Keeping Financial Reporting Working During an ERP Transition

Advanced Framing Construction | Greenville, TX

Team: ~70 field | 20+ office
Systems: QuickBooks → NetSuite | Fieldwire | Mitre

How We Connected QuickBooks Online and NetSuite to Maintain Reliable Financial Reporting During a Phased ERP Implementation

A large framing contractor with 20–30 active construction projects was moving from QuickBooks Online to NetSuite.

This wasn't simply a software conversion.

The company was moving from an environment without processes such as purchase requisitions and three-way matching into a much more robust ERP system. To fully use NetSuite, new internal processes and controls also needed to be developed.

Rather than trying to change everything at once, management made a deliberate decision:

Implement NetSuite in phases.

The Problem

New projects, payroll information from Mitre and fixed assets were moved into NetSuite first.

Existing projects and other accounting activity remained in QuickBooks Online while those projects worked their way through completion.

That reduced the risk of disrupting dozens of active construction projects — but created another problem:

The company's financial information now lived in two accounting systems.

And the bank required trailing 12-month financial statements.

Manually combining QuickBooks and NetSuite in Excel every reporting period would have been time-consuming, difficult to maintain and increasingly risky as activity continued moving between the two systems.

What We Built

We created a consolidated financial reporting system that automatically brings together transaction-level information from QuickBooks Online and NetSuite.

The model prepares:

Trailing 12-Month Income Statement + EBITDA
Balance Sheet
Direct-Method Cash Flow
Indirect-Method Cash Flow

It also handles and validates the necessary intercompany elimination activity.

But producing the financial statements wasn't enough.

We built a validation dashboard that allows the accounting team to trace the information back through the underlying systems and confirm that the pieces of the consolidation agree.

The Result

The company can maintain consolidated financial reporting while continuing its phased NetSuite implementation.

The system:

• Combines financial activity from QuickBooks Online and NetSuite

• Produces the trailing 12-month financial reporting required by the company's bank

• Provides EBITDA and consolidated balance-sheet reporting

• Produces cash flow using both the direct and indirect methods

• Handles and validates intercompany eliminations

• Provides an accounting trail to validate the information coming from each system

• Reduces reliance on a large, manually maintained Excel consolidation

• Allows management to continue a controlled, phased ERP implementation rather than forcing active projects into a premature conversion

You Don't Have to Move Everything at Once.

An ERP implementation doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing event.

Sometimes the safer decision is to move the business in phases — provided you have a reliable way to connect the old system to the new one while the transition happens.

The technology may change.

The requirement doesn't:

The financial statements still have to be right.

Clean the books. Connect the data. Put the information where the owner can use it.