How Rhodes Companies unified 9 entities and cut accounting time by 50% with Intuit Enterprise Suite

Managing a multi-entity education portfolio

Rhodes Companies serves as the family office for a diverse portfolio of businesses, with a primary focus in the education space. Among nine distinct entities, their flagship operation, Rhodes Graduation Services, stands as the nation’s largest Jostens representative. Rhodes’ day-to-day reality is complex, spanning distinct lines of business ranging from real estate and promotional products to a boutique branding agency.

The limits of a disparate SMB tech stack

As Rhodes Companies expanded, spinning up and acquiring new businesses every year, their financial tools struggled to keep pace. Using QuickBooks Online, the organization had nine siloed sets of books and no ability to consolidate financials.

CFO Caleb McDaniels described financial operations that were continuously held back by manual friction. Consolidating financials required the team to “pull down 9 different sets of information, and then manually create all of our reporting,” a process that hindered the team’s ability to focus on growth. Simple tasks became time sinks. McDaniels noted that “it would take half a day to manually book intercompany entries and reconcile balance sheets across every entity.”

Furthermore, the business lacked sophisticated controls and insights. Nearly 100% of vendors were receiving paper checks, with the only control being the owner signing them at the end. Additionally, their service-based entity, Rhodes Branding, suffered from what McDaniels called “lumpy” financials due to annual contracts that average over $50,000 being booked all at once rather than recognizing revenue over time.

Unifying a 9-entity ecosystem under one roof

Initially driven by a desire to bring their accounts payable (AP) “into the 21st century,” Rhodes Companies evaluated several vendors they believed could handle their complexity. McDaniels engaged in serious discussions with Avidxchange for AP automation and bill pay, and NetSuite for a full ERP, but ultimately ruled them out because “integration was going to be substantially more effort.” McDaniels says that a typical implementation would take “many months” and require a massive capital investment.

In the end, Rhodes selected Intuit Enterprise Suite because it offered the “benefits the big players have,” such as robust multi-entity consolidation and intercompany journal entry capabilities, but without the friction of a traditional ERP implementation. This included advanced accounting features that allowed Rhodes to recognize revenue directly within the platform, eliminating the need for accountants to manage those entries by hand.

For McDaniels, the Intuit ERP’s core value was unification. Rather than patching together disparate tools, Intuit Enterprise Suite offered a single source of truth. This unified environment enabled the team to build automated workflows where owners and operating business presidents can approve actions based on specific rules, adding a layer of organizational control that didn’t exist before. McDaniels says, “It's nice to not have to create a Frankenstein [situation]… and do it through 5 different platforms. It's nice to just get that functionality all in one place.”

Driving efficiency and record breaking years

The move to Intuit Enterprise Suite drove immediate, measurable impact for Rhodes Companies across the board:

• Operational efficiency and time savings: The shift to Intuit Enterprise Suite has drastically reduced manual work for the accounting team. By automating intercompany journal entries and consolidations, the team can now allocate shared costs, such as a single bill or payroll entry, across all nine entities in one step. This efficiency helped slash month-to-end close time by 50%, from 10 days down to 5. Reporting that also used to be completely manual is now near-instant, with executives being able to pull reports in as little as 5 minutes.
• Agile budgeting: The team was able to revamp their entire annual planning with Spreadsheet Sync. Instead of “reinventing the budget process” every cycle, the team can pull their live data into Excel, adjust their forecasts, and push it back into the system. McDaniels notes this agility shaved “up to a week off the budgeting process,” ensuring that business leaders and owners were “on the same page from day one.”
• Profitability and project visibility: Rhodes Branding saw the most significant financial turnaround. By utilizing advanced accounting features for proper revenue recognition, the team moved away from “lumpy” cash-basis reporting to true accrual accounting. This visibility allowed the team to track job profitability on a granular level, providing real-time insights into performance, and driving record-breaking results across the company’s history.
• Enhanced governance: Moving away from manual processes where owners signed checks without visibility, the organization now utilizes Intuit Enterprise Suite’s dual-level approval workflows. This enables business leaders to scrutinize and challenge invoices before payment to vendors, significantly reducing financial risk.

Using AI as a “mini-auditor”

Going forward, Rhodes Companies plans to leverage the AI capabilities within Intuit Enterprise Suite to further streamline operations, especially spotting anomalies. McDaniels says the Suite’s AI insights once caught a 50% variance in a prepaid asset account. “It’s like having a mini-auditor,” he says. The feature helped flag a vendor subscription costing tens of thousands of dollars that had not yet been set up for monthly accrual, an error human eyes may have otherwise overlooked.

The team is also working toward 100% electronic payments and plans to use AI forecasting to navigate the tricky cash flow cycles common in the education sector. McDaniels’s goal is to find more ways to leverage Intuit Enterprise Suite to make the business better.

Recommended for you