Construction Case Study: DeNova Homes
At Velixo, we thrive on partnering with organizations that are committed to excellence and innovation in their fields. It was a privilege to sit down with Brandon LaRocco, Controller at DeNova Homes, to discuss their transformative experience with Velixo and Sage Intacct.
Customer overview
- Company: DeNova Homes
- Location: San Francisco Bay Area, USA
- Operations: California, USA
- Industry: Construction, Real Estate Development
- ERP System: Sage Intacct
- # of Velixo Designers: 2
- Customer since: February 2024
About DeNova Homes
For 30 years, DeNova Homes has earned a reputation as one of the most respected homebuilders in California. Their approach is simple—as a private, family-owned builder, they address each community individually, incorporate the unique characteristics of the surrounding area and commit to build only the very best. These guiding principles have been recognized numerous times by the Building Industry Association through various awards, including the prestigious Builder of the Year award. Perhaps most rewarding of all though are the hundreds of satisfied homeowners who have confirmed DeNova Homes’ standard of quality, lifestyle, and value.
DeNova Homes’ primary commitment is to the lifestyle their homeowners enjoy when they move into a DeNova home. Building community is what they do, whether it is creating the ultimate environment for a dream lifestyle, building homeless shelters with HomeAid Northern California, or supporting the American Red Cross, Volunteers of America, the American Cancer Society, and many other local organizations. DeNova Homes is there for the neighborhoods in which they build.
Meet Brandon
Brandon LaRocco is the Controller at DeNova Homes, reporting to the CFO. He oversees financial reporting, project costing, and budget management. A seasoned finance professional, Brandon is passionate about leveraging technology to streamline processes and enhance productivity within the organization.
Key Challenges
In March 2023, DeNova Homes transitioned from Sage 100 to Sage Intacct. While working with Sage 100, their team often found themselves having to build very customized reports in Sage 100 in order to have the necessary data to build, budget and construct their cash flow projections. This complex and tedious process prompted the migration to Sage Intacct, with the aim of streamlining their reporting and alleviating pain points.
However, despite the transition, DeNova Homes encountered several challenges with their financial reporting and project management processes in Sage Intacct:
- Migration of Existing Excel Reports: The team relies heavily on Excel for reporting, budgeting, and forecasting, maintaining decades’ worth of project and financial data in existing spreadsheets. Transferring this extensive repository of reports and data to Sage Intacct presented a considerable challenge.
- Reporting Limitations: Sage Intacct reports were not easily able to be formatted in the way the business required. There were also limitations around having multiple dimensions in reports, requiring manual labor and sometimes resulting in data mismatches.
- Inefficient Report Distribution: Multiple departments depend on the reports generated by Brandon’s team. However, distributing these reports required him to manually export each report and send them out, leading to inefficiencies and inaccuracies in the process.
"The reports that we could pull out of Sage Intacct were not exactly meeting the needs that we had, that’s where we found our need for Velixo.”
The Velixo Difference
Working with Velixo, DeNova Homes discovered an array of functionalities that addressed their challenges head-on while improving their reporting and automation efficiency:
- Dynamic Reporting with Excel: DeNova Homes manages numerous reports involving substantial dollar amounts across multiple concurrent projects, some of which date back over a decade. Velixo enables seamless integration of these reports and data, allowing the team to analyze them efficiently and effectively for budgeting and cash flow purposes, eliminating all manual labor requirements.
- Real-Time Data: Thanks to Velixo’s data pull and push capabilities with Sage Intacct, Brandon’s team only had to build their reports once and they became connected and refreshable, which significantly saved time and effort.
- Simple Monthly Job Cost Updates: Each month, Brandon updates the job costs for all DeNova Homes projects along with their master budget workbook. However, due to limitations in Sage Intacct, he struggled to integrate the reports into his master budget as desired. Velixo provided the necessary support, enabling Brandon’s team to achieve the seamless integration they needed.
- Streamlined Report Distribution: Velixo empowered Brandon to effortlessly distribute reports as offline snapshots directly through Excel to stakeholders in the click of a button. This process ensures data security by allowing stakeholders to view only the information relevant to their access level. Now, Brandon uses Velixo for all distribution needs including the monthly job costs for bank draws. “It’s just an easy and reliable way to pull the data quickly and accurately.”
- Fast and Simple Refresh Capabilities: “It’s a huge time saver for me!” Brandon often relies on separate workbooks or multiple sheets in a workbook to analyze his data. Refreshing a specific sheet or workbook and getting real-time data when many workbooks are open is a game changer for Brandon.
- Exceptional Customer Service: “One thing I love about you guys is that I have gotten such great responses from customer service and the tech support staff. The customer service that Velixo offers is exceptional.” Brandon pointed out that being able to speak to support 1:1 anytime is a game changer. He is confident that any issues he may come across would be resolved quickly and efficiently with Velixo.
"Typically, when I go through monthly updates for all the projects and budgets, it would take me roughly 1 week. Now, I can do it in a single day! All I have to do is refresh the workbook. As long as I have my dates right, I have everything in the blink of an eye!”
Favorite features
Brandon indicated his favorite feature among all features that he likes was simply the Refresh button providing a real-time data experience. He also praised Velixo for implementing one of his ideas to introduce a way to only refresh specific sheets of a workbook to significantly reduce the refresh time.
What’s next for DeNova Homes?
Looking ahead, DeNova Homes is excited to review all the templates of the Velixo for Sage Intacct Construction solution. Brandon is eager to explore how they could enhance efficiency and reduce the time and complexity associated with creating reports from scratch.
“Now that you gave us the new refresh option, it has gotten even faster and better. I would probably say I save 80% of my time on the monthly updates for all projects and budgets now compared to before.”