The situation
The client was running on a legacy accounting system that had carried them to where they were. Inventory tracked across spreadsheets. Multi-entity accounting consolidated by hand in Excel. Basic questions — actual margin by product line, working capital trends, real-time inventory position — couldn’t be answered without a half-day spreadsheet exercise.
The mandate
Stand up NetSuite as the single source of truth. Migrate financial history, open transactions, and master data cleanly. Train the team. Cut over without breaking shipments or close.
What we did
- Discovery and chart-of-accounts redesign. We spent the first phase understanding how the business actually runs, not just rebuilding the legacy chart of accounts. The new structure was designed for how the team wants to report — by product line, by channel, by entity — not just for how things were historically recorded.
- Master data preparation. Customers, vendors, items, parent-child relationships, units of measure, pricing tiers, and tax mappings — cleaned, deduplicated, migrated.
- Financial history migration. Brought in years of historical GL data so the team could run prior-year comparisons from day one. Open AR, AP, and inventory loaded as of cutover.
- Process design. Order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and inventory flows configured to match the business, not the textbook. Locations, classes, departments, and segments set up to reflect how the team actually thinks about the company.
- Role-based training. Trained the controller, AP clerk, sales ops, and warehouse leads in the workflows they actually use — not a generic NetSuite admin course.
- Cutover. Final data load over a weekend. Monday morning the team opened NetSuite for the first time. Day-one issues were minor and addressed same-day.
The outcome
The team was running at normal capacity within the first week. The finance close started getting shorter from the first month. Reports the business had never been able to see — channel-level margin, true working capital position, inventory turn by category — became routine.
Why it worked
Most NetSuite implementations fail because the consulting team treats the project as a software install. We treat it as an operational redesign that happens to use NetSuite. The result is a system the business owns, not one they tolerate.