CASE STUDY

The Revel Group Builds a Multi-Entity Financial Foundation With NetSuite 

August 21, 2026

The Revel Group is a Knoxville, Tennessee-based management company overseeing a portfolio of entertainment, hospitality, residential, and commercial real estate brands across the Great Smoky Mountains region, including the amusement park Anakeesta. 

The company’s operations span 34 entities supported by a staff of about 50, with a seven-person accounting and finance team managing the books. Michael Motes, VP of Finance at Revel Group, served as executive sponsor of the company’s NetSuite implementation, overseeing finance, accounting, procurement, and IT functions across Revel Group’s operating and real estate entities.   

Challenge 

  • Fragmented Systems: as Revel Group added commercial real estate clients beyond its original amusement park entity, the company grew from QuickBooks Online alone to more than 20 entities spread across three different accounting systems, each with its own chart of accounts and billing setup.  
  • No Single Source of Truth: finance colleagues pieced together reports from multiple disconnected systems rather than working from one consistent set of data.  
  • Limited Multi-Entity Capability: Revel Group’s largest entity had a procurement process that worked well on its own, but the company had never operated in a true multi-entity environment and needed a platform built to support one.  
  • A Lean Finance Team: with only seven people across accounting and finance, Revel Group needed a system flexible enough to run day to day without a dedicated, full-time administrator.  

Solution 

Revel Group ran an evaluation process that stretched over several months, considering Microsoft Dynamics 365, Great Plains, and NetSuite. Motes had worked with Dynamics 365 at a previous company and found it capable but intensive for a team Revel Group’s size. NetSuite stood out as an established Oracle platform with more than a decade in the market, and every vendor already in Revel Group’s technology stack had integrations built for it. NetSuite’s native approach to multi-entity structure and intercompany transactions also fit what Revel Group needed more closely than the alternatives.  

“Every implementation I had been part of took longer, cost more, and did less than we expected going in. When a partner tells you they are always on time and always on budget, that is one of the worst things they can say,” said Michael Motes, VP of Finance at Revel Group.  

Selecting an implementation partner took up more of Motes’s attention than choosing the platform itself. Having been through multiple prior ERP and warehouse management system rollouts, he was wary of partners who promised flawless timelines. Caravel’s direct feedback and detailed project map gave him the confidence that the team would tell him the truth about what the project would take, not just what he wanted to hear.  

Once implementation began, Revel Group and Caravel focused first on financials and procure-to-pay. Anakeesta, the company’s largest and most established entity, already had a procurement process that worked, but it could not extend across multiple entities in its existing software. Caravel’s implementation team worked through several options before identifying a piece of software Revel Group had not previously considered, and the company paused for a month or two right before year-end close to get it integrated and stood up properly, a decision Motes credits as critical to getting everyone on board with the new tool.  

Data migration proved to be one of the most time-consuming parts of the project. Revel Group pulled trial balances from all 34 entities, none of which shared a common chart of accounts, and worked with Caravel to condense and map them into a single, standardized structure. The company committed a portion of its team’s time to the effort for close to two months, prioritizing which entities to bring in clean first while the rest moved through verification in the background.  

Outcome 

  • Faster Close: standardizing processes across Revel Group’s real estate entities and working from a preset list of reports has significantly shortened the company’s close process.  
  • Broader Visibility: instead of logging into three separate systems to check on individual entities, the finance team can now run reports across all of them at once and start variance analysis immediately.  
  • Faster Ramp-Up Than Expected: Revel Group planned for a difficult adjustment period after go-live, but the system was already outperforming the company’s prior setup within the first month and a half.  
  • Quick Onboarding for New Colleagues: recently hired finance colleagues have been able to get up to speed on NetSuite in a matter of weeks.  

“Our close process has completely shrunk. We can now run fifteen different P&Ls in one sitting and start variance analysis right away, instead of logging into three different systems and piecing it together,” Motes said. “We expected ninety days of pain after go-live. By day forty-five, everything was already running faster than before.”  

With its financial foundation in place, Revel Group is now turning to what Motes calls phase two: automating more of its day-to-day processes. Many of the company’s entries still rely on CSV uploads, so the team is working with Caravel to set up SFTP connections, connect NetSuite to its inventory system, and make better use of statistical journal entries.  

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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