CASE STUDY
Rothschild Wealth Partners Gains Real-Time Financial Clarity with NetSuite and Caravel
August 21, 2026
Rothschild Wealth Partners has grown from a small asset management shop near Joliet, Illinois, into a firm managing roughly $7 billion for high-net-worth individuals, 401(k) plans, and institutional clients. CFO Curtis Ellergodt has been with the company for nearly 10 years, joining as employee number six. A merger about a year and a half ago and continued high growth, backed by family office capital, pushed Rothschild’s finance operations past what its patchwork of legacy systems could support.
Challenge
Rothschild ran several entities on QuickBooks, a platform with no straightforward consolidation tool. That meant combining numbers across entities happened manually in Excel. The company Rothschild merged with a year and a half prior added another layer of complexity: it relied on a dated, legacy Sage-supported accounting product, so Rothschild’s team was doing even more reconciliation work outside any system of record.
“I did a presentation about a year ago, and part of it was a snippet of one of our folders from about two years ago. There were like 40 different versions of the same Excel file, with just a bunch of different what-ifs,” Ellergodt said.
The setup worked, but only barely. It was slow to update, prone to errors, and offered little real insight for decision-making. As Rothschild began answering to a board and fielding more detailed questions from its banking relationships, the firm needed software built to support its current size and its growth plans, including a goal to double in a few years.
Solution
Rothschild moved quickly once it began evaluating ERP options, landing on NetSuite after finding a team that understood the firm’s needs, and then some. Ellergodt said the difference between vendors came down to whether people understood his industry rather than simply confirming a feature existed.
“We talked with a few other vendors, both in terms of ERP as well as implementation specialists, and both NetSuite as well as Caravel I felt were far superior at being able to answer questions for us, provide questions that we weren’t even thinking about, and help us think through what it would look like,” Ellergodt said.
That distinction showed up early. Caravel invested significant time upfront to understand Rothschild’s business processes in detail, going beyond checkbox demonstrations to show how the software would function inside Rothschild’s operations. Data migration followed a two-staged approach: Rothschild’s original QuickBooks data was in solid shape and migrated with relative ease, while the records from the merged company’s legacy system needed considerably more cleanup than anticipated.
The project stayed on pace throughout, with clear expectations set upfront about what would happen and when. Rothschild targeted a January 1 go-live and hit it, with the Caravel team taking on much of the heavy lifting so Rothschild’s own point person could stay focused on her day job while still shaping the outcome.
Outcome
Since going live, Rothschild has consolidated its financial close process and gained real-time visibility into its numbers. As an SEC-regulated firm required to undergo a full financial statement audit, Rothschild has seen auditors take notice of the improvement.
“I sleep much better at night for starters,” Ellergodt said. “Even the auditors are complimenting us on how much smoother this has been. We’re able to provide them useful data, whereas in the past it wasn’t nearly as clean.”
Rothschild’s finance team now uses the NetSuite planning and budgeting tool for consolidations and is exploring NetSuite’s data warehouse capabilities to support commission calculations. The firm currently consolidates five entities up through its holding company, with a sixth structured as a separate C corp for regulatory purposes, and is preparing to add another entity following a pending acquisition.
“You always hope a new vendor has all the answers and can solve all your pain points. Rarely does that actually happen,” Ellergodt said. “In this instance, without a doubt, I can say that it did.”