeted and how much was spent. Now they just log in and look at their dashboard.”

During the September Yearling Sale, the Stonestreet team was able to keep up with transactions, sales and purchases in real-time. The finance team set up specific dashboards for the owner and managers attending the sale.

Additionally, Stonestreet won Sage Intacct’s Customer Success Award at the annual customer conference, Advantage, in October 2019.

“We don’t have to wait for farm managers to come to the office and sign invoices. And we’ve cut the cumbersome batch and approval process from a two week process to seven days,”

— DARA PURCELL, DIRECTOR OF FINANCE, STONESTREET FARM

Article

Spendthrift Farm is an international thoroughbred horse operation with farms in Lexington, Kentucky and Kerri, Victoria, in Australia. Established in 1936, the company breeds, trains, and races thoroughbreds on two continents.

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THE CHALLENGE

While financial reporting for Spendthrift Farm wasn’t easy before their Australian thoroughbred farm acquisition, it became an even bigger challenge after. Using Microsoft Dynamics GP, the finance team had to grapple with more than 18,000 accounts. Separate instances of Dynamics for the Australian and U.S. operations meant exporting data and using spreadsheets to combine reporting.

The Solution

With Sage Intacct’s multi-dimensional approach the general ledger now has only 300 accounts delivering more relevant information, from the global to the local level, than was ever possible.

With the acquisition of the Australian operation, Spendthrift needed to report on operations for each location, but also in aggregate. While Dynamics forced the finance team to create consolidated reports in spreadsheets, Sage Intacct automatically converts currency and consolidates to provide financial results from any prospective owners and managers need. In addition, the Australian operation was struggling with VAT in Dynamics GP. The Sage Intacct VAT solution provides increased efficiency and accuracy to ensure compliance without maintaining cumbersome, error-prone spreadsheets.

“With Great Plains, the reporting process was very cumbersome, cutting and pasting data into spreadsheets to see information as we needed it. With Intacct, it’s the push of a button.”

— CHRISTI CONNOR, CONTROLLER, SPENDTHRIFT FARM

Using Sage Intacct, Spendthrift is able to provide dashboards with the specific information each farm and department manager needs. As there continues to be an increased focus on expenses, revenues, and budgets, managers can use role reporting to make well-informed decisions. Access to real-time dashboards from a tablet or smart-phone provides an advantage in making decisions quickly under pressure because they trust their financial information is accurate.

Results with Sage Intacct

With multiple locations and business units, Spendthrift Farms can now see financial data on the individual parts of the business as well as in aggregate. Sage Intacct tracks ownership, costs, and revenues of individual horses across their lifetime.

Information and automated processes streamline work for finance and managers no matter where they are working. Multi-dimensional reporting gives managers and owners the exact information they need through dashboards designed just for them.

Account structure designed to simplify and automate reporting across multiple locations, currencies, and business entities. Sage Intacct also provides the ability to track and report on mare’s offspring throughout their careers.

“Account numbers are so simple now. When we are coding invoices, Sage Intacct pulls up the dimension, like horse, for a much faster, cleaner process.”

— CHRISTI CONNOR, CONTROLLER, SPENDTHRIFT FARM

Article

The Southeastern Spine Institute (SSI) is the largest medical practice in South Carolina, specializing in spine-only care. Founded in 1991 as Carolina Spine and located in Mount Pleasant, SSI provides state-of-the-art spine MRIs, digital X-rays and most forms of diagnostic equipment to help determine their patient’s problem-focus areas. The medical facility is made up of multiple non-surgical treatment rooms and block suites, along with an in-house Pharmacy and Physical Therapy Center, exclusive to spinal-related problems.

As the healthcare practice has matured over the last 28 years, SSI was in need of an accounting system that would keep up with business growth. Glenn Taylor, Accounting Manager at SSI, along with the rest of the finance department, worked with Dean Dorton to evaluate and implement a cloud accounting solution that has the ability to equip their business with the flexible reporting capabilities they needed.

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THE CHALLENGE

Prior to Sage Intacct, SSI was using Creative Solutions Accounting and Creative Bookkeeping Solutions- accounting software commonly used by CPA firms. This meant the company’s CFO and Accounting Manager were using separate software for accounting purposes, making it impossible to collaborate on business data insights.

Data was not easily accessible to the accounting team. The on-premise software did not allow multiple users to be logged in at the same time, requiring the finance team to resort to their own workarounds, such as writing checks, running reports, and other duties. This severely limited business productivity.

“We just started picking up on what wasn’t working,” commented Taylor. “In order to get to certain data, I had to click this, then click something else, and then something else… If I didn’t do it in a specific order, I couldn’t find the data I needed.”

Additionally, the staff was spending more than 20 hours a month on manual data entry. Without access to a report writer, data had to be manually exported out of all reports and loaded into SSI’s custom-made templates. Deposits also had to be done manually, requiring employees to key in each individual deposit in the system and code it themselves.

