Tipalti Cuts RealWear’s Close Time by 50%

• Reduced the financial close process by seven days
• Eliminated three days of accounts payable workload per month with a streamlined NetSuite integration and automated PO matching
• Increased team visibility to improve tracking and eliminate payment errors

HQ Vancouver, WA
Customer Since 2019
Industry Manufacturing & Technology

Industrial workers need professional devices to work for them. RealWear gives workers in the field the tools they need
to operate hands-free, safely. Founded in 2016 by Dr. Chris Parkinson, RealWear empowers teams with knowledge— transferring technologies to train their people within minutes and stay connected on the job. Their flagship product, HMT-1,
is a ruggedized head-mounted tablet computer that frees a worker’s hands and is controlled with their voice, even in noisy environments. During COVID-19, RealWear has enabled teams to stay connected with remote mentoring from experts all around the world, without having to meet physically.

To support RealWear’s pace of innovation, the finance team needed to act as a partner to the rest of the organization and streamline processes where possible. However, Cherith Aasen, Staff Accountant, managed 90% of the accounts payables processes herself, and everything was time-consuming and manual. She was making payments and then going back and recording them in NetSuite. The process of onboarding vendors also presented challenges on the compliance end.

“Security and compliance were at the forefront of our minds when we were looking at AP automation solutions. We wanted to implement the right technology—not just for us, but for our customers.”

Aasan required an automated solution to reduce close times, implement seamless supplier onboarding, execute domestic and international payments, and provide a centralized source of truth for audit tracking.

With Tipalti, RealWear increased oversight of the approval process—allowing reviewers to access bills and dispute them when necessary.

Plus, the platform’s added transparency created a user-friendly environment for people to approve bills and track payables.

“We’ve streamlined our payment workload by 200 percent. I was spending one day every week setting payments and onboarding vendors manually, and now this has been condensed to a few hours over an entire month.”

Tipalti’s robust integration with Netsuite gave Aasan peace of mind as she handled reconciliations. Now, the system is flexible for dynamically processing invoices with both two-way or three-way PO matching. “That process is seamless. I can do it all in Tipalti and automatically know it’s back in NetSuite.” Aasan no longer contends with the risk of duplicating payments if they weren’t recorded right away. With improved operations, RealWear makes payments just twice a month and has reaped the benefits of a simplified executive approval process.

“Our CFO is a lot happier and gets his financials quicker. Plus, the data is accurate, and he can approve everything easily.”

The RealWear mission is to remove physical barriers for workers with technology. Naturally, they would expect their accounts payable process to evolve towards similar tenets of efficiency and modernization.

“We want finance to be a partner to help the company. And we can only do that with smart solutions.”