How Emerge Found Over $1.2M in Savings with Increased Financial Visibility

About Emerge

Emerge is reinventing freight procurement and transforming the $800 billion trucking industry. Built by freight professionals for freight professionals, Emerge enables shippers and carriers to make more empowered, strategic decisions backed by real-time connectivity and AI-driven decision-making, all to maximize cost-savings.

The Challenge

Achieving Smart Growth

Emerge has been building its advanced digital freight marketplace platform and growing its business into a driving force in transportation procurement since 2017. In 2022, its marketplace surpassed $6 billion in transportation transactions, with over 1,000 shippers engaging with more than 45,000 carriers. That success propelled Emerge to realize more than substantial revenue growth, and helped it raise $130 million in Series B funding in late 2021.

But the following year saw the global macroeconomic economy start to slow, and Emerge had to move from hypergrowth to smart growth. To do so, it needed more visibility for its finance team.

“Our accounting system didn’t have much flexibility, and our data wasn’t the cleanest, so we had to do all of our reporting in Excel,” recalled Christopher Decker, Senior Finance Manager at Emerge. “As we saw the freight market contract, we knew we had to get a handle on those issues, plus gain more visibility into performance across the business.”

Emerge had migrated from QuickBooks to Netsuite, but it still needed a way to visualize business and financial performance without spending hours in Excel. And with salaries accounting for most of the company’s spend, Decker wanted to analyze its Paylocity HRIS data along with financial and other business data.

The Solution

Real-time Insights for Better Business Visibility

As Emerge completed its migration to NetSuite, Decker started evaluating solutions to help the finance team gain more visibility, build forecasts and budgets in less time, and start finding ways to better use cash. Putting a premium on customer service and product capabilities, Emerge chose Mosaic.

“Once we had NetSuite up, it took just a couple of weeks to bring Mosaic on,” Decker said. “Just like that, we could see real-time data and look back a few months to see what’s trending in the moment rather than having to pull together Excel reports mid-period and knowing they weren’t going to be complete. Mosaic gave us that streamlined, clean view of our business.”

From there, the Mosaic team was able to help Emerge bring more flexibility to their NetSuite data by creating custom workflows such as:

• Backfilling actuals with vendor details to analyze operating expenses and BvA variances by vendor
• Building a custom AR Aging metric including Unapplied Payments to accelerate collections
• Creating a customer Overdue Invoice List metric with Collector IDs to quickly spot overdue customers
• Customizing GL account numbers and name fields for more flexible reporting presentation and sorting

Emerge quickly added their Paylocity integration to Mosaic to visualize headcount data, build staffing models, and get newfound visibility into its workforce costs. Decker and team could then run scenarios on hiring plans, look at how attrition impacted the numbers, and make better planning decisions.

“As a startup, a huge portion of our spend is salaries, and when you don’t have good visibility it’s difficult to manage your P&L,” Decker added. “Having this view into our salary spend with Mosaic is a huge deal. And now we’re budgeting for 2023, so using Mosiac’s forecasting and budgeting modules has been very helpful because we can plug in our headcount and instantly see payroll forecasts across the next year.”

Emerge also put Mosaic to work visualizing budgets to drive more meaningful conversations with department heads. As a growth-stage company looking toward future valuations, getting those expenses optimized now will help the company be better prepared in future funding rounds and when the economy starts to pick up speed.

The Impact

Eliminating $1.2 Million In Spend While Saving Time

Mosaic gives Emerge faster, more detailed visibility into its financial performance, all in real-time and without forcing Decker and team to spend hours gathering and cleaning data, then manipulating complex spreadsheets. It’s helping to drive better planning as the company looks to maintain momentum in 2023 and be better prepared when future opportunities arise.

“Prior to Mosaic, we didn’t have ownership of departmental spend because we were totally focused on growth,” Decker explained. “Now that we’re catching up with that growth, we can have monthly budget reviews, give better insights to our department heads, and start to find areas where we might be overspending.”

Using Mosaic, Emerge started digging into spend by vendor and working with the business to identify potential savings. That visibility alone helped the company audit its technology spend and identify $100,000 in monthly savings.

“We’re a growth-stage company looking toward the future, so we need to to show investors we can manage expenses thoughtfully,” added Decker. “That was a big deal, and Mosaic made it possible.”

In addition to the added visibility, Mosaic gives Emerge easy access to real-time data visualizations. Decker previously spent hours building models in Excel every month, with some tools requiring the team to create and download single-month reports over and over. Now, Decker brings Mosaic to his meetings, and expects department heads to start using Mosaic themselves soon.

“It was a pain before Mosaic,” Decker concluded. “It used to be a very manual process. Now, we just show Mosaic and it’s all right there. And the expectation is that department heads will start using Mosaic to see budget overages, see where they can save, and get those insights on their own rather than coming to finance.”