Surety Title Company Eliminates Manual Tasks with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central ERP

CHALLENGES

An On-Premise Accounting and ERP Solution That Was Behind the Times

Surety Title Company’s accounting department has financial management responsibilities for five divisions under its holding company, Fenix Holdings, LLC. Because Surety Title was using an outdated version of Microsoft Dynamics GP on-premise, the company’s accounting team was struggling to keep up. They had to do a lot of manual payroll entry, lacked efficient ad hoc reporting capabilities, and had to deal with massive amounts of paper records to process payables.

“We had to develop numerous workarounds to create the reports we needed and manage payroll and payables,” explained John Gault, Surety Title’s Controller. “Dynamics GP was using old technology. We had a huge chart of accounts to deal with, and we had to input a lot of data into Excel.”

Gault said that Surety Title wanted a solution that would stay up to date with the latest functionality while allowing his team to break away from time-consuming manual processes.

SOLUTIONS

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

After seeing a Cargas webinar about Dynamics 365 Business Central’s capabilities and Microsoft’s intentions to focus their efforts on this new cloud product, Surety Title was ready to make a change.

According to Gault, “Our relationship with Cargas goes back very far, since implementing Dynamics GP, and we felt confident in moving forward with them.”

In October 2018, Cargas began working with Surety Title to transition its accounting solution from Dynamics GP to cloud-based Dynamics 365 Business Central. To extend on their financial reporting capabilities, they integrated Jet Reports, which provides the flexibility to build reports from inside Excel and access them through Dynamics 365 Business Central.

The cutover to Dynamics 365 Business Central was completed in January 2019.

“This year will be spent on integrations to automate more payroll, integrate our CRM, and implement other efficiencies. The next steps will be real process game-changers.”

~ John Gault, Controller, Surety Title Company

RESULTS

Significant Time Savings; Elimination of Manual Tasks

“We’ve been on Dynamics 365 Business Central for a relatively short span of time, but we’ve already seen improvements,” shared Gault.

Surety Title’s general ledger has been simplified, which has streamlined preparing P&L statements for each of its 18 locations (which all have multiple departments). In Dynamics GP, the GL consisted of 35 to 40 account codes per branch to track everything. Now, through Dynamics 365 Business Central, there’s just one account code, and they use the Dimensions feature to drill down into the branch and departmental details.

Another advantage is that the accounting team has reduced its reliance on paper when processing payables. Gault explained, “Many of our vendors are ‘mom and pop’ companies that issue paper invoices and receipts. Now everything is scanned and saved digitally, whereas before we had to input data manually and sift through piles of paper to find records if we needed to research anything.”

With Dynamics 365 Business Central, the accounting team can access the system anytime and from anywhere using any device. “We had remote access to Dynamics GP, but it’s more convenient with Business Central,” said Gault.

Also, Surety Title has no ongoing hardware costs associated with the solution, and Microsoft rolls out upgrades automatically so they will always have the latest features.

“Overall, the implementation went well. Cargas showed us how to set up accounts, and then we could replicate the process and do a lot on our own,” shared Gault. “Of course, not all of the transition was easy. We experienced some growing pains, but we have seen improvements to our processes already and expect to see even more benefits over time.”

He said that they spent much of the past year getting things in place and duplicating what they had in Dynamics GP.

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