Amongst the many sessions at SuiteWorld 2025, the practicality of Kieser CFO and co-owner Dianna Butterworth’s session, “How Kieser Reduced Their Budgeting Time by Over 50%”, stood out. Alongside Nate Keller, Principal Solutions Consultant at Oracle, Dianna took the audience on an in-depth walk-through of how her finance team moved from spreadsheets and manual reconciliations to a unified system that now delivers year-end results on day three and turns budgeting into a two-month, scenario-ready cycle.
Looking for the case study? Read Kieser’s case study here.
The speed problem in finance
There’s a point where spreadsheets stop being helpful and start slowing the entire business. For Kieser, that moment came when scenario analysis requests had to be turned down because the finance team simply couldn’t deliver them.
The core issue was time. Close cycles dragged out to 20–25 days. Budgeting stretched across six months. Leaders were making decisions late, or not at all, because the numbers weren’t ready.
The baseline reality before change
Kieser may look clinical on the surface, but its finance function was anything but. When Dianna joined, the business had 13 clinics and 200 staff. As the network expanded to 31 clinics, 800 staff and 75 people in head office, the finance backbone buckled. The team was juggling 27 separate Xero files, each with its own chart of accounts and processing around 2,000 intercompany invoices manually every month.
Budgeting was worse. Consolidation required roughly 80 linked spreadsheets, leaving gaps in workforce planning and entire regional budgets built on the wrong versions. What had worked for a small business was no longer sustainable at scale.
Building the business case for change
For Dianna, the decision point came from the numbers. With 31 clinics already operating and another three to five opening each year, the finance model couldn’t keep pace. Each bookkeeper could manage five Xero files at best, which meant the business was on track to hire ten more simply to keep processes afloat. That cost would stack up year after year without ever fixing the underlying problem of manual consolidation, reporting delays and a budgeting process that dragged on for six months.
Month-end reporting had become a drawn-out exercise, often taking 20-25 days before results were available. Budgeting was even more fragile, stitched together from around 80 linked spreadsheets that routinely broke and created inconsistencies across clinics. In one cycle, key staff were left out of workforce plans because responsibility was split between leaders and no single file carried the full picture. As new clinics came online, every addition multiplied the risk of error, added more reconciliation work and pushed the finance team deeper into low-value manual processing.
Dianna built her case by focusing on the cost of not changing. Scaling on spreadsheets would force headcount growth without improving speed or control. What the business needed was a single source of truth, faster reporting cycles measured in days rather than weeks, and a budgeting engine that could handle scenarios cleanly.
That case led Kieser to select NetSuite as the ERP foundation, with Annexa as the implementation partner to scope and deliver the project. Supporting integrations were added to eliminate manual touchpoints and ensure data could move freely across systems without burdening internal teams.
The architecture as one source of truth
The first step was consolidation. NetSuite ERP became the single ledger of record, standardising the chart of accounts, entities and tracking codes.
Data integration also shifted from a constant tech-team headache to a controlled process. Celigo connected Kieser’s custom CRM directly to the ERP, posting invoices and payments overnight with clear error handling available to finance rather than IT.
Accounts payable was overhauled with Zone & Co’s OCR tool, which pushed supplier invoices straight into NetSuite, and ExpenseMe gave staff a mobile way to manage card spend and claims.
Intercompany invoicing, once a grind of 2,000 transactions coded, posted and reconciled manually each month, was replaced by automated scripts that post directly across clinic ledgers.
Next comes the planning engine with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting
Once the ERP foundation was in place, Kieser turned to NetSuite Planning and Budgeting (NSPB). For Dianna, the priority was to replace a budgeting cycle that relied on 80 spreadsheets and dragged on for half the year. NSPB provided a single model seeded directly from the NetSuite ledger, pulling through actuals, chart of accounts, tracking codes and clinic structures. That meant budgeting started from one source of truth rather than a collection of Excel files.
The workforce cube became central to budgeting. This is NSPB’s dedicated model for headcount and staff costs, holding all 800 employees with their pay rates, standard hours and allocations across clinics and head office. It removed the risk of missing roles or duplicating headcount, and a new employee tab made it easy to add planned hires on demand. Because the cube is integrated with the wider model, changes to workforce assumptions – such as wage increases or new clinic openings – flow directly into revenue and cost forecasts. Subscription volumes and average yield prices are modelled alongside, creating a controlled framework that replaces dozens of disconnected spreadsheets.
