Fast Facts
Industry: Business Services
Location: Downers Grove, IL
Employees: 500
GL System: Dynamics GP
Testimonial
“My budgeting process is now about a month-long, maybe less – so it’s a pretty significant time savings.”
“Using Planning Maestro as a budgeting tool has been the biggest deal for me – it has just cut down so much on the time I spend building our annual budget because everything is automated, and the formulas are built – and everything carries over year to year. It’s a phenomenal tool for budgeting.”
Nate Walters
CFO
The Wildlife Gallery
Streamlined Annual Budgeting
The Wildlife Gallery is the largest tannery for the taxidermy industry in the United States offering tanning, skinning, trophy room design and fine woodwork services in Michigan, Texas, and Alaska. The organization of 145 employees, based in Blanchard, MI, prides itself on providing an ‘industry-changing experience’ by producing exceptional quality and
craftsmanship with new and creative ideas, while maintaining the highest level of customer service.
Challenge
Nate Walters, CFO at The Wildlife Gallery for over 20 years, had seen his fair share of financial tools – from Excel, QuickBooks and then NetSuite, all of which proved to not be ideal when it came to their annual budgeting process. In addition to the cumbersome nature of using spreadsheets for budgeting, QuickBooks and NetSuite didn’t have the budgeting functionality he needed. The annual process of consolidating spreadsheets and uploading them into their ERP system for reporting was becoming too time consuming and error prone. “It was just a very manual process,” said Mr. Walters.
Solution
The Wildlife Gallery began to look for a more sophisticated solution that would integrate with NetSuite and provide them with a faster, more streamlined process. “I was looking for something to simplify my budgeting,” said Mr. Walters. “And I did a lot of research and ended up coming across Centage.”
Today, The Wildlife Gallery uses Planning Maestro for their annual budgeting – finding the solution’s ability to quickly and easily build a driver-based budget model using built-in accounting rules and business logic, as well as its personnel planning capabilities particularly beneficial. And it’s seamless integration with NetSuite saves valuable time and avoids data entry errors. “It’s made the process much easier when we go to build the budget year-over-year – it’s been a huge help,”
said Mr. Walters.
Benefits
By moving to Planning Maestro, The Wildlife Gallery has cut their annual budgeting process in half. “My budgeting process is now about a month-long, maybe less – so it’s a pretty significant time savings.” Mr. Walters notes that when he goes into the budget year after year the model is there and it’s easy to go in and update for the coming year.
Planning Maestro also integrates seamlessly with NetSuite, their current ERP solution, automatically and securely bringing in GL data to create the annual budget which eliminates he potential for data entryerrors and duplicated information. With just a few clicks, The Wildlife Gallery imports their Chart of Accounts and structures into Planning Maestro which ensures that all accounts are accurately reflected.
In addition, Mr. Walters has found Planning Maestro to be especially helpful when it comes to personnel planning in their annual budget as it’s an area of the business that requires a lot of detail – from employee’s salary and taxes to benefits.
“As far as personnel goes, it’s really easy to go in and update changes in pay rates, tax withholdings – it’s all pretty simple.”
“Using Planning Maestro as a budgeting tool has been the biggest deal for me – it has just cut down so much on the time I spend building our annual budget because everything is of automated and the formulas are built – and everything carries over year to year. It’s a phenomenal tool for budgeting.”
