How Volato stopped rerunning consolidations and cut its close in half

Volato Group was founded in 2021 and grew quickly. Mark Heinen joined as chief financial officer partway through that growth, which means he inherited the accounting stack rather than choosing it. The setup included five entities, four QuickBooks instances, and a consolidation tool to roll them into one parent.

The Problem: Every correction meant rerunning the whole consolidation

Leslie Miller, Volato's chief accounting officer, ran the month inside that setup.

"Some of the limitations of QuickBooks with multiple instances were having to switch entities in order to book entries, switch entities in order to do research, and then running new consolidations every time you have to book an entry outside of the system."

That last clause is the expensive one. Find a problem late and the fix is not one entry, it is one entry plus a full reconsolidation. The close ran about 15 days, and the length had nothing to do with the team's discipline. It was the number of times a person had to move between systems to answer a single question.

Leslie's read on what it cost: "Having a longer close process takes time away from being able to really review and check, making sure the numbers are right before we fully close the books." A long close does not just take time. It eats the review at the end, which is the part that catches errors.

The close checklist itself lived in Excel and Word documents.

Mark had inherited the same problem one level up. "As I tried to understand what had happened with the numbers, it was very difficult to get strong answers." His board preparation showed it. "Prior to DualEntry, it took me many days to understand the numbers and get them into a reasonable report for the board."

He also wanted controls the old setup could not give him: preparers separated from approvers, approvals documented, and evidence that both actually happened.

The Solution

An ERP that went in faster than the timeline promised

Volato looked at NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics, the names Mark's team had used at previous companies. The decision came down to price, the control environment, and one thing he had been burned on before. "I've been in too many implementations that take too long."

Volato's CEO met a DualEntry co-founder at a conference, which opened the conversation. Implementation speed closed it. "What sealed the deal as we chose DualEntry was the ease of implementation."

Then it did something Mark had not seen in an ERP rollout. "Implementation exceeded my expectations. I'm used to hearing really good timelines only to see them missed. And actually in this case, my memory is that DualEntry beat the timeline that was projected."

Leslie's data was in the system within a couple of days of kickoff, and her team needed no ramp. "My team was comfortable using DualEntry almost immediately." A financial analyst on the team put it more precisely: about 90% of what he needed to know, inside half an hour of first logging in.

What Volato runs on now:

• Multi-entity consolidation: five entities in one ledger. No instance switching, and no reconsolidation every time an entry changes.
• Segregation of duties and approvals: preparers separated from approvers, with a control checklist that documents the controls ran
• Close management and reconciliations: the close checklist moved out of Excel and Word into the ERP. Volato had been evaluating a third-party close management tool before finding the capability was already native. "Running our close process within our built in ERP minimizes risk, reduces risk that API failures that occur, and helps us to close without having to go outside the system," Leslie says.
• Custom reporting: Volato built a report that mirrors the structure of its quarterly reporting package, cutting significant time out of every quarter. Leslie no longer assembles quarterly and annual statements from a stack of Excel files. "Custom reporting in DualEntry has saved time as we're creating our quarterly and yearly financial statements, by not having to pull a bunch of Excel files together to create the same report."
• Fast support access: issues go to DualEntry over Slack and come back inside half an hour

Results

The close went from about 15 days to about 7, and the team is still working it down.

Mark's board preparation is the sharper contrast. Many days became minutes, and the time goes somewhere better. "Now it takes me minutes to pull that information, and more of my time is spent preparing to explain those answers to the board." The numbers he brings are also numbers he can defend, because he can drill into any of them.

Consolidating the entities changed what he can see at all. "Once we implemented DualEntry, I found that my ability to have visibility into the results was improved dramatically." He has since built custom reports on trends that were invisible when the data sat in four places.

Hiring is where it shows up in the budget. "Choosing DualEntry allowed us to delay hiring additional headcount, as the features within it were much more efficient than we had experienced in the past." Not a headcount cut. A growing company that did not have to staff up to keep pace with its own reporting.

Mark has no anxiety about the next transaction either, which from a CFO who has integrated books before is not a throwaway line. "As we think about mergers and acquisitions in the future, I don't have any worries. Our ability to pull in numbers from other companies into DualEntry has been simple and intuitive."

His summary of the category is short. "DualEntry is a system that can compete with a lot of the legacy ERP systems, but I find it to be a much simpler system to implement, and I find it to be much more intuitive."

‍