Smart View, the Excel add-in that comes with NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, became the bridge between finance and the wider business. It looks and behaves like a standard spreadsheet, but every cell is tied directly into NSPB. Clinic and department leaders can enter their numbers in a familiar format and submit them straight into the central model, eliminating the endless version swaps that used to circulate by email.
Because NSPB is structured, three-way statements covering P&L, balance sheet and cashflow are generated automatically rather than stitched together manually. The finance team also extended the model to run a ten-year forecast, something previously impossible to maintain across dozens of fragile spreadsheets. As a result, the budgeting cycle shrank from six months to around two and scenario analysis could be run in minutes. Wage increases, sales shifts or new clinic openings are now modelled instantly without destabilising the entire budget.
The process changes
For month-end, the changes were just as pronounced. Where results had once taken 20-25 days to finalise, the finance team now closes in three to five days, even hitting day three at year-end. The driver is automation layered on standardised processes: intercompany invoices post automatically between entities, accounts payable is digitised and reconciliations are managed in-system rather than across disconnected files.
The speed of reporting has shifted the role of the team itself. Bookkeepers who were once buried in coding and reconciliations now analyse sales and labour ratios on day one. Variances are identified early with clinic leaders receiving calls within days of month-end to discuss wage blowouts, sales shortfalls or overspending on discretionary items.
This change in cadence matters. Leaders base decisions on fresh data rather than retrospective reports. The finance team is no longer a bottleneck, but a source of live analysis that helps guide operations across all 31 clinics.
Improving the budgeting cycle
Before NSPB, budgeting was a painful marathon. Each clinic leader submitted an Excel file, head office departments added their own versions and finance spent months consolidating and reconciling errors. Versions overlapped, formulas broke and important details slipped through the cracks.
With NSPB in place, the process is faster and far more controlled. Budgets are now built in around two months, supported by a single assumptions page that governs the key drivers across all clinics and departments. Leaders input their numbers through Smart View, which feeds directly into the model without version confusion. Every submission is tied to the same data structures, so finance no longer needs to manually reconcile different files.
The agility of the system has proved critical. When wage increases are announced across the health sector, finance can model multiple outcomes within minutes and present the impact at clinic and enterprise level. The same applies to shifts in sales volumes or pricing. Scenario analysis has moved from a request finance couldn’t service to a routine part of planning.
This speed and clarity have changed how leaders engage with the budget. Rather than waiting months for approval, they now work with finance in near-real time, adjusting assumptions and testing outcomes before committing.
The human side of transformation
Kieser’s transformation was led by a small team balancing day-to-day operations with the demands of implementation. Dianna and her colleagues were opening three to five new clinics each year while scoping, testing and deploying NetSuite and NSPB. The pace was relentless, but it forced the project team to embed the new systems into business as usual from day one.
That hands-on approach meant the team understood the engine intimately by the time the systems went live. They could troubleshoot, identify gaps and work with Annexa to refine processes after implementation.
The experience also highlighted the importance of partner choice. With limited resources, Kieser relied on Annexa to guide scope, provide technical expertise and support integrations with CRM, AP automation and expense management. This relationship was key to delivering the project without derailing business growth.
Today, Kieser’s finance team is embedded in strategy, able to collaborate with leaders across the business, and equipped with systems that match the scale of the organisation.
The numbers tell the story of how far Kieser’s finance function has come
- Month-end close reduced from 20-25 days to three to five days, with year-end completed on day three
- Budgeting cycle cut from six months to around two months
- Intercompany invoicing automated across 31 entities, eliminating roughly 2,000 manual transactions each month
- A ten-year forecast maintained within NSPB, replacing fragile long-range Excel models
- Reporting sliced by state, region, or franchise group in seconds, with outputs to PDF or Excel at the push of a button
- Bookkeepers redeployed from transaction processing to variance analysis, providing clinic leaders with timely insight
Ready to see what NSPB could do for your finance team?
Annexa is one of the few partners in ANZ with deep experience implementing NSPB as part of a broader NetSuite environment.
Talk to us about how NSPB can shorten your close, simplify planning and give leaders the scenarios they need to make decisions fast.