“The project has improved the accuracy of our revenue and cost of sales, resulting in improved gross margin accuracy. We are better able to understand the drivers of gross margin results to make more informed decisions.” 

Anne Hinkle, CFO – 4G Clinical

Founded in 2015, 4G Clinical (4G) has become a global leader in randomization and trial supply management for the global life sciences industry. Based in Wellesley, Massachusetts with offices in Europe and Asia, 4G has more than 300 employees worldwide with sales in more than ten countries. The company offers a fully cloud-based, 100% configurable and flexible solution utilizing natural language processing to accelerate clinical trials. This innovative company is growing rapidly propelled by its accelerated international expansion in recent years.

Challenge

4G is enhancing its business systems and processes to streamline operations and accounting. NetSuite was implemented as the company’s ERP in April 2020 to care for the finance operations and related global accounting needs. NetSuite cares for the company’s general ledger, accounts payable, billing, revenue recognition, and cash management processes. The company also leverages Atlassian’s issue tracking software, Jira, to log time for support users against key activities including customer onboarding and support. The accounting team sought to gain insight into the status of key projects against budgets as well as more granular visibility of labor costs incurred to support its customers. Collection and reporting of this data would allow management to enhance its accounting for related activities.

Rapid Cloud Partners (RCP) provided 4G with automated recurring billing and contract management features by replacing NetSuite Billing Schedules with 360 Subscription Billing, a native NetSuite SuiteApp. Given the modifications to contracts during the term, the solution would be required to address related billing adjustments as well as corresponding impacts to the revenue recognition. The accounting team further aimed to minimize manual intervention as much as possible. Moreover, management expressed interest in the ability to capture time spent on key support and project activities by employees with estimated labor costs allowing for appropriate cost allocations. This process would provide more meaningful data to drive key metrics.

Solution

RCP implemented NetSuite SuiteProjects with the ability to handle the intake of key activities and appropriately trigger milestone billings. The design also included a reimplementation of the NetSuite Advanced Revenue Management module to ingest data from billable projects which drive applicable revenue accounting for services. RCP provided 4G an automated recurring billing process by replacing NetSuite Billing Schedules with a powerful recurring billing module, 360 Subscription Billing. The deployment supports accurate time entry data used to drive key billing, revenue and labor allocation processes.  RCP worked with the 4G Atlassian consultants from Oxalis.io to revamp 4G’s data structure and process flow in Jira. The upstream capture of accurate data in Jira facilitates accounting for project revenue. 4G has derived benefits from the solution including more efficient and timely customer billing, automated revenue recognition postings and more granular, real time reporting.

Rapid Cloud Partners, a NetSuite Solution Provider, has the expertise to help companies address their recurring billing and revenue management challenges. Contact RCP to learn more at info@rapidcloudpartners.com or visit www.rapidcloudpartners.com.