Creative Solutions Accounting also lacked proper training and resources for its software, which was a big obstacle for its users. “I got in the system and just had to figure it out—there were no training programs, no instructional videos, no support. I was basically looking at the FAQs to solve my problems,” said Taylor.

The Solution

The main reason for SSI’s transition to Sage Intacct was that Creative Accounting Solutions decided to no longer supply any more servers. The program announced that no more enhancements or upgrades would be made to the product and that sometime in the future, the software would no longer be serviced.

SSI was using Webster Rogers, leading CPA firm in South Carolina, and one of Dean Dorton’s top referral partners. Webster Rogers had highly recommended Sage Intacct and Dean Dorton to SSI.

“Going through and learning the report writing, I’ve found that you can get whatever data you want. I love that there’s that level of customization where you can choose which categories of reports you want to show.”

— GLENN TAYLOR, ACCOUNTING MANAGER, SOUTHEASTERN SPINE INSTITUTE

With cloud-based Sage Intacct, SSI was able to adapt and use the reporting module, which eliminated all manual data entry by the finance department and allowed for smoother reporting overall.

Results with Sage Intacct

Besides the efficiency of the report writer, SSI is benefiting from Sage Intacct’s Import Module, which allows the software to extract data from other systems. This is proving invaluable to the finance team, saving them over 20 hours a month in manual data imports.

Another advantage for SSI is the functional way they can coordinate financials between employee levels. In any healthcare organization, there are doctors and regular business employees, each with their own expenses. With Sage Intacct, SSI can assign expenses or revenue directly to a specific doctor, which has been extremely important to the business thus far.

Sage Intacct has additionally allowed SSI to segregate duties based on different levels of accessibility. “When we had Creative Accounting Solutions, everyone had access to either everything or nothing. Anyone could have entered bills or written a check,” said Taylor. Now, SSI has the ability to give certain tasks and access to specific levels of employees, making business data more secure.

Overall, SSI needed a cloud-based solution that would give multiple users access to financial data, a flexible report writer, and automated accounting capabilities that can keep the segregation of employee duties in line. They also needed a modern system, with access to support and training resources.

“The cloud is a turn in the right direction,” said Taylor. “It’s accessible anywhere and anytime, which is huge. If I have to stay home, I can log in at my house and the data is the exact same. You don’t realize all these limitations you had until you use a system that’s smooth and easy to use.”

— GLENN TAYLOR, ACCOUNTING MANAGER, SOUTHEASTERN SPINE INSTITUTE

“We chose to work with Dean Dorton because they provided a superior product for a reasonable price. At first, we were concerned about some of the features in Sage Intacct that wouldn’t apply to us. However, we learned exactly what we would need and Dean Dorton streamlined it with us—without being pushy on modules that didn’t suit us. Our experience so far has shown that we made the right decision.”

— GLENN TAYLOR, ACCOUNTING MANAGER, SOUTHEASTERN SPINE INSTITUTE

Article

Horizon Eye Care is a leading full-service eye practice firm that serves the greater Charlotte area of North Carolina, with offices in six locations. Horizon Eye Care is different from typical eye care specialist facilities because physicians offer a realm of different eye care treatments within each location, from Lasik surgery, optical care, to a department just for contact lenses.

With multiple entities, departments, and locations, Horizon Eye Care needed a solution that would function with each of their entities and offices. Sandra Miller, Horizon Eye Care’s controller, worked with Dean Dorton to find an accounting solution that could handle multiple entities and deliver reporting to fit their specific needs.

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THE CHALLENGE

Multiple departments within multiple locations can create chaos for financial management if a company’s accounting solution cannot handle these types of complexities. Before switching to Sage Intacct, Horizon Eye Care was using a legacy software product, Sage 500, as their financial management system.

One of the biggest challenges that the finance team at Horizon Eye Care faced with Sage 500 was that each legal entity required a separate database, which meant they each had a separate chart of accounts and the corporate office lacked full visibility for all locations. Horizon Eye Care needed a solution that offered one chart of accounts and real-time insight into all locations.

Another side-effect of the multiple, separate database requirement was the need for multiple login sessions to access the accounting system. This often led to confusion and frustration for team members as they moved back and forth between entities. Additionally, since Sage 500 was an antiquated system, there were no training manuals or support teams for Horizon Eye Care to turn to for any assistance.

The Solution

The decision to move to a different accounting system came when Horizon Eye Care discovered Sage 500 would be phased out by 2019. It was at this point that the business knew that their on-premise version would no longer be supported and that they were going to lose their software’s capabilities. Miller immediately began looking for a different solution. After looking at three different systems, an accounting firm recommended Sage Intacct. Horizon then decided to make the move to the cloud.

“The decision to move to a different accounting system came when Horizon Eye Care discovered Sage 500 would be phased out by 2019. It was at this point that the business knew that their on-premise version would no longer be supported and that they were going to lose their software’s capabilities. Miller immediately began looking for a different solution. After looking at three different systems, an accounting firm recommended Sage Intacct. Horizon then decided to make the move to the cloud.”

