How Commvault delivers accurate financial reporting worldwide with Solution 7 by Zone

Commvault, a tech leader in helping organizations uncover and rapidly recover from cyber attacks, struggled with slow and inaccurate financial reporting. The company's ERP system and a separate reporting tool couldn’t completely handle the complex reporting demands of its growing international footprint. This led to lengthy, error-prone manual processes, making it difficult for the finance team to report timely and accurate results for each global subsidiary. To address these challenges and standardize financial reporting across the company, Commvault needed an all-in-one solution with two-way NetSuite ERP and Excel integration capabilities. 

The Challenge: Slow and inaccurate month-end reporting in ERP during global growth

Commvault's journey from a startup to a global leader introduced significant financial and reporting complexities. As the company's reputation grew with awards and accolades from Gartner, Forbes, and other notable publications, it attracted a global customer base. This led to explosive growth, adding new subsidiaries in countries like India, China, Brazil, the UK, and various parts of Europe. Today, Commvault supports over 100,000 customers worldwide with offices in 40 countries.

Rapid expansion and a flood of new customers created new challenges for Commvault's financial system and its Enterprise Resource Planning tool (ERP). By 2013, Commvault had outgrown the previous ERP, leading to a migration to NetSuite ERP, a leader in cloud-based ERP solutions.

Before NetSuite ERP

With its previous ERP, Commvault relied on a separate, on-premise reporting tool and Excel to consolidate financial data for each subsidiary and create financial statements. Every month-end, the team manually exported data from ERP, formatted it by hand, and imported it into the on-premise reporting tool. This manual handling and lack of integration between the systems often led to data errors, causing delays and inaccuracies in financial reports.

After NetSuite ERP

Switching to NetSuite ERP improved financial consolidation, making data aggregation more accurate. The team continued to use their on-premise reporting tool and Excel for specific consolidated reports, like Profit & Loss (P&L) and Balance Sheets, for each subsidiary in its native currency. This added additional complexity. The data transfer process between systems was slow and prone to errors, which delayed month-end reporting and made it challenging for the team to maintain control over the accuracy of the data.

The four biggest challenges Commvault faced were:

A) Limited reporting for multi-currency global subsidiaries: The team struggled to achieve the needed granularity and multi-dimensional analysis in ERP for each of Commvault's 40 global subsidiaries operating in 15 currencies. Converting currencies and creating consolidated reports at the company level was incredibly challenging.

B) Long ETL significantly slowing down the month-end reporting: The extract, transform and load (ETL) process took 30 to 40 minutes to run and had to be rerun each time a NetSuite transaction was posted or updated – sometimes 20 to 30 times a month. This process alone consumed up to 20 hours of staff time each month. 

C) Inaccurate data: The team was never able to ensure 100% accuracy, as the manual process inevitably led to errors and discrepancies. This resulted in incorrect report details, preventing the team from making accurate financial decisions.

D) Reporting tool’s limited scalability: As Commvault continued to grow, the volume of financial data and the number of international subsidiaries also increased, making the manual process even more unmanageable. The existing reporting tool could not scale enough to handle the growing demands efficiently.

Commvault needed a growth-friendly reporting solution designed specifically to work with NetSuite ERP and Excel, the platform their finance team was already very well skilled at using. 

“Our biggest pain point in using an on-premise reporting tool was making sure data in the ERP and in the reporting system matched.” – Andrew Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems at Commvault

The Solution: Success built on existing Excel knowledge with Solution 7 by Zone & Co

Because the finance team was already quite experienced in using Excel, they were looking for a tool that fully integrates with both Excel and NetSuite ERP and helps automate most of the work. Commvault needed to speed up the month-end reporting and reduce errors to a minimum – and they needed something fast.

The plan was clear: With the new solution, the team could use live NetSuite data to build standardized financial reports and templates in Excel for all 40 international subsidiaries. This would ensure company-wide reporting is standardized and compliant with global regulatory standards, now and in the future as Commvault was just getting started to grow and expand.

The key requirements for the new reporting solution were:

• Automation of data transfer: Speed up data transfer by reducing manual work, waiting time, and errors.
• Real-time reporting: Generate up-to-date, accurate financial reports quickly based on live NetSuite data. 
• Multi-currency handling: Manage multi-currency reporting by automatically converting and consolidating financial data.
• Scalability: Handle increasing data volumes and new subsidiaries without compromising performance or accuracy.
• Two-way integration: Ensure smooth and accurate data flow between NetSuite ERP and Excel, using native Excel functionality without needing to learn NetSuite's back-end.

Solution 7 for Excel financial reporting and planning for NetSuite (now known as Solution 7 by Zone & Co) exactly met Commvault’s requirements and was the perfect replacement for the teams’ existing reporting tool.

“Solution 7 by Zone & Co is so easy to use.” – Andrew Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems at Commvault

Why is Solution 7 by Zone & Co easy to use?

• Excel extension: Solution 7, a NetSuite SuiteApp, combines NetSuite’s power with Excel’s familiarity to build and distribute reports in whichever way the company needs it to. It’s an extension of Excel, and its functions look and behave like Excel’s own native functions.

• Real-time data: Solution 7 uses NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Connect to pull real-time data into an Excel spreadsheet. As soon as a transaction is posted, it automatically appears in Commvault’s reports, with no middleware or admin required. 

