Simera upgrades to a “modern, full-featured, international ERP”

Simera’s CFO Jason Baldachino had finally accepted that Sage Intacct would never provide them consolidated financials. Simera is a staffing company and professional employer organization (PEO) with 600 contractors and operations in 50 countries. He had tried to standardize on Sage. But for various reasons, each of their five global locations was still on its own ERP or ledger, which ensured his team’s work spilled out into spreadsheets.

“Having a bad ERP implementation means you’re always late,” says Jason. “Late in providing figures to business leaders, late on closing, and slow to create reports that are meaningful. The danger is that eventually, people learn not to come to accounting for answers. Then you don’t even know what numbers they are generating.”

And now, Sage was hampering their growth. They’d purchased it to run roll-up reports globally, and technically, it could. But in practice, it couldn’t. Nobody, including Sage’s own support staff, knew how to set it up correctly. “At one point, we had to hire a third-party consultant to configure it to allow credit card reconciliations,” says Jason.

Further, Sage charged per entity, and some of Simera’s entities were too small to be worth it—so Jason kept those on QuickBooks Online or in spreadsheets. Whenever he tried to customize Sage, the service fees for even minor requests stretched into tens of thousands of dollars. Just calling Sage support cost money. “You call them, and it’s like, ‘Well, there goes $1,000,’” says Jason. “And it didn’t fix my problem.” 

This was not Jason’s first run as CFO, and he also knew he wouldn’t be choosing a big legacy ERP system. Those implementations might take years and cost millions. He needed to stay lean and agile. And it just seemed that by now, some software ought to be able to offer that.

“Sage was quite a legacy software platform and it had features we could just never really take advantage of,” says Jason. “I’d paid for their standard implementation back when we installed it, which was expensive, and it was ultimately a failure. I needed a system that wasn’t so nitpicky about modules, where it didn’t feel like we were being nickeled-and-dimed.” 

In comparison, he rather liked QuickBooks Online. For all its limitations, it was fast. Just feature-poor—unable to handle multiple entities, and of no use for currency conversions. 

Jason’s ERP evaluation criteria: 

• A more modern system

• True global multi-entity, multi-book

• Automatic currency consolidations and audit trail

• Aligned incentives, where the pricing actually fit them

• Integrations with their finance stack

• Audit-readiness for investors 

• White-glove implementation 

Jason evaluated several ERPs. Lensing stood out as a frontrunner, and the more he learned, the more attractive the system seemed. Lensing was a full-feature ERP, but much newer, more flexible, and logical. 

“In the past, with other ERPs, it’s been, ‘Oh, there’s this nuanced trick to how prepaid or accruals work,’” says Jason. “In Lensing, everything’s rational. It’s transparent. You know exactly where to go in the menus. It’s a world apart. And what Lensing pitched was very complete for our needs: Multi-currency support, multi-entity support, all these matters that were sticking points for us in both QuickBooks and Sage.”

Lensing is also actively innovating and has invested in support. “A big selling point was implementation and support,” says Jason. With Lensing, he’d get a Slack channel and a direct line to the product team. “I have nothing but good things to say about the implementation team. They worked very hard on the process, held our hands all the way through. Very competent. Very organized. A complete change from what we had prior.” 

“From an ease of producing consolidated financials, and working within that consolidation to click something and investigate it, along with the ease of understanding our configuration, making changes, and having confidence that they’ll work as expected, Lensing is in a league of its own,” says Jason. “It is unprecedented compared to past accounting systems and ERPs I’ve used.”

Lensing was live within three months, and Jason feels they are rapidly on track to have a professionalized financial operation. 

“To me, professionalization means work happens without manual intervention. Which is what auditors want to see,” says Jason. “It’s nice to not have to explain how I’m consolidating or dealing with exchange rates because before, I had our Cayman location in QuickBooks and our U.S. location in Sage. But now I have everything in Lensing, and it just handles it all.” 

Among the benefits are:

A logical, intuitive system

“You can adjust any option. The catalogs, the chart of accounts, those things are way more accessible than I have ever seen before. As a CFO, and with my controller, we can understand what’s happening in our system in a way that was just impossible with Sage. This is maybe the biggest difference with Lensing. Plus, dimensional tagging allows me to tag employees to contracts. Everything is nicely organized and laid out in an organized way.”

Global, consolidated financials

Simera can pull reports from across all five entities into one system to manage together or separately as needed. Jason can also create unlimited, additional, regional sub-books, like their PGC books in Spain.

Revenue automation

“The system generates sales orders and uses them for invoice runs, with a full tracking history.”

A friendly interface

“Usability like this goes a long way because unusable systems cause people to seek shortcuts around the system, and then you have holes. Whereas if it’s easy to use like Lensing, people will use it more.”

Multi-currency and automatic conversions

Jason and team can now pull reports and financials and, with a click, convert any currency to any currency. “The system does such a good job with that, I no longer have to think about it.”

Audit-ready professionalism

“With Lensing, I see a path to having an ERP system for our business that’s Big Four audit-ready. I can confidently just let them log in and dig around and it’s all set up how it needs to be. I don’t have to be downloading everything into Excel and relining things up and double-checking.”

The ability to customize

“Lensing is nimble. It doesn’t lock us into certain approaches like legacy ERPs. I don’t have to go spend $25k on consultants whenever I want to change something. Overall, I’d say the constant development and flexibility are worth quite a bit.” 

They consolidated an HR tool into Lensing

“Lensing’s HR module was robust enough that we could drop a separate HR system we were using, and there is a cost savings.”

They have a platform for AI

“I am particularly excited about some of the AI-enabling workflow updates Lensing is working on. We’re currently using the MCP server for reporting and are going to be testing new features in the coming weeks.” 

And  most of all, their ERP system is no longer a topic of conversation or frustration: “I don’t really have to get too involved. It just kind of works, which is great,” says Jason. “It creates a nice routine, scheduling invoice runs and all that.” 

Nobody ever wants to switch an ERP. But in Simera’s case, that switch is on track to deliver serious cost savings. “It’s definitely not something you want to do,” says Jason. “But what motivated me was the long-term cost efficiency I could see with Lensing. And really professionalizing our financial operations in a way that it’s all audit-ready, but also affordable.”