Customer Case Studies

Creative Dining Services

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© 2018 Sage Intacct, Inc. All rights reserved. www.sageintacct.com 877-437-7765 Company Overview Founded in 1990, Creative Dining Services had a dierent focus from the start: to serve as a transparent hospitality services provider with the goal of becoming an integral part of their client's community through exibility, customization and adaptation. Since then Creative Dining Services has grown to serve over 70 clients, including Fortune 100 companies, colleges and universities, full service retirement communities, conference venues and others. To learn more, visit www.creativedining.com. Executive Summary Previous Soware: • Intuit QuickBooks Results with Sage Intacct: • Eliminated 350 hours a week of manual accounting work at 70 client locations • Accounting department reduced stang costs by 20% • AR collections time reduced by 12%, driving $760,000 in improved cash ow • Dashboards and real-time data enable informed business decisions Challenges The Key Ingredient for Strong, Insightful Financial Management Creativity, collaboration, innovation, exibility and quality — those are some of the characteristics by which Creative Dining Services denes itself. Founded in 1990 by two colleges dissatised with the caliber of university food service contractors, Creative Dining has grown exponentially over nearly 30 years. Today, the Michigan-based food service and hospitality provider employs 1,800 individuals and serves over 70 client locations across 12 states, including higher education institu- tions, senior living facilities, corporations, conference venues and more. Yet until 2017, Creative Dining's accounting practices didn't match the high caliber of its custom- er-centric food service oerings. Prone to frequent crashes, QuickBooks was poorly suited to scale with the company's rapid growth. Creative Dining sta at client locations spent hundreds of hours each week manually entering data into Google Sheets to produce P&L reports, which would then need to be reconciled against nancial data in QuickBooks managed by corporate accounting. Frustration among nance personnel was high. Plus, the company found it increas- ingly dicult to hire programmers with the specialized skills needed to maintain a homegrown accounts payables system. "The company had grown too big for QuickBooks," said Je Banaszak, who spearheaded a move to modern, cloud-based nancial management upon joining Creative Dining as CFO in 2016. "Creative Dining planned to continue growing rapidly and we knew we needed a new accounting system." Aer evaluations against NetSuite and others, Creative Dining selected Sage Intacct as its nancial management platform based on its straightforward customizability, exibility, rich reporting, aordability and ease of use. Top ratings on the G2 Crowd soware reviews website and Sage Intacct's endorsement by the AICPA were also inuential in Creative Dining's decision. Solutions Huge Eciency Gains Free Sta for Higher-Value Work Creative Dining, with about $100 million in annual revenue, is reaping massive time savings of an estimated 18,875 hours a year since Maner Costerisan, a leading Sage Intacct partner, implement- ed the cloud-based solution. The bulk of that saving results from eliminating 350 hours a week of manual data entry into Google Sheets by sta at the 70 client locations, which gives them new time to focus on front-of-house customer service and culinary support. In addition, corporate accounting is saving 10 hours a week by no longer manually reconciling data from Google Sheets. Another 17.5 hours of weekly work is saved by automating cash management of credit card and cash transactions. Roughly $20,000 a year is saved with automated invoice approval workows through Sage Intacct, avoiding the need for a third-party application. The Key Ingredient for Strong, Insightful Financial Management Creative Dining Services C A S E S T U D Y

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