CASE STUDY

$1 Million Recovered: How Gachina Fixed Its Accounts Receivable Problem

September 23, 2026

Gachina Landscape Management is a family-owned commercial landscaping company that has served clients across the greater San Francisco Bay Area for 35 years, delivering plant health care, water management, and regenerative landscape solutions to commercial properties and high-end estates. Dan Wolf, IT Director at Gachina Landscape Management, has led the company’s technology strategy for the past seven years and partnered with Caravel on its move to NetSuite.

Challenge

  • A Sunsetting Core System: Gachina ran its accounting on Microsoft Great Plains, and the platform was already being phased out when Wolf joined the company, with Microsoft steering customers toward Dynamics instead.
  • A Manual, Time-Intensive Budget Process: Building the annual budget in Excel required flying in a high-level consultant for roughly two weeks each year, and the result was still a static, error-prone budget that grew outdated almost as soon as it was finished.
  • High Accounts Receivable Aging: Collections relied on manual follow-up rather than a structured process, leaving Gachina with significant outstanding balances and no automated way to keep clients current.
  • Disconnected Purchase Order & Expense Processes: Gachina lacked a formal purchase order workflow and expense-matching process, and the company wanted to move away from paper-based operations.

Solution

Gachina evaluated Microsoft Dynamics 365, Sage, Acumatica, and NetSuite before selecting NetSuite with Caravel as its implementation partner. Dynamics was still an immature product for the company’s needs at the time, and Acumatica, while already integrated with Gachina’s Aspire job-costing and operational CRM system, felt as restrictive as Great Plains. Sage advanced further in the process, running its own implementation team through the evaluation alongside Caravel, but Gachina’s confidence in Caravel’s team ultimately set NetSuite apart. “Caravel impressed us with their capabilities and knowledge, and their ability to execute on what they were saying. We did not have that same confidence level with Sage,” Wolf said.

Caravel recommended two modules that became central to the rollout: a Dunning module to automate collections, and NetSuite Planning and Budgeting, built on the Hyperion platform NetSuite had acquired, giving Gachina a single integrated system rather than a separate budgeting tool. Caravel also assigned a dedicated integration specialist who worked with Gachina’s in-house developer to connect NetSuite with Aspire and ADP through Jitterbit’s Harmony middleware platform, an integration Gachina would not have been able to design on its own without NetSuite-specific expertise. Caravel additionally staffed the project with a project manager who brought controller-level accounting experience, helping Gachina modernize purchase order and expense workflows it had not previously thought through.

“Having someone with real-world business experience as a controller allowed us to understand how we could use NetSuite and take it to the next level in our business processes,” Wolf said. The rollout still took real effort. Wolf’s three-person team, made up of himself, Gachina’s controller, and an in-house developer, worked as many as 15 to 17 hour days as the project approached data migration, and the company still went live on schedule. “It is a heavy lift, but making sure you have the right implementation team is critical to any successful ERP implementation,” Wolf said.

Outcome

  • Reduced Accounts Receivable Aging by Over $1 Million: The Dunning module automates collection reminders at 15, 45, and 90 days, sending increasingly direct notices as invoices age. Gachina reduced its AR aging by more than $1 million, cash the company would otherwise have needed a full-time hire to collect.
  • Real-Time Planning & Budgeting: NetSuite Planning and Budgeting replaced Gachina’s static, spreadsheet-driven process with real-time visibility into costs, giving Wolf the ability to model different scenarios throughout the month rather than waiting on a single annual cycle.
  • More Structured Purchase Order & Expense Workflows: New purchase order and expense workflows, including matching, brought discipline to processes Gachina had not previously formalized, supporting the company’s move toward paperless operations.
  • A Continued Partnership: Caravel implemented Gachina’s NetSuite system four to five years ago and has continued supporting the company ever since, including bringing in a NetSuite Planning and Budgeting specialist each year to help guide Gachina’s annual budgeting cycle.

Wolf, who has led ERP implementations at other companies over his career, including on Oracle, points to the NetSuite and Caravel rollout as a standout. “This is probably one of the smoothest ERP implementations I have been through. I have been through Oracle and a variety of other ERP implementations over my career, and this was the smoothest,” Wolf said. Gachina is now evaluating a payment gateway, recommended by Caravel, that would let clients pay invoices directly through a link generated from NetSuite, further streamlining the collections process the Dunning module already improved.

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.

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