Invoice local, report global

The Board of Innovation story

Board of Innovation (or BOI in short) is a global independent innovation firm that helps the world’s leading enterprises make bigger moves, design new experiences, and create new businesses.

Being a truly global business, BOI has teams all over the world in hubs like Singapore, Shanghai, Hanoi, New York, Antwerp, São Paulo, Mexico City, Amsterdam, Cape Town, London, and more

“Innovation is not just our business, it’s our ethos. At Board of Innovation, we are more than a consultancy agency – we are a global collective of strategists, designers, and entrepreneurs, united with the world’s most ambitious businesses to drive impactful change.”

The challenge; control over global projects, diverse resource pools, local invoicing and consolidated reporting

Even innovators must evolve. Board of Innovation recognised the limitations of their existing manual reporting systems in Excel and Google Sheets.

As their operations expanded, they needed a centralised hub for crucial insights, from revenue to project profitability, accessible across all entities and operating countries effortlessly.

The timing was ripe for change. BOI’s previous setup was cumbersome, lacked scalability, and dispersed crucial information across disparate tools and sheets.

When their old licences expired, BOI seized the opportunity to act, embarking on a quest for a future-proof solution that would empower them to manage the company more effectively.

“Enter VOGSY,” – remarks Anton Blockx, Controller at BOI - “a beacon of promise in the realm of professional services automation. Among a sea of options, VOGSY stood out as the only tool capable of fulfilling our diverse needs.“

Requirements for a global services ERP

The company needed a central platform that was able to handle the entire project life cycle, from first quotation through to invoicing. Along the way, tracking all crucial project indicators around timelines, budgets, and margins.

Being a global business, BOI needed the platform to handle multiple entities in different countries, each with their own local currency. Whilst automatically also translating all financials to the company’s base currency.

A single resource pool, irrespective of the consultants’ location was key as well. With employee cost and sales rates expressed in local currency as well as automatically translating those to the project currency of wherever the project was sold.

Competitors and decision rationale

Board of Innovation evaluated Kantata, Certinia, Productive, Teamleader, and ProjectorPSA (BigTime). The choice for VOGSY was quite evident reasonably quickly;

“From accommodating our multi-entity structure and handling foreign currency applications to seamless accounting integrations and robust reporting capabilities, VOGSY exceeded our expectations.”

What truly set VOGSY apart was its intuitive and easy interface, facilitating a smooth onboarding process for our entire organisation.

The choice for VOGSY was based on it’s comprehensive fit for BOI;

• Enterprise-grade, robust, made-for-purpose software

• Native multi-entity, multi-country, multi-currency capabilities

• Local (per country/project) reporting as well as consolidated at the group level

• Ability to integrate with multiple billing tools in different countries concurrently

• Quick time to value, competitive pricing, fast to learn, easy to onboard and maintain

• Vendor quality; flexibility, experience, speed, ease of doing business

The result; One platform for multiple countries, multiple currencies, with one resource pool

Blockx, reflecting on the onboarding journey; “we can proudly affirm that our collaboration with VOGSY has been transformative. VOGSY suits our global company set up, achieving a state that represents a quantum leap for our business.”

Aquene MacPolin, Global Head of People & Operations adds:

"Today, our operations hum with efficiency, thanks to VOGSY’s automation prowess. From project profitability to revenue recognition and billability, our reporting is not just streamlined – it’s instantaneous."

Current and future revenue and margins can be forecasted and tracked for each project, operating company, region as well as for the entire company.

Consolidated reporting automatically translates various project and operating company currencies to the base currency at HQ level.

Resourcing and hiring decisions are based on up-to-date insights into resource availability, skills, as well as costs - no matter what location and currency the employee is contracted in.

MacPolin concludes; “As we look to the future, we envision continued growth and innovation, fortified by our partnership with VOGSY. Together, we’re poised to conquer new horizons and redefine what’s possible in the realm of consultancy and beyond.”