CASE STUDY
Anaqua Strengthens Revenue Management With NetSuite’s Advanced Revenue Management Module
August 21, 2026
Anaqua develops software that helps clients manage and protect their patent and trademark portfolios, supporting renewals and cross-functional intellectual property decisions for a global customer base of nearly nine hundred employees. Ryan Kovacs, Associate Director of Revenue Operations at Anaqua, has 13 years of corporate accounting experience and has led the company’s revenue operations group for the past three years, including its transition from a perpetual license model to a hosted software as a service model over the last decade and its work with Caravel to optimize NetSuite’s Advanced Revenue Management module.
Challenge
- A Shifting Revenue Model: Anaqua’s move from perpetual licenses to a hosted software as a service model introduced financial and revenue recognition complexities that its existing systems were not built to handle.
- Acquisitions Outside the Core System: years of acquiring smaller software companies had left much of Anaqua’s bookkeeping and technical accounting work outside its formal system, even after the company adopted NetSuite.
- Manual, Unreliable Reporting: Anaqua relied on heavy, manual data files to manage reporting, a process that delayed the month-end close, created inefficiencies, and left the revenue operations team unable to fully trust its own data.
- Complex, High-Volume Revenue Data: with thousands of customers generating unique and dynamic revenue streams, Anaqua needed a more sophisticated way to manage revenue allocation than its existing spreadsheet-based workbooks.
Solution
Already running on NetSuite, Anaqua determined that implementing NetSuite’s Advanced Revenue Management module, known as ARM, would address its reporting gaps and give the revenue operations team a reliable, scalable way to manage its complex revenue streams. The company needed a partner who could steer that process from both a data and a functionality standpoint.
Anaqua evaluated its options, including NetSuite’s own internal implementation team, before selecting Caravel. The company felt NetSuite’s internal consultants, spread across many outsourced teams, would not provide the dedicated attention the project required, while Caravel offered a more personal, fully committed partnership.
“We were looking for more of a personal touch. We were looking for someone that was going to dedicate their full team and their full resources to working with us and making sure we were on the right track and that we understood everything that went into the implementation,” Kovacs said.
Caravel built a clear plan with defined milestones and a targeted start date, giving Anaqua confidence in the project’s timeline from the outset. That confidence was tested when the team encountered a bug tied to a NetSuite issue rather than a Caravel one, requiring an escalation to NetSuite’s level three support.
“I remember Caravel calling them on our behalf at eleven at night just trying to make sure the ticket could get resolved. We just felt really confident that the go-live target would be achieved, and that even if there were any delays or hiccups, we would be really well supported in that,” Kovacs said.
Outcome
Anaqua’s ARM implementation went live smoothly, with the base rule sets performing as intended. Once the initial project was complete, Anaqua returned to Caravel for a follow-on optimization effort focused on more intricate fair value rule sets tied to how the company recognizes revenue under software as a service accounting rules and timing requirements.
Caravel helped Anaqua build new scripts and rule sets from the ground up, refining the review process behind its use of ARM and making it more efficient than the original implementation. The engagement also deepened Anaqua’s own understanding of the module’s capabilities.
“We were really pleased to know that not only could Caravel support us in other initiatives, but they also helped us understand the module better than we did before,” Kovacs said. “There are a lot of things that we learned in the post-go-live process that I do not think we would have learned otherwise.”
About Caravel
Caravel has served more than 1,000 clients over the past decade, providing a comprehensive range of services, including accounting, strategy, business process, and technology selection. Caravel is proud to be part of the technology services group of BPM LLP, a top 40 accounting and advisory firm.