CASE STUDY
InSource Solutions Modernizes Revenue Management and Builds a Custom NetSuite Platform With Caravel
September 21, 2026
InSource Solutions is an employee-owned value-added reseller that helps industrial companies, including beer and liquor manufacturers, automotive producers, and paper and pulp operations, digitize their manufacturing processes from incoming warehouse to outgoing warehouse. Thomas Barczak, Chief Information Officer and a co-founder of the company, has spent nearly 30 years at InSource across sales, marketing, and IT roles, and has guided the company’s NetSuite journey since its original 2014 implementation, including two projects with Caravel.
Challenge
- A Business Model Shift Toward Subscriptions: as InSource evolved from a hardware and software distributor into a subscription-based business, deferred revenue grew from less than five percent of the company’s business to 80 percent, requiring a fundamentally different approach to revenue management under ASC 606.
- A Sunsetting Contract Module: the NetSuite contract renewals module InSource implemented in 2014 was being phased out in favor of a replacement product that did not meet the company’s needs, leaving a gap that had to be filled.
- Manual, Time-Intensive Revenue Reporting: calculating annual recurring revenue and monthly recurring revenue across more than 1,000 subscriptions and 3,000 subscription line items took the company’s president several hours each month, limiting how often leadership could review the numbers.
- Disconnected Systems & Manual Processes: InSource had historically relied on multiple disconnected applications, moving data manually between them and stitching together reporting with what Barczak described as digital breadcrumbs, a process that was slow and error-prone.
Solution
InSource partnered with Caravel on two distinct projects. The first was an Advanced Revenue Management, or ARM, implementation to bring the company’s subscription and services revenue into compliance with ASC 606 while automating what had previously been a largely manual process. Caravel took deliberate steps to mitigate the risk of implementing ARM inside a live production system, allowing the rollout to proceed smoothly.
The second project was a fully custom build rather than an off-the-shelf configuration. Caravel worked with InSource to translate the company’s specific requirements, including a custom pre-opportunity inquiry system, subscription automation, client success plans, and client effort and net promoter scoring, into a working technical solution, extending capabilities across the NetSuite platform that InSource had been building on for a decade.
“We found you to be very fair as we were working through all this stuff, and I felt like it was a very rewarding experience working with your smart people,” Barczak said. Barczak described the back-and-forth nature of the custom project as a productive exercise in pushing each other to challenge assumptions rather than settle for the first solution proposed, calling out how quickly the Caravel team grasped InSource’s business and translated it into clear, actionable requirements.
Outcome
With subscription and revenue management now automated inside NetSuite, InSource manages its entire subscription book, more than 1,000 active subscriptions, with a single person. The company’s president, who once spent hours each month manually calculating annual and monthly recurring revenue, can now view accurate, timely figures on demand. “It’s like the tire monitor on your car. Before, you had to stop, pull off the road, and measure your tires. Now you hit the little dial and it tells you your pressure immediately, and if it is out of the norm, it alerts you,” Barczak said.
InSource also built out automated retention monitoring and combined it with client effort and net promoter scoring captured directly in NetSuite, giving the company earlier visibility into which subscriptions are at risk of not renewing and where it can intervene to demonstrate more value to clients before a renewal decision is even made. “Our client experience runs above a score of 70, and that is not a percentage, that is a score. In the world of retail, companies like Nordstrom have a score of 70, and we are really proud of that,” Barczak said.
Beyond the two Caravel projects, InSource has continued to extend its use of the platform, most recently launching quote management to give sales support leadership real-time visibility into quoting workload and stage, with plans underway to bring true Gantt-chart project management and automated, usage-based billing to its managed services business.
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.