Smarter Data. Better Deals. DXD Capital’s Evolution with BT Partners

When Avram Penner joined DXD as Controller, he immediately noticed the accounting infrastructure was slowing growth with two different entities, a management, and a fund. In the commercial real estate space, managing multiple legal entities, including funds, ownership structures, and general partner entities, is common. These often layer together, requiring a seamless accounting platform to manage the complexities. At the time, DXD’s systems were not designed to manage multi-entity operations or easily connect with their Fintech stack.

Penner had previously enjoyed working with BT Partners on a Sage Intacct implementation at another company. “Having worked with the team before, it was natural for us to continue working together here at DXD to suit the needs of our entire organization. We want to leverage data in the system to extend visibility and information to all the teams,” says Penner. This set the stage for DXD’s collaborative partnership with BT Partners, whose expertise in Sage Intacct and multi-entity environments was key to solving their challenges.

Since implementing Sage Intacct, the year over year KPI growth has been no less than 12%, while DXD’s finance team headcount has remained the same. Penner says, “We’ve seen tremendous growth in the amount of volume that we’ve been able to process as a team. Both transaction volume and dollar volume. The number of tax returns that we’ve been able to issue with our tax team, the number of K1s that we’re able to get out for our investment partners, and it’s still just three of us in-house.”

Ferranti adds, “We’re also able to close our financial statements in a more timely fashion. My KPI for the finance team at DXD is that we’ve doubled in size and I have not doubled the accounting team. That is due to the fact that we have clean data. We’re in a system that we can build process around. It allows us to scale without adding additional overhead.”

One specific example of efficiency is expense management, where DXD has saved the equivalent of a full-time employee’s salary. “When I first started, we had maybe 7 employees, and we’re close to 30 now. Everybody has been issued a corporate spending card, so we probably have close to 400 credit card transactions every month. Manually entering those into our legacy system would have been almost a full-time job. Now, because we use a credit card processing platform that integrates directly with Intacct, we’re able to keep pace with the volume,” describes Ferranti.

“Previously, our accounts payable system was almost a triple entry, where we would have to enter invoices into our accounts payable system manually, then enter them into the accounting system. Then, because of our work as an investment fund, we utilize a fund administrator as well, and we would have to give them that information also,” describes Penner. This was cumbersome, time-consuming, and mistake-prone. With Sage Intacct, this process is completely streamlined and automated, significantly reducing manual effort and potential mistakes.

With the time saved, staff are shifting from data manipulation to strategic analysis that provides long-term value, while managing projects and entities more effectively. Ferranti explains further, “As we have added many, many more entities into the platform, we are consolidating our views. We’re able to build views that help us from a managerial perspective versus a financial reporting perspective. Again, that allows us to make better decisions as we’re periodically reviewing the data, whether it’s project-based or entity-based. We can look at our budgets to actuals on an accrual basis to see how well we’re doing both within the management company and the projects. Sage Intacct and BT Partners have helped us get the multi-level insight and perspective we need to make data-driven decisions.”

With Sage Intacct’s powerful reporting capabilities, Penner is able to focus on custom reports that deliver timely answers to the most critical questions. “The reporting functionality within Intacct is extremely robust and the BT Partners team understand the back end deeply and are able to build custom reports in a way that supports what we’re trying to do,” says Penner.

On the legacy system, staff couldn’t run project reports. They had information about where spend was on a project-to-project basis, but no systematic way for the project managers to review those reports and incorporate information into their day-to-day decision-making. Now, that has all changed.

Penner states, “Intacct has really democratized that data throughout the organization”. Now, everyone has full visibility into current and past progress, leading even some of the less tech-savvy staff to be impressed. “When they’re really marveling at some of the reporting that Intacct is able to produce, I consider that a win in our book,” commented Penner. This transparency has proved invaluable in curtailing contingency spending throughout projects, as everyone now has access to the bigger picture.

One of the biggest impacts DXD has seen was improving transparency between project managers and general contractors. Working closely with BT Partners, DXD introduced a pending item to allow their team to track possible change orders into the future. Ferranti explains, “BT Partners was integral in helping us set up that functionality within Sage Intacct, specifically, the construction module and I thought that was very awesome. It was not a normal feature that I thought we could just add. We had an idea, we floated it, and we’re using it now. So, it’s been great.”

DXD now has greater visibility into project changes, can better manage potential cost changes, and improved communication between project stakeholders.