Inside REA Group’s decade-long ERP transformation with Annexa

A long-term partnership has delivered innovation across REA’s finance systems, with the latest phase focused on AI.

In 2014, REA Group was struggling with an ageing ERP system that was nearing end of life and placing growing strain on its finance operations.

Its finance teams were relying on a series of separate databases, requiring repeated data loading to complete month-end reporting.

REA Group engaged Annexa to replace the legacy system and implement a modern ERP platform capable of supporting its growth.

Annexa consolidated 26 separate databases into a single NetSuite OneWorld platform, eliminating manual consolidations and delivering real-time financial reporting.

Each solution takes out a chunk of manual effort, gives the team cleaner, more reliable processes and delivers more efficiencies.

“We built these solutions by working very closely with the REA team and shaping them around real use cases,” said Matthew Owens, director, Annexa.

The unified NetSuite environment enabled consolidation and real-time financial reporting across the group as REA continued to scale its operations. It’s reduced month-end close times, with processes that once stretched across weeks now completed in a fraction of the time.

The initial engagement has extended into a long-term partnership focused on continued improvement across REA’s finance systems.

In that time, Annexa has delivered CapEx automation module, Slack integration for purchasing approvals, playbooks for acquisition integrations and an automated collections system.

“The flow is simple but powerful. The bill becomes due, it sends the reminder, and most people just pay then and there,” said Owens.

“If they don’t, it nudges them, and if they still don’t, it escalates. Doing that automatically makes a massive difference to how quickly the cash comes in,” he added.

These initiatives were developed through close collaboration with REA’s finance and delivery teams, with each solution shaped around specific operational bottlenecks and real-world use cases.

“We spent time understanding how the team actually works, what slows them down and what would make an impact,” he said.

Annexa has now built an agentic AI engine to orchestrate multi-step finance processes across NetSuite and other systems.

It extracts structured NetSuite data, assisted by LLMs (including NetSuite’s own model, OpenAI and Claude) and deploys specialised agents for collections, reconciliations, accruals, month-end sequences or procure-to-pay steps.

Human oversight is retained and an interface shows each agent’s progress, approval requirements and any blockers. The platform will soon begin beta testing with a small group of customers to pilot AI-enabled workflows.

For REA, the initial focus is extending the automated collections capability while still giving credit clerks and account managers full control.

“AI will handle more of the structured work, like predicting when cash will land, sending the right customer communications and matching payments,” he said.