Hailo taxi app maker drops Sage for NetSuite OneWorld

Taxi cab app maker Hailocab has switched from Sage Line:50 to NetSuite OneWorld, in a bid to speed up accounts reconciliation and improve cashflow.

The company set up in Ireland, Canada and US in 2012 and outsources its accounting to local bookkeepers who used Sage. The company used an Excel template, which was sent to the bookkeepers for loading into Sage.

“It took the team ten or so days of manual spreadsheet entry to generate a month-end report which was far too slow, not to mention the worry of manual errors," said Nick Lally, financial director at Hailo.

Hailo used Netsuite as the integrator to do the migration out of Sage. “We rolled out a multicurrency, multicountry accounting system in 12 weeks," Lally said.

The migration needed to take into account different exchange rates when running the extraction of the accounts from Sage to upload into NetSuite. Lally said he also needed to factor in audits, as the company took the decision to  keep historical data in the old system and only migrate monthly totals. 

He said: “We can take the final balances from old system and look at open balances in the new system.”

Invoicing is still paper-based but Lally hopes Hailo will eventually get all its invoices into NetSuite in electronic form. In the US, he said it is possible to use Bill.com, a Netsuite partner, to enable suppliers to email invoices the US

The company has just gone live with NetSuite Financial Planning, which Lally said would allow managers to streamline forecasting and planning.

Netsuite has reported its Q2 2013 financial results. The company posted a net loss for the second quarter of 2013 of $20.4m, compared with a net loss of $9.9m in the second quarter of 2012.