CASE STUDY
Auterion Unifies Nine Global Entities on One Financial Platform With NetSuite
August 21, 2026
Auterion builds the operating system powering unmanned aviation systems, including drones, autonomous boats, and other autonomous vehicles, for customers around the world. The company operates across nine legal entities spanning multiple countries, currencies, and languages. Nicole Fiore, VP Corporate Controller at Auterion, led the company’s ERP selection and implementation with NetSuite and Caravel, overseeing accounting, treasury, and risk management across the global organization.
Challenge
- Four Disconnected ERPs: Auterion ran on four separate systems, one each in Germany, Switzerland, and Ukraine, plus QuickBooks in the United States, with no way to consolidate results without exporting everything to Excel.
- Complex Statutory Requirements: each entity carried its own jurisdictional reporting obligations, local currencies, and languages, making intercompany eliminations and multi-entity consolidation difficult to manage consistently.
- No Real-Time Visibility: closing the books required manually pulling data from four systems and reconciling foreign exchange rates by hand, delaying financials by weeks rather than days.
- A Scale-Up Growth Trajectory: Auterion needed a platform that could support its current nine entities as well as the additional entities and jurisdictions it planned to launch in the years ahead.
Solution
Auterion evaluated NetSuite, Microsoft Dynamics 365, and Sage Intacct. Fiore had previously worked with Intacct, SAP, and NetSuite at other companies, and NetSuite’s intercompany eliminations, local book reporting, and consolidation flexibility stood out, particularly for Auterion’s structure, in which subsidiaries roll up into a U.S. entity, then a European entity, and back into a U.S. entity again. Auterion issued a formal RFP built around its core requirements: multi-entity and multi-currency support, with the flexibility to preserve historical foreign exchange rates on data brought over from legacy systems while pulling live daily rates going forward.
“The particular implementation specialist on our team was not only technical in NetSuite, they also had a CPA or chartered accountancy background, so they understood the system side and the accounting side. When I would try to talk accounting, our project manager was giving us options like SuiteTax versus Avalara and explaining why, so I didn’t have to do the ground-up research myself,” said Nicole Fiore, VP Corporate Controller at Auterion.
Implementation surfaced changes Auterion had not fully scoped at the outset. The team originally planned to use SuiteTax, embedded directly in NetSuite, but testing showed Avalara was a better fit; Caravel completed the change within a week without disrupting other workstreams. Separately, Auterion had scoped a warehouse management system around a California warehouse that the company decided to shut down before go-live, prompting the team to redesign the inventory model generically rather than around a specific location, which also set up the architecture for future locations and products. As Auterion’s product line evolved mid-project to include bundled products with different delivery milestones, Caravel brought in a revenue recognition specialist to help configure the advanced revenue module and update Auterion’s revenue model.
Data migration carried its own complexity: source data was in German, and the team member managing it was not a native GAAP practitioner, requiring a careful translation from IFRS to GAAP alongside the language shift. Auterion assigned a single file owner to manage chart of account mapping and require that all changes route through one person, preventing the version conflicts that come from multiple people editing a shared mapping file independently. The team also ran parallel checks in sandbox, tying total assets and liabilities back to source systems and documenting the rationale for every remapping decision to preserve an audit trail.
Auterion’s original six-month timeline proved aggressive once the team accounted for the realities of operating as a scale-up mid-fundraise. Around month five, Fiore made the call to extend the project by 60 days to get through a quarter-end close and board meeting before finalizing configuration.
“Talking with Caravel, it was really beneficial that the resources stayed consistent from the original six months and we were able to extend another two months. Whatever you think makes sense on paper, you have to factor in the macro activities happening across the company,” Fiore said.
Outcome
- Real-Time, Multi-Entity Financials: Auterion now closes the books across all nine entities day by day rather than waiting weeks to consolidate results from separate systems.
- Single Source of Truth: finance no longer relies on Excel to consolidate, eliminate, and apply foreign exchange rates across entities; NetSuite handles local book and U.S. GAAP reporting side by side.
- Scalable Architecture: the generalized warehouse and inventory setup means Auterion can bring new locations and products online without rebuilding the system from scratch.
- A Realistic Benchmark for Success: Fiore considers hitting 80 to 85 percent of the original project design a strong outcome, with the flexibility to adjust the rest as the business changes.
“If everyone owns the data, then no one owns the data,” Fiore said. “Assigning one person to be responsible for the mapping file and hold everyone accountable was a key change for us.”
Fiore also credits Caravel’s broader client network for surfacing practices Auterion would not have found on its own, with the implementation team flagging approaches used on other multinational NetSuite projects throughout the engagement.
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.