• Ease of navigation: When using Solution 7, the team can easily navigate the NetSuite data structure live in Excel, creating plug-and-play refreshable reports without IT involvement or technical expertise.

• High-quality reports: With Solution 7, teams can build and publish high-quality and complex NetSuite reports and financial forecasts with full drill-down and drill-back to NetSuite. Reports are presentation-ready. No pre-formatting is needed.

• Quick onboarding: Training is minimal. Finance teams already skilled in Excel, like Commvault’s, only need a handful of internal training sessions on their global chart of accounts and how to create reports. After that, utilizing the app can start immediately.

Once the system was up and running, Andrew’s team built reports and templates to be used by all subsidiaries with little to no modification in daily use. The team worked closely with the Solution 7 product team to extend the app’s reporting capabilities further and created many Commvault-specific customizations, including extending the drill-down capabilities.

“Implementing Solution 7 by Zone & Co was a snap, we simply ran the client install, configured NetSuite SuiteAnalytics Connect and away we went.” – Andrew Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems at Commvault

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The Result: Faster, more accurate NetSuite reporting at a lower cost with Solution 7 by Zone & Co

Using Solution 7 with NetSuite ERP, Commvault has greatly reduced the time needed to create regional and global consolidated financial statements for 40 countries in 15 currencies, making their month-end reporting nearly instantaneous. Some of the key outcomes include:

One full day gained every month: With Solution 7, generating an Excel report from live NetSuite data is now instant. The team simply points and clicks through the NetSuite data structure and inserts any combination of fields into the desired cells in Excel. Previously, the ETL process often consumed up to 20 hours a month, depending on how frequently it had to be rerun each time a NetSuite transaction was posted or updated. Solution 7 cut report generation time from 30-40 minutes per iteration to almost immediate. This has shortened Commvault’s monthly financial close, saving at least one working day each month for more accurate financial planning and budgeting. 

Cost savings and elimination of middleware: Solution 7’s integration with NetSuite, Excel and the cloud has allowed Commvault to reduce its server count, saving on hardware maintenance, software licensing, and administrative costs required to keep production servers running. Without middleware, there are no additional costs for maintaining intermediary software, further reducing IT expenses.

Ready-to-use Excel reports, also for non-NetSuite users: Once a transaction is posted in NetSuite, it automatically appears in Commvault’s Excel spreadsheets, with no middleware or extra admin needed. The finance team can easily give access to Solution 7 reports to colleagues and contributors without requiring them to log into NetSuite. Using the NetSuite live data, the app creates refreshable reports with just one click. Within a few seconds the entire report, dashboard, or pack gets populated with up-to-date information for the team to query and drill down.

Dashboards and reports for stakeholders: Reports are generated in presentation-quality format, requiring no pre-formatting. Whenever the team needs numbers displayed in a specific format, they can do it with just one click. This means they can immediately hand these polished reports to department heads, shareholders and banks, ensuring the data is correct, visually organized and understandable. 

“As soon as a transaction is posted [in NetSuite], it automatically appears in our reports with no middleware and no administration. The reports are created in presentation quality format that users can hand to department heads, banks, and shareholders. No pre-formatting is required.” – Andrew Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems at Commvault

Customizable and standardized Excel templates: Andrew’s team can now build standardized templates for month-end reporting, including consolidated P&L, balance sheet, board reports, cash flow, and various regulatory, operational, and variance reports to analyze results by location or department. This standardization simplifies and optimizes the reporting process across the company, making it easier to consolidate financial data and generate corporate-wide reports without discrepancies.

100% accuracy and reliable data, all the time: The data pulled into Solution 7 is now always accurate, reflecting real-time updates in NetSuite. This reliability gives Andrew’s team and the entire company confidence in their numbers. This means no more time wasted on resolving data mismatches. Drill-down capabilities further enhance accuracy by allowing the team to verify and audit numbers down to the transaction level. 

Scalability and compliance: As Commvault continues to grow, the added reporting complexity is no longer a reporting burden. New entities can quickly adopt existing templates and make modifications if and when needed, ensuring their reporting meets company-wide standards and regulatory compliance from day one – a big confidence boost in financial data precision for the whole team.

‍“Previously, our biggest pain point was ensuring that data in our ERP matched the financial statements. Most times it didn’t, and time had to be spent resolving issues. Now, however, we have confidence in our numbers.” – Andrew Manning, Former Director of Financial Systems at Commvault

Financial reporting a strategic asset rather than a bottleneck with Solution 7 by Zone & Co

Solution 7 by Zone & Co transformed Commvault’s financial reporting from a long, error-prone process into a smooth, accurate operation. With bi-directional integration between NetSuite and Excel, Commvault achieved faster month-end close, 100% data accuracy, zero human errors, and reduced reliance on manual processes. The finance team regained full control of their workload. The ability to scale Solution 7 alongside the company's growth guarantees that financial reporting will continue to be a strategic asset rather than a bottleneck.

In the future, Commvault plans to expand its use of NetSuite and Solution 7 as NetSuite’s functionality expands. The company also plans to broaden Solution 7’s reporting footprint to more users, including line-of-business managers, to enable and encourage self-service financial reporting.

3,000+ businesses like yours trust Zone & Co to combine the full power of NetSuite with the ease and flexibility of Excel for all their reporting needs. Start your free trial of Solution 7 today and experience instant, error-free financial reporting.

‍Not quite ready to dive in just yet? Watch a quick preview of the key Solution 7 features and see how it all works in practice.