Online education company GetSmarter has successfully implemented Acumatica Cloud ERP, the fastest growing business management software in mid-size businesses. GetSmarter partners with the world’s top universities to present career-advancing online short courses, and has educated more than 37 000 working professionals to date. It offers a portfolio of short courses, postgraduate degree programmes and professional accounting programmes to service the working professionals.

With exponential growth over the past financial year and several new business lines in multi-countries, GetSmarter required business management software that would empower it, unlock its potential and drive its growth.

Anthony Saunders, GetSmarter CFO, says Acumatica was the best decision. "We went live in just under 8 weeks from the start of the project, which is traditionally unheard of in the ERP space. The success has a lot to do with the embedded integration services within Acumatica."

Palladium Business Solutions managing director Stephen Corrigan says the key to a smooth ERP implementation hinges on two key aspects. "Firstly that there are clearly defined expectations from the client that is properly documented and secondly, that there is a client project owner that is available to drive and coordinate the implementation from the client side.”

“With Getsmarter, we had an entire business that knew what they wanted with clear expectations and deliverables. So, we were all working towards a single goal,” he adds. Saunders says Getsmarter chose Acumatica because it is a modern web-based system that has the ability to handle projects in a flexible way, using Acumatica's fully embedded attribute feature.

“The migration to Acumatica was somewhat more challenging than expected. The system is intricate, it requires more management and maintenance when compared to our original very simple programme. This is to some extent expected with the upgrade, but there definitely is less room for error than using a smaller system. Compared to a simple online accounting system, it has more checks and balances - and many more benefits," he explains.

He says that the benefits have been phenomenal, especially having come from a single simple system in Pastel Partner. “Acumatica has vastly improved our ability to budget accurately and to measure against budget due to the flexible account structure, clear data structure and audit trail. The ability to export easily to excel from any report is magical. The field descriptions are clear, which means we can all understand what we are referring to.”

"We wanted to be able to integrate our invoicing to Acumatica, which was important in terms of backup and functionality. The invoicing also has instalment sales arrangements and functionalities, something we required," he adds.

Acumatica has a single, real-time version of the truth to accelerate business performance with automated processes, accurate data collection, financial analyses and forecasting capabilities that drive better business decisions.

"We now have the total project costs of every course from lecturer support, content creation and of course revenue on every course, rolling up to faculty for complete integration," he says.

"The most important benefit has been a much tighter financial control environment. Coupled with distributed access, access control, document management, workflows and improved user functionality, it has in general been a big success for us. We were even able to do our budgeting process on the new account codes and that has been a tremendous benefit for 2016," he concludes.

For more information, contact Palladium Business Solutions at (011) 568-2900.