School of Rock Hits the Right Note with NetSuite

School of Rock Adds Locations, Closes Books 32% Faster and Eliminates Complexity With NetSuite OneWorld

School of Rock is not your average music class. At more than 300 school locations worldwide, the company uses its patented teaching method to prepare young students for live stage performances at real venues in front of actual audiences. For over 20 years, School of Rock has provided training in guitar, drums, singing and more—mainly for kids, but also adults, looking to build confidence and music skills.

Company

School of Rock

Location

Canton, Mass.

Industry

Education

Revenue

$50-100 million

Employees

500 to 999

NUMBER OF SUBSIDIARIES

110

NUMBER OF Countries

Applications Replaced

QuickBooks
Salesforce

NETSUITE PRODUCT IMPLEMENTED

NetSuite OneWorld

IMPLEMENTATION PARTNER

Trajectory Group

“There is no way we could’ve managed this growth without NetSuite—we probably would’ve needed to double the team. And if we were still on QuickBooks or some other system, forget it.” John Cappadona, CFO, School of Rock

Automation Amps Up Accounting

Adding schools and students: When CFO John Cappadona came aboard, School of Rock had 200 schools and about 23,000 students. Three years later, it’s up to 300 schools and 54,000 students—with more locations in the pipeline. The corporate entity owns 45 schools and the rest are franchises. Beyond providing in-person and online lessons, School of Rock sells musical instruments and gear from big-name brands like Fender, Gibson, Roland and Zildjian.

Accounting goes off-key: One area where the company had issues when Cappadona came aboard were time-consuming intercompany transactions. Whenever a school in L.A., for example, exchanged inventory with a Miami school, the accounting team manually created a journal entry. With 10 entities and many of the same transactions occurring between the same schools every month, the work piled up. Meanwhile, the month-end close took 28 days—the team “was always closing”—and occasionally delivered inaccurate numbers because the team didn’t have time to check its work.

Easier transactions and a faster close: With a growing number of schools to account for, School of Rock’s accounting team created journal entry templates in NetSuite to ease intercompany transactions: Details like the entity and GL account stay the same, and the team simply tweaks dollar amounts, saving time. They also employed NetSuite automation to shorten the close to nine days—giving them time to ensure transactions are recorded correctly before producing monthly reports.

Rocking on: School of Rock is planning to implement NetSuite Revenue Management in order to automatically recognise revenue among its many franchises according to new accounting rules, instead of using a spreadsheet. NetSuite will also house the details of each franchise’s contract, an ideal setup for audits. Cappadona also looks forward to using NetSuite for bank reconciliations—and continually finding new ways the system can save his team time.

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