PartnerHero builds a finance tech stack for global operations

Home Customer stories PartnerHero builds a finance tech stack for global operations

Case study

Learn how PartnerHero’s finance team sleeps better at night using ApprovalMax for better visibility of accounts payable.

PartnerHero is the BPO for companies that care about quality and people. It connects talented and capable people from all over the world with innovative companies who care about business metrics and values. The PartnerHero team are big fans of integrity, finding the right fit, and bringing opportunity to places that have traditionally been left behind. PartnerHero specializes in Customer Support, Trust & Safety, Quality Assurance, and Software QA.

3,000+

Employees

Oracle NetSuite

Accounting Platform

Outsourcing and Offshoring Consulting

Industry

Idaho, USA

Location

In just 10 years, PartnerHero has grown substantially. The Idaho-headquartered organization, which helps other businesses wanting to outsource certain functions, like customer service, content moderation, and workforce management, has expanded over the past decade to eight global offices, 19 remote hubs and more than 3,000 associates.

PartnerHero now partners with over 200 customers to help them scale quickly with ease. But while the business now operates at scale across multiple markets, it prioritizes the core values that make up its culture and puts people, both employees and the communities they live in, first.

Fueling future scalability

This fast-growth has been felt in all areas of the business, including finance. With the business now operating across multiple entities in multiple markets, it needed systems and processes that could keep up with the demands of a fast-moving, international organization.

“One of the tasks that my department has taken on was replacing our entire finance and accounting tech stack with programs that are better suited for future scalability and sustainability. Going from QuickBooks to NetSuite was a big step we took last year,” says Rod Mourant, VP of Accounting & Global Controller at PartnerHero.

PartnerHero already used ApprovalMax with QuickBooks Online, so continued using it once the business made the switch to Oracle NetSuite. Prior to ApprovalMax, the team managed AP approvals through a messaging app or email, which was slow and inefficient. To stay on top of the complex approvals matrix, they referred to a static, master spreadsheet mapping out who was responsible for what, but only invoices over a certain size went through approvals due to the time consuming manual process.

“We had to really set our approval limits very high because we couldn't run every invoice through a Slack message to get approvals because it would have been overwhelming. We were only really getting approvals and VP level review on very large invoices,” says Mourant.

“With ApprovalMax, not only were we able to automate that whole process, it could then post those into QuickBooks for us to eliminate the manual side of it, and we could then set much lower limits.”

Systems for global growth

Now, every invoice goes through ApprovalMax. With the switch to Oracle NetSuite, all of PartnerHero’s subsidiaries are on the same system and around 200 invoices each month go through the right approvals before entering the GL, every time. This gives the PartnerHero team far greater visibility of budgets and costs as each invoice comes through.

“I've had nothing but positive feedback from approvers in the company because they have better visibility of the spend in their department,” says Mourant. “They didn’t have this level of visibility before. If a big invoice came in, they might not have seen 30 small ones, and now they see every invoice that's quoted against their department or budget.”

This extra layer of control is vital for a growing business operating across multiple countries. With the way budgets are managed across subsidiaries, some decision-makers are in a different country to where the bills they approve are entered. Now they’re getting a complete view of spend and control over approvals they didn’t have before. Since ApprovalMax allows unlimited seats, ParterHero can easily add approvers from all over the business without needing to give them access to NetSuite.

“The biggest change since we started using ApprovalMax is the visibility of our accounts payable process. People who are far removed from finance, like those in marketing who don't think about finance on a daily basis, they can easily see the status of an invoice,” says Mourant.

Cost savings

Since ApprovalMax offers unlimited approvers, PartnerHero saves thousands each month in software subscription fees to manage the approvals process.

Speedy approvals

PartnerHero’s approvals are much faster now with ApprovalMax, especially for team members using the Slack integration to manage approvals on the go. 80% of invoices are approved within 3 days.

Global visibility

PartnerHero now has the right tech stack to see clearly across its entire organization, including subsidiaries in different countries, to stay on top of bills and expenses.

Multi-region, multi-currency compatibility

The PartnerHero team manages complex tax and reporting requirements with ease using ApprovalMax. For example, ApprovalMax automatically breaks out VAT taxes and posts them to NetSuite, saving huge amounts of time.