Building computers for continuous use in the toughest work environments imaginable is no easy task. But Teguar's biggest challenges haven't come from designing and manufacturing waterproof, impact-resistant industrial- and medical-grade desktops, tablets, monitors, and handhelds for use in laboratories and hospital settings. They've come from the explosive growth they've experienced.
"We've grown every year since Teguar was founded, which was 2010," says Melissa Skalla, Controller at Teguar, "and 2022 was an explosive growth year." Not surprisingly, Teguar was on the Inc. 5000 list for five years straight as one of the Fastest Growing Private Companies in the country. And they're still growing, opening a new partner office in Taiwan a few years ago and ending last year with nearly $27 million in revenue.
Rapid expansion has also meant larger and more custom orders, which means increased reliance on vendors, many of which are international. As Skalla puts it, "We have a fair amount of inventory on hand, but we end up getting a lot of custom orders, especially in the medical space, so we have to work with them to order more custom pieces. So we're constantly paying our international supply vendors."
With all this growth comes complicated vendor management, lack of approvals, and endless manual financial processes. Or it would, if Teguar hadn't implemented BILL to streamline and automate their accounts payable and accounts receivable (AP and AR). As Skalla shares, "We use BILL for all of our bill pay. When I came here and saw that they were using it, I was very, very happy."
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Managing all this explosive growth is a tiny finance team of two. "My team is myself and an accounting clerk," shares Skalla. "I'm on my own here with no CFO. When I started, we had someone who had been here for almost two years, and she pretty much ran the whole thing along with the president. It was very impressive."
With BILL, Skalla and her accounting clerk have leaned into automation and integration to further streamline Teguar's AP process. "I would say BILL saves us at least five hours a week. And some of that is just how well it works with NetSuite too. I can put my bills with my PDF into NetSuite, and all of it goes over to BILL. I don't have to worry about re-uploading a PDF."
That 5 hours a week Skalla conservatively estimates saving allows her to make the most of her time and concentrate less on the day to day and more on planning for the future. "I'm able to do a lot more strategic work than maybe most controllers would do, or that I have in my experience anyways. So running reports and thinking about how we can do things better." And, of course, it also means more time to keep the momentum going on automating more financial processes. "One of my big pushes here is to try to start automating stuff even more than we already do. So of course, BILL helps with that."
"I would say BILL saves us at least 5 hours a week. And some of that is just how well it works with NetSuite too. I can put my bills with my PDF into NetSuite, and all of it goes over to BILL. I don't have to worry about re-uploading a PDF."
BILL helps Teguar manage its myriad of vendors, many of which are international. In Skalla’s words, "If a vendor says, 'We think you paid this,' being able to send them that payment screenshot is great. I can go right into that payment, if it's an international wire, and I can pull up those trace details. I don't have to go to my bank account separately and do that. So that's another area that saves a lot of time; the back and forth with our vendors."
Cash flow forecasting has also improved thanks to BILL's digitization and real-time reporting. Says Skalla, "Having the insights into that and being able to forecast out cash and then some of the reports that you can run on a BILL that show you what's upcoming for bills that are due, being able to pull those kind of reports and say, okay, well, this is going out next month, so we're going to be down this cash for a massive inventory payment or something.
Check chasing is also all but eliminated thanks to BILL, giving Skalla and her little finance team less busy work and more peace of mind. "As soon as I pay my bills, BILL draws it all out and the cash is gone. So I'm not sitting here chasing unreconciled checks forever. It keeps the books very clean. I write maybe one manual check a month."
As a long time user of BILL, Skalla is in her element at Teguar as she pushes for more and more financial automation to keep supporting their long-term business growth. To her mind, "AI is coming for our jobs," but it's not coming for Controllers and Accountants, it's coming for the busy work. Her strategy? "Sitting back and seeing where we can automate more things with more software (or with the software that we already have) so that we can make the day-to-day, mundane data entry-type stuff a little more automated so we can look at the numbers and strategize."
