Arango consolidates 4 tools into one global ERP in 3 months

As their NetSuite renewal loomed, Tom Pham, VP of finance, and his team conducted a retrospective. The assessment was that NetSuite hadn’t delivered much of what they’d needed, back when they upgraded from QuickBooks. For one, Tom was still doing a lot of work in spreadsheets that he felt ought to be done in the software. And to supplement what NetSuite lacked, they’d purchased half a dozen finance apps, all linked together:

• Pay-as-you-go usage billing in a homegrown tool built on BlueSnap

• Revenue recognition done by hand in Excel

• Accounts payable ran through Tipalti

• Expenses ran through Expensify 

• Celigo connected NetSuite to Salesforce

Arango’s German GmbH also needed separate statutory and tax books, and this setup meant Tom had to switch entities in NetSuite every time he made a local entry. The resulting software stack was costing them in the mid-six figures. The integrations sometimes caused outages, and support from NetSuite “wasn’t great.” 

“We couldn’t integrate everything into NetSuite without spending major development time and effort,” says Tom. “The level of support at NetSuite is pretty much non-existent. If you have an issue, you file a ticket and hopefully get someone from the Philippines and have to escalate through multiple tiers and account managers to get anything done.”

The company was contemplating a rebrand, where it would re-launch its offerings around a new AI core, and Tom just couldn’t conceive of this finance stack continuing to support them. They would only ever move faster and need more support. 

And that’s when they got locked out of NetSuite. 

Someone had forgotten to refresh the Celigo license managed by NetSuite, and it didn’t get cleared up for two weeks. “That was the straw,” Tom says. “How do you have a multi-week outage with SaaS? Sales orders were not syncing to the accounting system."

For the four years up until that point, Tom had kept tabs on the AI-native ERP Lensing. “Jackson had reached out about what was, at the time, a stealth project,” says Tom. “Over the years, I kept seeing iterations of it. It reached a certain point where it had improved so much, and the innovation with NetSuite was so non-existent, that we made a bet.” 

A big part of that bet was that Lensing is also a German company. Arango was founded in Cologne, and knew Lensing understood something about that position, and could offer local expertise and support. “We’re both German-founded and both have selling entities in the U.S. and Germany,” says Tom, “which made for nice, shared overlap.”

Tom wrote out his evaluation criteria: 

• Native support for subscriptions sold monthly, quarterly, and annually

• Native support for pay-as-you-go usage, billed monthly

• Integrations: Salesforce, Ramp, and Stripe

• The ability to consolidate at least 2-3 other pieces of software

• Coverage for ASC 606 and IFRS 15

• Automated revenue recognition

• Global, filterable reporting for ARR and MRR

• German statutory books, viewable in USD, EUR, and GBP

• A fast implementation and lots of support

“The moment Lensing really landed for me was seeing true multi-entity and multi-currency consolidation," says Tom. “It really consolidates international operations in a smart way. Plus, they have a pre-built NetSuite connector that’d help us move fast before our renewal, and Lensing was much more feature-rich, which could help us reduce our patchwork of tools.”

Still, Tom did due diligence and evaluated a few downmarket competitors, Campfire and Rillet. He ruled out both within a few calls. “They didn’t support any of the international functions,” says Tom. “That’s a must-have for us. With the German statutory requirements, we would be triggering the HGB compliance rule with our revenue size and number of employees. Only Lensing was able to address that, so it was a no-brainer for us. No other tool could solve that issue.”

Lensing felt different right from onboarding—they set up a shared Slack channel to talk, and Tom had access to the team. Responses came within minutes or hours, whether in the U.S. or Germany. “Lensing gives us coverage on both sides,” says Tom. “The service has been amazing. They’ve been able to address our questions without the usual time zone mismatch.” 

The implementation took longer than planned because they had to pause around Arango’s rebrand, financial audit, and the holidays but had it not, Tom estimates it was a concerted three months of work. With that, they were set up with a complete ERP that united their business, made several of the prior software redundant, and gave them full record to report, procure-to-pay, and multibook / multi-entity to consolidate all global financial operations. 

Now they’re enjoying:

A 5-day close

“We close our books with Lensing in five business days. Now we’re able to integrate the SaaS part of our business, and replace that internally built tool, which reduces the manual work. It’s now automated.”  

Quick, multilingual support

“With NetSuite, you’re always waiting for someone to get back to you. With Lensing, we’re in Slack and they’re always helping us learn the system." 

A consolidated finance stack—just Lensing as the core

“Tool consolidation was big for us. NetSuite required Tipalti, Expensify, and homegrown tools like billing and a dashboard that tracks our cloud costs. All that is gone now. We just have Lensing and Ramp. And I want to reduce it even further.”

Sandboxes for daily testing

“Our team tests every small change in a sandbox, AP to AR to revenue to general ledger. Before doing anything in the main instance, we test to ensure everything’s working as intended. That’s been amazing. NetSuite had limits to the sandbox and it could take hours or a day to refresh. Huge time saver.”

Cost savings

“Dropping all those other applications meant savings easily in the six figures.” 

Future-proofing

“Some of these improvements would have taken us much more time and effort with the other vendors, and Lensing is looking forward. Like addressing Germany’s 2027 e-invoicing requirement where we have to send and receive invoices in XML format.” 

A partner that builds features with them

“It’s been amazing working with you guys. As a design partner, it’s so refreshing! We’re really looking forward to building out configure-price-quote. Nothing about the present journey would be the same without this partnership. You innovate as quickly as we innovate.” 

And, there’s more room for Tom and team to grow into. 

While they aren’t using it yet, Lensing offers a complete professional services automation module. He also wants to start doing more FP&A work within Lensing, and integrate it with their own product for a complete knowledge graph of the customer. “I want to do a complete business value analysis for every unit leader,” says Tom. “Like help a marketing or sales team see how much they’re spending compared to budget. If I could have an automated dashboard for that, that would be huge.”

Tom is also just now getting to explore the potential of AI automation that Lensing allows. Before that, he wanted a complete financial foundation in place. “Even with a newer generation ERP, our focus was on core accounting and then revenue, and then now the SaaS integration,” he says. “Yet because of that work, we can now sit back and say, okay, let’s see what AI agents can help us with. I’m really excited to start that process.” 

“I would recommend Lensing to  anyone who has international business. I think that's such a strong feature of what they support, and especially German businesses,” says Tom.