Lumio revolutionizes financial management and automates AR processes

About

Lumio, a company based in Lehi, Utah, specializes in manufacturing solar panels for residential use. With a mission to empower individuals with personalized power solutions, they primarily emphasize solar power systems for single-family homes. Additionally, Lumio offers a range of power banks and portable solar generators to meet various energy needs.

Lumio was founded in 2020 and is one of the top five residential solar power providers in the United States.

Background

In December 2021, Lumio acquired four solar installation companies at once. Most of these organizations only had sales and/or basic project management systems in place, with no HR, finance, or legal software in their tech stacks.

Lumio’s eventual goal was to build out world-class, IPO-ready versions of these key back office systems and robust procedures to go with them. To start, all of the acquired companies would need their customer, sales, financial, and IT data to go into the same systems and to follow the same policies and processes.

Matthew Morrill, our Assistant Controller, joined the Lumio team six weeks before all of the acquisitions. Consequently, one of his first objectives was establishing efficient accounting processes for companies that had previously operated without them.

The challenge

Most of the acquired companies didn’t have an ERP or CRM. The Lumio team had to get their data into Salesforce, clean up the resulting Salesforce data, and standardize their sales processes to have reliable metrics. They also needed to get their NetSuite instance up and running and connect it to all of their other systems.

Morrill quickly became responsible for managing significant tasks. He initiated Quickbooks for basic bookkeeping while collaborating with a partner to integrate NetSuite. It was only a short time before he discovered that Celigo was the essential tool linking all their systems. Eager to take charge of data flow creation himself rather than relying on IT for every issue, he requested access from the implementation team so he could build integrations himself.

Morrill began exploring the Celigo sandbox, familiarizing himself with the platform. Despite lacking extensive coding knowledge or technical expertise as a CPA, he discovered Celigo was remarkably user-friendly. Morrill quickly learned how to establish data filtering, effortlessly aligning attributes across platforms. This empowered him to adopt a self-service approach, creating accounts and managing other tasks.

“I didn’t have to wait for some IT developer to make a change in Salesforce. I could make changes myself. So easy, even a financial controller can do it.”

The solution

When it was time to enter large amounts of accounts receivable data into NetSuite and Salesforce, Morrill used his recently acquired integration skills.

He set up webhook listeners to successfully import the huge amount of accounts receivable data, then sort and run through different jobs depending on a combination of different field attributes. While it was helpful that he did know some code, he didn’t need to be an expert to get the job done.

“If you can just establish the connectors successfully, it’s built out pretty simply, so you don’t need a ton of technical knowledge,” he says.

“Thanks to its ability to seamlessly handle large amounts of data between Salesforce and Netsuite, Celigo played a crucial role in streamlining the AR process.”

Bottom line

Each year, Lumio completes tens of thousands of solar panel installations and deals with an even larger number of customer records. Before the team implemented NetSuite, Salesforce, and Celigo, customer data, sales invoices, and other processes were managed via spreadsheets.

Each month, reconciliation used to take an entire week. With Celigo, however, all of this information flows through their systems automatically.

“We’re saving 96 hours a month in manual processes,” says Morrill. “Before Celigo, three accountants spent eight hours a day, four days each month during month-end close managing data entry tasks and information transfers that are now automated.”

Reconciliation now only takes a day, and the company is planning to send even more traffic through Celigo in the future.

According to Morrill, good accounting is three things: timely, accurate, and actionable. “Celigo really helps with the first two.” he says. “But it goes beyond time-saving and cost-cutting. Once I realized Celigo’s flexible capabilities, I began looking at our various systems with a fresh perspective. I’m consistently identifying more opportunities to improve data flow across our different solutions.”