— SANDRA MILLER, CONTROLLER, HORIZON EYE CARE

As a multi-entity company, Horizon Eye Care had specific reporting needs. For example, since each of the six locations has multiple departments, physicians liked to have the ability to compare profit/loss statement by locations and department. Additionally, expenses were broken out by physicians, as some are labeled employed vs. shareholders. With Sage Intacct’s dimension modules, all of these relationships can be tracked smoothly.

With Sage Intacct, all of Horizon Eye Care’s data is stored offsite, eliminating the need for an in-house server that has to be monitored and backed up. The finance team can also access the accounting software offsite and do work from anywhere, any device, at any time.

Results with Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct has saved time for the Horizon Eye Care finance team. By automating the AP process, Miller’s team spends less time uploading files to the bank for processing checks, positive pay, and voiding and re-issuing checks.

With Sage Intacct, the business now has the ability to upload large volumes of data efficiently, edit journal entries, and reclassify AP invoices if the accounting period is still open.

Having one chart of accounts and one set of vendors has created efficiencies across all Horizon Eye Care companies. Sage Intacct ERP software gives the finance team the flexibility to create financial statements in a variety of formats and in different dimensions for all locations, departments, and physicians.

“The ‘duplicate’ option is one of the best features. Once you have a basic report created, you can use the duplicate feature, rename the report, and choose another set of dimensions to create the same report for a different location. We have not been disappointed.”

— SANDRA MILLER, CONTROLLER, HORIZON EYE CARE

“Working with Dean Dorton has been a wonderful experience. I don’t think I could have asked for better.”

— SANDRA MILLER, CONTROLLER, HORIZON EYE CARE

Article

tvsdesign is an architect and design firm headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia. Established by three founding partners, tvsdesign is a group of makers, thinkers, techies, and artists who have been shaping skylines since 1968. The company has grown over the last 50 years, completing 20% of its projects internationally and is renowned as one of the top three firms considered for the proposals and designs of convention centers nationwide.

Over the last year, tvsdesign brought Sage Intacct on board as their best-of-breed financial management software. Sage Intacct’s flexible reporting capabilities and unique project management tracking abilities are proving absolutely invaluable to tvsdesign. Dean Dorton, a top VAR Partner for Sage Intacct, spoke with Karen Roy, Controller at tvsdesign, about the company’s deployment and implementation process of their cloud-based ERP software.

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THE CHALLENGE

Before Sage Intacct, tvsdesign was using a fully integrated system for its project management and accounting needs called BST Software. However, tvsdesign’s finance team found BST’s data management and reporting processes to be extremely time-consuming and cumbersome.

tvsdesign was introduced to CMAP software, a cloud-based solution for project management. CMAP is progressive with keeping screens simple for input, so tvsdesign made the decision to move away from BST and utilize CMAP. The need for good, solid accounting software to handle all core financial activities led to the organization’s decision to purchase Sage Intacct.

However, the specific challenge for this ERP implementation was creating a proper and functional integration, capable of accurately mapping the information inputted into CMAP over to Sage Intacct. CMAP is coded in a certain format, while Sage Intacct’s software also has a set routine for how information from other systems migrates to it, which did not particularly coincide with CMAPs formatting.

Dean Dorton needed to customize and write the full integration in order to ensure that Sage Intacct would be able to map and properly represent all financial data inputted into CMAP.

The Implementation

The first step of the implementation was a discovery process with tvsdesign to understand their specific needs. “It was critical that the partner we chose to work with aligned with our timeline and had a good understanding of what tvsdesign and CMAP were about,” said Roy. “We’re here in Atlanta and our Dean Dorton team is in Raleigh; we hadn’t gone through a process like this before so it was an important exploratory discussion in order for us to get to a good comfort level.”

The implementation process at Dean Dorton starts with a discovery call, during which the consultants are present, to uncover the volume of work needed to be done, what the timeline is, and for everyone to get straightforward answers to all their questions. The project then gets handed to the implementation team and a kick-off meeting is scheduled.

“A proper understanding of accounting was extremely critical to us. Philip Massey [Director of Software Consulting] explained the background of his team and that they were very knowledgeable and experienced with both accounting and implementations.”

— KAREN ROY, CONTROLLER, tvsdesign

After a clear-cut and smooth discovery process, Massey and tvsdesign were ready to move forward with the implementation. tvsdesign worked with Stubanas, along with Ian D’Amelio, Dean Dorton Software Consultant, who was continuously involved directly behind the scenes with tvsdesign’s software database professional.

Although the basis of Dean Dorton’s implementation is done the same as Sage Intacct’s, Dean Dorton is able to offer customers a quicker implementation and a more personable approach when it comes to support. Additionally, the consultants make sure to be with the client every step of the way, from discovery to the end of implementation.

“I strongly recommend Dean Dorton. Their team tailors their service to meet the needs of the client. They are professional, accountable, very organized, and extremely knowledgeable in the industry and with Sage Intacct software. I have absolutely no reservations recommending them and their services.”

— KAREN ROY, CONTROLLER, tvsdesign