How All Around Children went from an annual close to a two week one

All Around Children operates early childhood education centers across Northeast Ohio. It began as one center, and has now grown to 8 with 3 more centers on the way. Hersh joined after business school to run finance. Each center and their piece of real estate accouted for 2 entities, coupled with an umbrella organization, a staffing company, and other investments, their total entity count was close to 20.

The Problem: 20 entities split between QuickBooks and Excel

When Hersh arrived, the books were split across two disconnected systems. "We had approximately 20 entities, but only eight of them were on QuickBooks, with the remaining entities being handled via spreadsheets manually." The entities inside QuickBooks each had their own chart of accounts, so the numbers could not be compared or added up easily.

That killed the questions the business needed answered most. "It made it really hard to understand the profitability of the different centers, or if the profit was coming from the real estate side or the operating side."

The close ran once a year and finished whenever the IRS stopped waiting. "Our close process was incredibly long. It was essentially up until the end of the extension period the IRS gave us." That put the numbers roughly nine months behind the decisions being made on them.

Hersh's first fix was a niche multi-entity platform, which he ran for about a year before concluding it would not last. "It was ultimately built on a legacy platform, and I didn't feel comfortable that it would be able to keep up with the advances happening in AI and automation."

The Solution

A ledger built for All Around Children's entity structure

The search for an ERP that can scale with their growth had two requirements: a platform that could handle complex multi-entity relationships, and one that would keep evolving. Hersh also got something he did not expect, which was direct access to the people building it. "One of the most surprising parts about the sales process with DualEntry was how involved the founders were, and how interested and open to feedback they were in terms of specific features or improvements to the product." He does not come from a traditional accounting background, so he arrived with views that did not match standard practice, including a particular approach to moving cash between entities. The product handled it.

What All Around Children runs on now:

• One ledger across close to 20 entities, with consolidated reporting and the ability to drill into any single center
• Automated eliminations, which matter because the umbrella organization and staffing company bill the schools constantly. "There are a lot of transactions that go between the different entities. Their eliminations feature that is automated as part of a multi entity transaction makes that really simple for us."
• AI categorization and bank rules. "We're able to effectively automate over 90% of our bank transactions without requiring any human intervention."
• API-driven credit card flow. All Around Children extracts data from emailed receipts with its own AI and pushes the results into DualEntry daily. "We're able to have a single source of truth in DualEntry that's updated near real time, and we don't have to wait for the end of the month to see within the month financials."

Results

The close moved from nine months after year end to about two weeks after month end. All Around Children now knows in mid-April what March produced company-wide with center by center granularity.

That visibility made a new compensation structure possible. "Having real time data enabled by DualEntry has enabled us to roll out a performance management system. We now have a monthly bonus for our directors, and that is based off of real financial data, which helps us align the company's incentives with our employees' incentives." Directors running each center are now paid against results they can still influence.

Growth no longer means growing the finance team. "With the adoption of DualEntry, our future growth at All Around Children no longer requires growth in our headcount for our finance and accounting team." Hersh runs the function with himself plus roughly half of another role, and he is aiming for full automation with one to two people.

He also describes the month differently now. "Closing is no longer a stressful process. It's really something that I can manage through a few different dashboards and a few check ins here and there. It's less of a slog of a ton of manual work and more of keeping the wheels running."

For a company whose back office exists to keep educators focused on children, that is the whole objective. "Focusing on making the processes more efficient and faster is a critical part of how we deliver our company's mission."

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