Discovery Builders Migrates to a New ERP with Procore’s Partnership

The Challenge

Discovery Builders (DB), a luxury residential construction company and a longtime Procore client, was outgrowing its ERP system, Sage 300. As the company expanded internationally, they needed an ERP that could handle multi-currency transactions. Additionally, they aimed to transition to a cloud-based ERP to enhance flexibility and eliminate costly servers. Crucially, they needed to integrate with their parent company, which had already migrated to Sage Intacct, to track and report financials as a single entity. Maintaining a tight integration with Procore was a key component during this entire transition.

The Solution

Although the company considered moving to other ERP software, upgrading to Intacct was clearly the smartest and least-disruptive solution. After a successful beta testing period with Procore’s new Sage Intacct integration, the migration was set to move forward.

The Results

• DB can now drill down deeper into its financials and produce real-time forecasting reports for the entire enterprise.
• Procore’s platform and integration allows DB to transact in multiple currencies without performing manual calculations.
• Switching to a web-based platform gives DB greater freedom of access, more flexibility and lower costs than its previous server-based solution.

Migrating Toward a Global View

Discovery Builders (DB) is the construction arm of a eal estate developer and operator of private luxury residential communities around the world. As a long-time Procore customer, they were familiar with the benefits of an ERP integration. Since the company integrated its ERP, Sage 300, with Procore in 2017, they had greatly increased efficiency and reduced waste through better financial tracking and reporting, standardized cost-code structures and streamlined processes for executing invoices and contracts.

But a few years later, DB began to outgrow Sage 300. As the company expanded internationally, they increasingly needed to operate in multi-currency—buying in US dollars and selling in Pesos, for example—which Sage 300 did not support. Sage 300 is also served-based, a setup that felt limiting and unnecessarily expensive in an increasingly cloud-based, SAAS world. And most critically, a separate unit of the parent company had already migrated to Sage Intacct, preventing the entire business from reporting as a single entity.

Luckily, Sage Intacct was cloud-based and built to handle multi-currency, so it checked all the necessary boxes for DB. But at the time, Procore did not offer an off-the-shelf integration with Intacct. Heidi Heitz-Lowe, Director of Procore Systems and Integration at DB, told Procore that her company needed to migrate to the new system and waited. When Procore was ready to beta-test an Intacct integration, DB was the first company of their size to integrate.

Building the Best Integration Together

Migrating to a new ERP can be stressful under the best circumstances. Doing so while simultaneously beta testing an integration with a management platform can be even trickier. To make the transition as smooth as possible, Procore’s implementation team worked closely with DB every step of the way, monitoring their progress and incorporating their recommendations. “Procore was great about asking us for feedback and making adjustments when we needed them to,” says Heitz-Lowe.

While the migration process is ongoing, the company is already seeing substantial benefits. Overseas teams are no longer using Excel spreadsheets to process multi-currency transactions, and the data from those transactions is automatically (and accurately) updated in real time across the organization. “Now we can do all of our transactions in US dollars but be paid in another currency, and those costs still come back correctly to our operations teams,” says Heitz-Lowe. And like all teams that have migrated to the new ERP, those overseas units are finally able to sync with the overall company and easily be included in cross-departmental financial reports. “Now we can pull from everywhere,” says Heitz-Lowe. “We’ve standardized everything, so now we have a data warehouse to work with, and we’re able to see what those long-term costs are for us.” As a company that typically spends up to 10 years on a single project, being able to see those long-term costs is a game-changer. “Our whole company now can report on a project from a global standpoint, from our club side to our development to us,” she says. With that kind of flexibility and transparency, DB can generate a greater variety of reports, with greater granularity, than ever before. “We can now drill in and see all different views of the project.” DB’s analysts have also gained the ability to put together highly informative dashboards for the C-Suite, giving them a real-time snapshot across the company’s many projects.

Moving to a cloud-based ERP has given DB more flexibility and easier access to its accounting software and allowed them to shed the price of maintaining pricey servers—a cost they look forward to shedding further once the migration is completed.

Streamlined Workflows

Of course, a primary benefit of any ERP integration is eliminating the need to replicate the same work in two different platforms, a labor-heavy process that opens the door to mistakes and missing data. With Procore’s Intacct integration, DB developed customized workflows for approvals and other tasks that help save time and ease the pain of the migration. “With those workflows, our financial people can do that work in Procore, so by the time it gets to our accounting system, it’s ready to be paid or updated,” says Heitz-Lowe. “That’s been significant. All of the routine activities are managed in Procore, so our accounting system can just be our accounting system.” In addition to simply being easier, and less error-prone, those workflows have been a major factor in driving Intacct buy-in from the accounting team.

Not that buy-in was a major obstacle. “Because we’ve been through an ERP integration with Procore before, our people were on board from the beginning,” says Heitz-Lowe. With half of DB’s teams now successfully migrated, the company is confident it made the right decision and excited about gaining more efficiencies as more teams move over. “Procore has been honest and open and communicative with us about what’s to come through the entire process,” she says. “It helps to have a great partner like Procore.”