Communications and agribusiness company moves financials to the cloud
Learn how Baker Tilly's implementation has provided Ritter with a scalable system that is cloud-based and easily integrates with other systems.
Client background
E. Ritter & Company, parent to Ritter Communications and Ritter Agribusiness, was founded in Marked Tree, Arkansas in 1886. Ritter Communications, headquartered in Jonesboro, began providing local phone service in 1906. Today, Ritter serves 59 communities and more than 45,000 customers in northeast and north central Arkansas and west Tennessee with advanced voice and data services typically found only in major metropolitan areas. Ritter invests heavily in the communities it serves by deploying proven, best in class infrastructure and technology while coupling it with a world-class customer-focused experience. Ritter Agribusiness, located in Marked Tree, is one of the most respected and diverse agricultural businesses in east Arkansas, offering farm management, grain services and cotton ginning/warehousing to area farmers. After a rigorous software evaluation, Ritter chose Sage Intacct over other cloud-based and on-premise solutions as the best fit for the business.
The business challenge
- Multiple, independent financial systems across divisions drove inconsistencies and inefficiencies in processes and reporting
- Ritter needed a highly integratable accounting solution to complement the company-wide “best-of-breed” systems upgrade initiative
- Legacy systems provided the company with limited real-time visibility to consolidated results
Penny Wells, VP of Financial Systems & Metrics, E. Ritter & CompanyWe can spend the time analyzing financial results that we used to spend just getting the books closed and reports prepared ...The project was completed on time, met our business requirements, and Baker Tilly has been a great alliance for us from start to finish.
Strategy and solution
- The ability to drill down through any piece of data in any module has increased the efficiency of the accounting department and other functional managers
- New dimensional reporting structure enables financial reporting not only by location and department, but also by product lines and customer types, allowing Ritter’s finance team to deliver greater insight into financial operations
- Baker Tilly's implementation has provided Ritter with a scalable system that is cloud-based and easily integrates with other systems
- Baker Tilly's focused specialization in accounting systems, compared to broadly focused ERP systems, was a better fit with Ritter’s desired best-of-breed systems strategy
- They now have greater dimensional support and more robust out-of-the-box multi-entity capability than previous solutions