London financial firm upgrades to Acumatica, trades data problems for new flexible ERP

Industry: Services company Fixnetix provides ultra-low latency market data, trading access, connectivity and pre-trade risk management to trading institutions globally.

Fixnetix provides market data, trading access, liquidity venue connectivity, and pre-trade risk management globally for market makers, investment banks, hedge funds and proprietary trading houses. By facilitating low-latency, resilient, and secure trading, Fixnetix enhances operational efficiencies for the world’s electronic trading communities and has grown rapidly.

Initially, Fixnetix ran the company using QuickBooks for its US and UK operations. But the firm quickly outgrew the software. The program was too small for the volume of data, and it lacked the functionality Fixnetix required. Processing speeds were slow, and report generation took ages. QuickBooks would also lose customer accounts, which required a data rebuild fairly often, additionally, it took over 30 minutes to run a financial report, both of which caused major headaches.

Their IT partner frequently fixed QuickBooks data errors, which led to a conversation about changing vendors and an introduction to Acumatica, says Shaun Jackson, Director of Finance for Fixnetix. “We were just looking to fix the errors at the time, but once we learned about Acumatica and reviewed other cloud products, we decided to implement Acumatica,” Jackson says.

“I was looking for a system that was much more robust but still easy-to-use. We needed more granular reporting and specific functionality for our deferral accounting and consolidation. We also needed a system that was fully multicurrency.”

One of the reasons Jackson chose Acumatica was because the company offered an unlimited-user pricing model.

“We found Acumatica to be a very good value compared to the total cost of the other mid-range ERP systems we reviewed,” he says.

With QuickBooks, Fixnetix lacked a process for deferred revenue because QuickBooks simply memorised and repeated transactions. Jackson adds that QuickBooks also had a very limited cost center feature: essentially, a transaction can only be allocated to one cost center.

Although Acumatica is a cloud-based system, it can be deployed in-house. That flexibility allowed Fixnetix to install Acumatica on its own servers, which the company needed to comply with its high-security standards. Acumatica is accessed through a secure connection.

The implementation of Acumatica was quick, taking only a month, and the go-live was on time.

The bulk of Fixnetix services are provided under a service contract that spans a number of months. “Billing is carried out before the actual month of service, so it is very important to be able to account for revenue and related expenses in the correct period,” Jackson says. Acumatica creates the deferred schedules from the invoices and allocates the income over the period of the contract. It also provides reports that show the remaining balance of deferred revenue as well as the projected income. “This is something that took the accounting team days to do each month using spreadsheets,” Jackson says.

The ability to leverage subaccounts added a new dimension to the reporting of sales, profit, and loss, he says. “Now it is possible to view these values by customer, product grouping, and supplier.” With Acumatica, Fixnetix used the multiple segmented account codes to separate branches as well as subaccounts to track revenue and expense down to product group, client, and supplier. Using the deferred revenue and expense features in the system eliminated a large amount of work at month-end, Jackson says.

Jackson says Acumatica’s pricing structure helps them save money. “No longer is there a cost implication in rolling out the system to new users,” he said. “We will be extending the system to the consulting employees, who outnumber the accounting team, but there is no additional software license cost.”

“Within two months, we reduced the work and the time spent preparing management accounts,” he adds. “It used to take 10 workdays to complete what now takes 7 days. Most of the time savings are due to the automation of billing and deferred revenue/expense. Before, we had to manually generate invoices and deferred postings via journals, which was very time-consuming.”

“I am now looking forward to having the other executives make use of the reports and dashboards whenever they want instead of having someone in my finance team prepare the figures for them. The immediate benefits have been the extensive accounting and the deferral processing. And, of course, Acumatica is quick and stable.”

Jackson plans to continue to extend Acumatica further into Fixnetix.

“Integration with our Concur management system is next followed by the creation of workflows and approvals,” he says. “We are expecting the flexibility of the system to enable us to grow the business by achieving significant cost savings through the introduction of contract margin reporting and timesheets.”