Selected Case Studies
Silverline
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How Black Ink Business Services helped Silverline transition into their next growth phase.
After nearly ten years, Silverline's Business Intelligence was stagnant and needed a fresh approach while entering into its next phase. With an eye on expansion, and the potential upcoming challenges of a possible deal, the founders wanted to avoid being bogged down in due diligence. They tapped Black Ink to address the need for more Business Intelligence while performing Pre-Diligence.
Silverline’s Background
Silverline is a Salesforce Platinum Cloud Alliance Partner headquartered in New York City with consultants throughout North America. They focus exclusively on the end-to-end deployment of salesforce.com products and powerful third-party apps. Silverline's results-driven methodology leverages best practices developed over 800+ deployments, with deep expertise in Financial Services, Healthcare, and Force.com solutions.
The
Challenges
Absence of Financial Reporting
Founders lacked reporting that gave them a holistic view of their business at any given point in time. This level of reporting was needed to make informed business decisions primarily related to hiring staff and capital investments as well as running 'what if' scenarios.
Lack of Transparency to KPI
Founders had noticeably minimal transparency to their business financials and its KPIs.
Access to Timely Reports
One challenge the founders were facing was obtaining timely reports. With growth, the complexities of the business's reporting needs also grew — which often led to delayed and after-the-fact reporting.
Retain Institutional Knowledge
There had been a small finance team for nearly ten years. Accounting processes were not well documented, and the dependency on single individuals to perform important accounting functions had become a liability.
The Timeline
March 2017
Kicked-off project to standardize Charts of Accounts and build a reporting tool.
July 2017
Launched Reporting Dashboard.
August 2017
Worked on Due Diligence with William Blair.
March 2018
Pamlico Capital Made Growth Investment in Silverline. Took control of General Ledger during the transition.
August 2018
Assisted in on-boarding newly hired CFO.
January 2019
Black Ink led 2018 financial audit.
July 2017 and On
Ongoing support for reporting and transitions surrounding the investment.
March 2017
Kicked-off project to standardize Charts of Accounts and build a reporting tool.
July 2017
Launched Reporting Dashboard.
August 2017
Worked on Due Diligence with William Blair.
March 2018
Pamlico Capital Made Growth Investment in Silverline. Took control of General Ledger during the transition.
August 2018
Assisted in on-boarding newly hired CFO.
January 2019
Black Ink led 2018 financial audit.
July 2017 and On
Ongoing support for reporting and transitions surrounding the investment.
Our Solution
Reorganized Charts of Accounts
As part of creating a new reporting tool for Silverline, we reorganized the chart of accounts to be industry-specific which added in giving an overall picture of the business with an option to drill down reports by department. Black Ink was able to condense a five-page-long income statement to one and a half pages without losing any reporting functions.
Dynamic Reporting Dashboard
Black Ink designed a Dashboard with Dynamic Reporting in Google Sheets — providing a holistic view of the business with forward-looking projections, planning tools for 'What if' scenario analysis, and readily available reports within G Suite. Monthly close turnaround time improved to less than two weeks.
Accounting Manual
In order to mitigate the risk of being dependent on a small staff's ability to document accounting tasks, Black Ink acquired institutional knowledge throughout the process and helped document accounting policies and procedures. This documentation was also used as a guide to onboard new staff on the internal accounting team.
Pre-Diligence
With first-hand knowledge of the amount of bandwidth needed from leadership for due diligence, Silverline's founders tasked Black Ink with getting the house in order before third-parties started any due-diligence. Black Ink began building out a data room pre-populated with reports. When inquiries came in from potential investors Black Ink took the lead on all requests with no needed bandwidth from department leaders.
The Deliverables
- ■Fully functional dynamic reporting tool used regularly for planning and business decisions
- ■Created redundancy in the finance department with documented policies and procedures
- ■Pre/Due Diligence: Main point of contact on behalf of Silverline for all accounting related requests
- ■Helped founders build a finance team including onboarding of a CFO and Controller
- ■Led Annual Financial Audit with an outside firm
- ■Analyzed and evaluated internal system integration from Concur and Salesforce to QuickBooks
- ■Launched 3rd party apps to integrate into accounting functions for overall efficiencies
- ■Ongoing support since initial engagement in early 2017
Don’t Take Our Word For It
« Silverline went through a period of impressive growth, and Black Ink was there for us when we needed help scaling our financial processes. Black Ink took on the heavy lifting so that the executive team and I could trust the data when making important decisions. »
— Gireesh Sonnad Co-Founder, Silverline