How Advanced Safety and Energy turned a 6–8 week close into 3–5 days without adding accountants

Advanced Safety and Energy is a global company working in the safety, energy and manufacturing space, with projects across four continents. Its work covers machinery safety, from physical guarding up to control systems and presence detection that let people work safely around large industrial equipment, and electrical safety in facilities that run extreme high voltage. Its newest business, Safety Academy, delivers safety training online. About 24 people work across five companies under shared ownership, most of them engineers. The finance function is two people: Curtis Blackhurst, director of finance, and the CEO.

The Problem: Five QuickBooks files, a lot of Excel, and a two-month close

Before DualEntry, the finance stack was QuickBooks Desktop (a 2010 or 2012 version, by Curtis's count) and Excel. Each company had its own QuickBooks file. QuickBooks moved money in and out, and everything else happened in spreadsheets with manual formulas.

"QuickBooks did not have the capabilities to do any of the higher accounting: consolidation, analysis, reporting and generating those final reports we actually needed," Curtis says.

The owners want to see how the group is doing as a whole, and transactions move between the companies. Every month, those intercompany transactions had to be eliminated and the companies consolidated by hand. Currency added another layer. Key suppliers bill in euros, and some contractors and customers work in Canadian dollars or Mexican pesos. The old system treated everything as US dollars, and Curtis corrected the difference with manual journal entries when payments hit the bank.

The close took six to eight weeks, sometimes longer. By the time the books were final, there was little point booking closing entries in QuickBooks at all.

"Most of my time was spent reconciling credit cards and things like that manually," Curtis says. "Sometimes two to three business days on generating some basic financial reports, because everything had to be subdivided and divided by hand through Excel."

Safety Academy forced the decision. An online SaaS business needed to connect to tools QuickBooks could not, and the manual workaround came with a headcount number attached. "What really drove us to start searching for a change was the need to either add a new tool that could handle everything, or add two to three accountants to the team to be able to manage it."

The Solution: The gap between QuickBooks and the big ERPs

Budget ruled out the largest systems. "SAP and NetSuite are great tools, but they're way beyond what a lot of businesses need or can afford or can manage," Curtis says. Several newer options looked to him like versions of QuickBooks Online. Others went the opposite way and let AI do everything.

What stood out about DualEntry was on its website before the demo: AI does the work, and a human approves it.

"With some of the others, the AI just did everything and then you had to find what it did. That made me very nervous. With a small team, I don't want to be double checking work. I want to just be right the first time."

The price made the case to ownership easy. Advanced Safety and Energy had budgeted almost double what DualEntry quoted. And when a technical question came up during the sales process, DualEntry's CEO joined the call to answer it himself.

The initial setup took about a week to a week and a half, which gave the team a working environment to test before all the historical data had moved. An implementation specialist guided the process and stayed on afterwards. The customer success lead who took over is an accountant. That mattered when payroll data from the company's third-party provider was not landing correctly.

"It looks at first glance like it's right, but it's not," Curtis says. "It was really nice to talk to an actual accountant about it who understood."

What Advanced Safety and Energy runs on now:

• Multi-entity consolidation: the group income statement and balance sheet come straight out of DualEntry, replacing the consolidation and eliminations Curtis used to build by hand.
• Bank feeds and bank match: matches stay current through the month instead of waiting for a full manual reconciliation before close.
• Multi-currency: euros, Canadian dollars and Mexican pesos, with exchange rates that update automatically. "Occasionally there's still a penny or two off, but I'd much rather make a penny adjustment than thousands of dollars at the end of the month."
• Drag-and-drop bills with bulk edit: invoices go straight from email into DualEntry as bills, and every line can be recoded at once. A 50 to 60 line invoice that took 15 to 20 minutes now takes 30 seconds to a minute.
• Document storage: bills and purchase orders sit on the transaction, so anyone on the team can check the original without going to a separate system.
• Integrations: Stripe for card payments, the third-party payroll provider, and the company's banks.
• Role-based access: department managers log in to see their own numbers, view-only, and only what is relevant to their role.

Results

The close went from six to eight weeks to three to five business days.

"DualEntry has saved me hours every week," Curtis says. "Most likely in a single month, probably an entire workweek of time." The overtime that used to go into managing transactions has gone with it.

The bigger change is how fast information reaches the people running projects. The interview was filmed during peak season, which used to be when the lag hurt most. "Previously that six to eight week close to be able to report on what's happened for some of these projects was a huge lag," Curtis says. Managers now see their department's numbers directly and can adjust while the work is still underway.

The hiring problem that started the search never arrived. "Adding DualEntry as an updated tool saved us two to three accounting hires just this year." Without it, Curtis estimates the finance team would have grown from one and a half or two people to five or six to support Safety Academy.

The product has kept moving too. In roughly three months, Curtis counted close to 100 major updates, and workarounds the team needed when it signed on have since been fixed. "DualEntry might be new, but with them being new, they're continuously improving. That's a huge change over a lot of older ERP systems and older accounting systems."

His own job looks different now. "My job feels much less like I'm a manual accountant, and much more that we're actually managing the finances and managing the business, rather than just managing a set of books." Going back to the old system, he says, "would feel like going back to the Stone Age."

His one-sentence version: "DualEntry fills the gap between the basic ERP and the big guys, and gives smaller teams the functionality of a much bigger system."