CASE STUDY

Rise Partners Builds an Acquisition-Ready ERP Foundation with NetSuite and Caravel

August 21, 2026

Rise Partners is a national youth sports platform headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, growing through both organic expansion and acquisition. In its first year of operation, the company acquired five youth sports businesses, each running its own instance of QuickBooks.  

VP of Finance and Accounting Alex Clark, who joined Rise Partners in December 2025 after leading finance through roughly 20 acquisitions at a private equity firm, moved quickly to put a scalable system in place before the pace of acquisitions made the switch harder.  

Working with Caravel, Rise Partners signed on in January and went live on NetSuite in just 10 weeks, hitting its May 1 target date and building a multi-entity foundation designed to support every acquisition that follows. 

Challenge 

  • No single source of truth: Rise Partners was operating three separate QuickBooks instances, one for each acquired company plus its corporate entity, meaning three separate general ledgers with no consolidated view. 
  • Manual, error-prone consolidation: Producing consolidated financials meant downloading three trial balances into an Excel workbook, then repeating the process against budget figures to track performance. 
  • A workload that would only get heavier: With more acquisitions planned and a lean finance team, staying on QuickBooks meant every new deal added another disconnected system to reconcile by hand. 
  • An aggressive, self-imposed timeline: Clark wanted an ERP in place from the earliest days of the company rather than waiting for acquisitions to pile up, targeting a 10-week implementation and a May 1 go-live. 

“Our system of record is an Excel workbook, which isn’t great. We needed to change quickly,” said Alex Clark, VP of Finance and Accounting at Rise Partners. 

Solution 

Clark had used NetSuite at a previous company and brought that experience into Rise Partners’ vendor selection, but he still evaluated multiple implementation partners before choosing Caravel. The deciding factor was Caravel’s hands-on experience with multi-entity consolidation and intercompany reconciliation, the exact configuration Rise Partners needed to scale across acquisitions. 

Caravel Project Manager Sydney Seufzer led the 10-week implementation, focused on deploying NetSuite’s out-of-the-box functionality first and setting aside customization requests for later. When the Rise Partners team identified a need for a shared vendor bill enhancement to support transactions across its five entities, Caravel added it to scope without disrupting the go-live date. Caravel also coordinated directly with NetSuite to provision additional subsidiaries mid-project when Rise Partners’ entity count outpaced what had originally been set up, turning that request around in about 24 hours. 

Clark credited early, direct access to Caravel’s team, including calls that happened outside standard business hours, as a key factor in hitting the 10-week timeline, particularly during data migration from QuickBooks to NetSuite. Rise Partners also began integration conversations with its banking and expense management partners in week one of the project, work that paid off once NetSuite connections to JPMorgan Chase and Ramp were built. 

“I think there was three different calls at 5:00 PM on a Friday that Caravel hopped on the line and we talked through it live. That really enabled us to hit the 10-week timeline,” Clark said. 

Outcome 

  • A faster, more efficient close: Rise Partners has cut four to five days from its close cycle, driven largely by automated intercompany reconciliation that replaced manual GL detail downloads across entities. 
  • One system of record: Clark’s team now moves between entities inside NetSuite rather than logging in and out of separate QuickBooks instances, and connections to JPMorgan Chase and Ramp keep banking, expense, and credit card data flowing automatically. 
  • More time for analysis, less for consolidation: With consolidation and reconciliation largely automated, Clark’s team now spends its time explaining variances against budget and prior-year results rather than assembling trial balances. 
  • A repeatable part of the M&A playbook: NetSuite onboarding is now a standard, month-one step in Rise Partners’ post-acquisition process, with a clear plan for building each new entity’s opening balance sheet. 
  • A foundation built to scale: The multi-entity structure Caravel helped design has already supported five acquisitions and is built to accommodate the next wave without a system redesign. 

“I really feel we have the NetSuite setup to scale efficiently,” Clark said. “NetSuite is a huge part of our integration playbook. It’s a month one thing.” 

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