We interviewed David Ally, VP of Finance at Allovue, who is known for his ability to run lean teams without compromising technical accuracy. David has 20 years of experience in finance at some of the largest corporations in the world. David said when he made the switch to startups, he never looked back. He embraces new technology and believes in the fundamental change technology can bring to the finance profession.

Decision for Change: Functionality and Cost

Most prospects think that only companies from QBO or Xero make the switch to Rillet and that if they’re already on a bigger system like Sage Intacct or NetSuite the ship has sailed. Not true, while no one wants to do ERP migrations over and over again, Rillet makes the migration super easy and fast.

Allovue’s decision to change from Sage Intacct to Rillet was primarily motivated by the need for enhanced functionality and a more attractive price structure. "First, we looked at functionality and, obviously, price. Rillet offered all the functionality we were looking for, and then some, at a much more competitive price." The key functionality that David was looking for was native integrations, more flexibility on invoicing, and better reporting capabilities around deferred revenue and ARR.

Benefits: Accounts Receivable, Design, Customer Support

Accounts Receivable

Incumbent ERPs often require “connectors” to connect other systems like CRMs and charge a rather expensive module fee for the custom integration. This was a big feature draw for David. Rillet’s native integration with Hubspot allowed the entire invoicing and data transferring process to be streamlined. Once an opportunity was in Rillet, the platform offered powerful invoicing and revenue recognition functionality. David thinks the “rev rec functionality in Rillet is a lot more flexible, you can do it by product module and create additional modules”. He also likes the reporting for rev rec, which he says “was far better, you couldn’t do a forward looking deferred revenue report, or a revenue waterfall or any of the revenue related reporting in Sage without engaging a third party to custom build. It’s off the shelf in Rillet.” David could also automate his invoicing process with customized, automated reminders which helped drive down outstanding AR, more on that below.

Design

Aside from Accounts Receivable, David really liked the modern UX/UI of Rillet generally. “Rillet is much more intuitive. Opening the dashboard, you can personalize it with pinning runway, cash balance and metrics at a glance”. The amount of clicks to do actions in a software really matters, Rillet has obsessed over the user experience and how to keep it familiar with current accounting workflows while driving efficiency. It shows in simple things like booking a journal entry, “there were a lot more clicks and tabs to run through with Sage compared to Rillet” and navigating reporting “it is much easier to drill through to see all the related transactions”. The “drill everything” functionality in Rillet allows you to drill into any number on the dashboard to see which journal entries or transactions made up those numbers, and it goes a step further to even link to the underlying contracts and transactions in the original CRM and expense management software.

‍Customer Support

With any new system, there is a learning curve. So it was really helpful for David to have a support team that’s super responsive. “I would recommend it based on the customer support itself. The support I get from Rillet and willingness to accommodate felt like they are a partner, not just a tool that I am using.”

The Migration Experience: Fast and Effortless

A lot of the implementation work going from system to system comes from the state of the source data. So implementations from QBO and Xero can be particularly long and difficult if the state of the source data is messy which can easily happen given the loose controls and multiple messy supporting schedules in Excel for e.g. deferred revenue and prepaids. Customers migrating from more established systems like Sage Intacct and NetSuite often benefit from having gone through the clean up process once already so it is surprisingly often shorter to go from Sage Intacct or NetSuite to Rillet than from QBO or Xero. For Allovue, the migration process to Rillet was only 1 week. David says “the migration experience was incredibly easy, I had to provide access and credentials to our systems. Their implementation team took it from there and I didn’t have to do anything. They made it super easy for me to verify that the historicals were there and things tied out.”

Post-Transition Outcomes: Higher Collections and Lower Cost

While the transition to Rillet saved David a couple of hours per week cleaning data and making sure nothing slips through the cracks, the true ROI really came from the cost savings he achieved and the reduction in collection times.

Following the transition, Allovue decreased their days to collect from 60 to 23 days due to the Hubspot integration and invoicing automations Rillet has. In terms of cost of the software, David managed to reduce the spend of the company on Sage Intacct and all the connectors from $60,000 to $20,000 p.a. with Rillet.

When asked to describe the ROI on his investment into Rillet, David said “Rillet freed up so much of my time with manual processes. Syncing with Hubspot and various systems and having that information flow over to Rillet without any cleaning, augmentation was an incredible time saver. It ensures things don’t slip through the cracks, time to collect has improved significantly with Rillet’s invoicing and dunning capabilities.”

Finally, we asked ChatGPT to put together a table of comparison based on the interview transcript, see what it had to say.

ChatGPT’s Table of Comparison