CASE STUDY
How Intel 471 Went from Manual Consolidations to a 4-Day Close
September 23, 2026
Intel 471 provides cyber crime intelligence to security teams around the world, with roughly 230 employees spread across 35 countries and headquarters in Texas. When the company was acquired by private equity in 2021, its finance systems needed to catch up fast to new reporting demands.
Challenge
Before the acquisition, Intel 471’s finance operations were split across a small online platform called Xero for its U.S. entity, with a third party managing its international subsidiaries. There was no consolidated system, so the two-person finance team lived in Excel to pull consolidations together. Revenue recognition, amortization, and allocations were all handled manually, and every report had to be built from scratch.
The private equity acquisition changed the stakes overnight. New sponsors required far more detailed reporting and more ways to slice the data than the existing patchwork of systems could support.
“When I came on board, we had everything pretty spread out, so we lived in Excel for consolidations, which made all of our processes very manual because we had limited system capabilities,” said Allison Groves, Vice President of Accounting and Financial Operations at Intel 471.
Solution
With backing from its private equity sponsors, Intel 471 moved quickly to select a cloud-based ERP that could support a fully distributed team, ultimately choosing NetSuite over Sage Intacct for its ease of use. The company brought in Caravel as its implementation partner to help a lean internal team, largely Groves working alongside her CFO, get the project across the finish line. The timing added complexity: Intel 471 implemented Salesforce at the same time, making system-to-system connectivity a priority from day one.
The team took a single-phase approach but broke the work into disciplined chunks, spending about a month documenting requirements in extreme detail before touching the system. Two years of historical data were loaded and vetted, along with current-year journal entries, ahead of a final cutover. From design through go-live, the entire project took about 17 weeks.
Design decisions were guided by the reporting Intel 471’s private equity sponsors required, working backward from those outputs to determine which modules and integrations made sense. The company integrated Salesforce, banking, card systems, and expense reporting into NetSuite, while deliberately keeping its HRIS system separate due to the complexity of country-specific leave requirements. Because NetSuite’s native functionality covered most needs, the team added only a handful of custom fields to support additional reporting attributes.
“The most important part of this was getting the design right up front. We knew we had a lot of reporting requirements coming in, especially with private equity ownership, so we really focused on making sure we had all the right modules to provide the cuts of data our sponsors require,” Groves said.
Outcome
Intel 471 now runs a four-day close for its U.S. entity and a five-day close across its international entities, a significant improvement over the manual, Excel-driven process that preceded it. The company also moved its expense reporting into its card program for tighter NetSuite integration, and added Sligo as a connector between Salesforce and NetSuite to streamline its order-to-cash process.
This year, Intel 471 layered in Adaptive Insights for forecasting, with a direct NetSuite integration that Groves said has transformed the company’s board reporting process. Looking ahead, the team plans to automate its commission tracking system, which is still handled manually. Reflecting on the experience, Groves credited the disciplined, reporting-first design approach with keeping a small team from being overwhelmed.
“Having an idea of your end goal and working backward from that to the design really changes everything. If we didn’t have that guidance from the reporting we were shooting for, we may have designed things differently and run into different roadblocks,” Groves said. She also pointed to Caravel’s role in making the project feasible with limited internal headcount. “I would not have been able to do any of this if it wasn’t for Caravel. They took what I needed and translated that into what we needed to do to design the system in the right way,” Groves said.