Woodfin Heating, Inc. Sees 60% Efficiency Gains with Sage Intacct Accounting Software 
Customer: Woodfin Heating, Inc.
Location: Richmond, VA
Solution: Sage Intacct Accounting Software
Based in Richmond, Woodfin offers the most diverse range of home services throughout central Virginia. Founded in 1977, the company offers everything related to home comfort, including HVAC, plumbing, electrical work, indoor air quality, generators, heating oil, propane, and home security and automation. Customers can purchase bundled care packages that cover every system in their home. Woodfin trains its employees and technicians on the job to provide the best possible customer experience to its clients.
Results with Sage Intacct:
- Improved gross margins • Increased finance team efficiency
- Shifted 25% of bookkeeping time to strategic projects
- Saved in accounting salaries amidst company growth
- Accelerated audit preparation, saving CFO 3 weeks every year
The Challenge: Moving to a Modern Technology Platform to Support Continued Growth
Woodfin Heating Inc. is a family owned company headquartered in Richmond, VA. Founded in 1977, the company started as a fuel oil delivery operation and has grown throughout the years to include other home services, convenience stores, and mechanical contractors. After adopting Cargas Energy software to support its rapidly growing home services, Woodfin wanted to further modernize its technology stack with a cloud-based financial management solution.
The company previously used multiple on-premise accounting packages, including Microsoft Dynamics GP, which were costly to maintain and not integrated. “We wanted a centralized system that would overcome our financial reporting limitations, improve internal controls, and allow people to focus on their core competencies rather than preparing data,” said Jen Loving, CFO at Woodfin. “Cargas introduced us to Sage Intacct, and what won us over was its robust dashboard, dimensions, and drill-down capabilities, which let us easily report by department – something we couldn’t do in Microsoft Dynamics GP.”
Now, the combined solution of Sage Intacct and Cargas Energy gives Woodfin real-time financial visibility with access to critical business decision-making data anytime, anywhere. Several automated processes and integrations helped increase finance team efficiency, reduce headcount costs, and save three weeks of audit preparation time – ensuring the team remains agile as the business continues to scale.
The Cargas Solution: Best-in-Class Financial Solutions Fuel 60% Efficiency Gains
Sage Intacct partner Cargas Systems supported Woodfin during its Sage Intacct implementation, migrating and streamlining key financial processes across the general ledger, such as accounts payable (A/P), banking, financial reporting, and consolidations. The company now effortlessly pulls in balances from subsidiaries’ accounting systems into Sage Intacct – simplifying global consolidations and the monthly close.
Woodfin extended these benefits by adding best-in-class solutions from the Sage Intacct marketplace to their ecosystem, starting with FloQast for managing the financial close and DocuPeak for paperless A/P. “Sage Intacct’s seamless integration with FloQast not only brought incomparable transparency to our various monthly reconciliations across four entities, it also helped us identify bottlenecks and balance our financial close workload,” shared Morgan Owdom, corporate controller at Woodfin. “In addition, DocuPeak tracks and automates all our A/P documentation, including invoices for 75 departments, which we manually keyed in before Sage Intacct. All of these improvements let us work smarter, not harder.”
The finance team also enjoys faster bank reconciliations, as well as easy expense allocations across its 30 convenience stores. “Thanks to Sage Intacct’s powerful workflows, we’re 60% more productive overall, and as a result, we’ve been able to shift 25% of the energy we spent on bookkeeping and data entry into more strategic to projects, like supporting the business with analytics or adopting new accounting best practices,” noted Loving.
“Since deploying Sage Intacct, our home services division has grown 20% and we’ve acquired other businesses, yet we’ve decreased the finance headcount we need to keep up with that growth and complexity by eight FTEs. What’s more, since the system can easily integrate with any other application, it will be easy to add new companies we acquire down the road.”
–Jennifer Loving, CFO, Woodfin Heating, Inc.
Results: Granular Visibility Improves Forecasting and Saves 100+ Hours During Audit
Woodfin leverages Sage Intacct’s flexible dimensions to tag every transaction with helpful business context, including the appropriate department, fixed asset project, division, or entity. The system’s filtering capability makes it significantly simpler to report on or drill into various aspects of the business, saving hours of data manipulation in Excel. For instance, the heating oil business uses Sage Intacct to pull in statistical data and track important metrics, such as revenue per gallon or cigarette margins at each convenience store for the month or the year. “Sage Intacct’s ability to do high-level trend analysis saves our leaders time from digging through all the nitty-gritty details from our operational systems,” said Owdom. “Now they can more quickly and frequently identify what to look into and rapidly zoom in on budget variances or pivotal issues that require correction.”
The finance teams also monitors trends via its trailing 12-month balance sheet and income statement, and uses Sage Intacct to forecast at the department, entity, and consolidated levels. With this insight, they were able to estimate Woodfin’s tax liability and make timely decisions to take advantage of tax savings before it was too late. For example, the company improved its ability to serve customers by accelerating the purchase of 30 much-needed vehicles in the last two weeks of the year.
Finally, Woodfin’s annual audit process is much easier as well. “Prior to Sage Intacct and DocuPeak, we kept everything in binders and it took forever to find back up. Now that we’ve eliminated all of that paper and have documentation attached to transactions in Sage Intacct, I don’t even keep an audit binder any more. That alone saved me around 120 hours during our most recent audit,” remembers Loving.
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