Calxa Case Study – Cutcher & Neale

Established in 1953, Cutcher & Neale is one of the Top 40 accounting and financial firms in Australia. With teams spanning across nine specialty accounting divisions and spread over 4 office locations, their success is founded on traditional values coupled with innovative thinking. Clients benefit from their suite of services covering aspects of personal and business financial offerings. As Xero Platinum Champions and NetSuite Partners, they know a thing or two of cloud accounting.

The Challenges

Michael Graham, Partner and Head of Business Systems Division, has been part of the firm’s growth over an illustrious 27 years. Calxa has been along for part of the journey as Michael is not a fan of spreadsheets. “While there is always a need for Excel, I think from a financial reporting perspective, you need to move away from it because you just want to be able to press buttons and produce information quickly and not be pushing raw data into something to then manipulate it.”

“Unless you you’re highly skilled or an organisation with a well-developed IT team that can assist with connecting Excel to the financial data. A lot of the time, the data is coming out and its dead data at that point for most users. So I probably suggest it’s far better to have something like Calxa to sync your data and then utilise it within that bespoke system.”

Initially, Michael started using Calxa as a value-add product for their clients. These companies range from process manufacturing plants to job service organisations as well as distributors. Across the range of clients, Cutcher & Neale handles their multi-subsidiaries, quite complex business structures and delivers consolidated company reports.

The Complicated World of Not-for-Profit Clients

In particular, he found Calxa a good fit for not-for-profits with their complex needs. Michael goes on “it’s quite complicated what they do and to some extent, because at the end of the day, they trace jobs in their systems. Essentially, they have to track all their costs, they’re reportable to their clients and they’re also accountable to a third party.”
“I’ve utilised the Calxa product for a long time, so I know how much time it does save.” For these reasons, Cutcher & Neale have implemented Calxa in many organisations with success.

Departmental Reporting using NetSuite

In an effort to handling multiple locations and business units across their own practice, Cutcher & Neale use NetSuite for their accounting. However, this is where they found constraints on how they could report in multi-level tiers.
For example, their superannuation division has three child divisions sitting within the unit. Michael goes on, “in NetSuite, when you say I want to look at department level hierarchy, what it does is it puts superannuation over the top of the three children. Then reports the children and gives you a total. This is not what we wanted. We just want to see the total for that specific division at the parent level.”

So, the team found they were putting the reports directly into Excel, remove unwanted columns, realign formatting and change fonts as well as other necessary tweaks to pretty up the reports. Doing this every month was taking up their time.

Access to Data for the Executive Team

One very important aspect of their requirements was data visibility. The team at Cutcher & Neale contemplated giving NetSuite access to their eight Executives to find and view data as needed. However, letting each one of the members use NetSuite was not only requiring individual user licences but also training to navigate around the platform. This was going to be expensive for users that just needed to look at information and a significant time commitment in learning.

They recognised that, “to buy NetSuite licenses and allocate them for that specific purpose is really not cost effective.”

The Solution

Solving Department Level Reporting leveraging Cost Segments

So, how does Calxa help Cutcher and Neale achieve its goals?

“Probably the most interesting thing about Calxa, and what we were trying to achieve at an executive level from a reporting perspective, was to obviously get that consolidation at a certain group level across our departments”, says Michael.

“Being a very large accounting firm, we have a big structure around us. So, dealing with this multi-site, multi-entity scenario, that’s the most important thing.”

At this point, Cutcher & Neale implemented Calxa within their practice to help track their own firm’s growth. Reporting across multiple locations and businesses recorded across NetSuite cost segments, Calxa is now handling their group consolidations. Explaining this in more detail, Michael says, “for us, we have a trading statement that looks across 12 divisions, and across multiple sites.”

What Calxa enables is the joining of the children under each department together and roll them up to a summary at the parent level.

Michael explains “we now can just report all our parent departments at the top level. And that seems like a very simple thing because I’ll be honest, NetSuite does a lot of things very well when it comes to consolidation. But, that just doesn’t work without some absolute crazy workarounds.”.

Visibility for Everyone on the Executive

To improve visibility of data for our partners, giving access to Calxa was a no-brainer. Not only does the software come with unlimited users, but it is also by far the easier platform to navigate.

“What Calxa does is lay out the information in a much simpler way with a modern, font and modern UI.”

Accessing dashboards and report bundles is easy. “It makes it really simple for an executive to go in and not have to, try and navigate the world of NetSuite.”, explains Michael.

Saving Time is a Huge Benefits

The team at Cutcher & Neale is clear on the savings of hours every month. But Michael sees an additional advantage, “I believe it’s going to save us even more because we’re just about to embark on our 2026 budgeting.”.

Creating next year’s budget will be a quick process by using the Budget Factory and using current year’s actuals as a base to prepare forward looking budgets.

Michael expands on this, “once the draft is created, we then push that out to Excel if we need to do some really extensive calculations. Instead, we will utilise the tools within Calxa to do our budgeting”.

Easy Learnings

These days, they share access with various stakeholders who are finding it easy to get the reports they need. Their CFO, who had never see Calxa before, simply needed a couple of quick training sessions to get up and running. Michael happily tells, “now he is able to pump out a budget really quickly”.

This process is providing a real foundation layer for the division heads. They work on their numbers updating their own budgets which are then rolled up to a full organisation budget.

About Cutcher & Neale

Cutcher & Neale is a large accounting and financial firm in Australia with offices across 4 locations. Besides specialising in accounting, tax and wealth management, they have a large software division offering Xero and NetSuite implementation to their clients.

Their progressive approach has seen them leading the industry in cloud accounting and helping their clients make informed decisions.

The Organisation

• Organisation: Cutcher & Neale
• Website: Cutcher and Neale
• Accounting System Used: Xero and NetSuite