How Annexa rebuilt physiotherapy chain Kieser’s finance platform

Annexa consolidated 27 Xero instances into a NetSuite environment — but the solution extended well beyond ERP.

Local systems integrator Annexa rebuilt physiotherapy chain Kieser’s finance platform and set the stage for national expansion.

With 30 clinics across the country and a workforce of more than 800, Kieser has been growing steadily, but it was drowning in manual labour and data entry.

With 27 separate Xero instances and a highly manual month-end close, the team was bogged down in spreadsheets, struggling with version control, data accuracy and inconsistent reporting.

“Xero is a great tool, but when you’re managing multiple instances, each one has its own chart of accounts, close process and data. “There's no relationship between all those files,” said Matthew Owens, director, Annexa.

In Kieser's case, there was also a technical ceiling — the Xero APIs couldn't handle the data volumes coming from Logic Plus into the billing process.

“It's both a functional capability limitation and a back-end technical one. As a business grows, you eventually outgrow the database and the API, not just the feature set,” he added.

Kieser turned to Annexa to design and deploy a finance architecture capable of supporting its continued growth. It needed a system that could consolidate finance, connect key business systems and bring structure to budgeting, reconciliation and reporting.

It was more than just plugging in an ERP system. “There was a real focus on integrating NetSuite with Logic Plus. The custom clinic system Kieser built themselves to manage bookings, scheduling and patient billing,” Owens explained.

Annexa needed to ensure the finance system remained the master of the finance data while the clinic management system was the master of clinics and bookings.

The Annexa team also looked outside of NetSuite to consider reporting, procurement and expenses across finance operations. They opted for Celigo to build the integration services and Zone & Co for automated supplier invoice processing — alongside NetSuite.

“It's the foundation. The real complexity, and the real value, is in how you connect the core system to everything around it,” Owens told CRN Australia.

Owens stresses that this isn’t a collection of point solutions that are expected to just work together. “Each of those tools is doing something specific and doing it well, because it's connected properly into the broader ecosystem,” he said.

The orchestration question — what connects to what, in what order, who owns the data and which system is the master for which information — is where projects succeed or fail, he noted.

“That's a real shift from what ERP projects looked like five years ago,” he said.

The transformation also involved a change management component. The head office has an accounting function and there are also clinic-level accounting functions.

"A lot of the change work was figuring out who does what going forward – what the clinics own, what head office owns, and how everyone aligns to a standardised way of working,” he explained.

Lessons for complex transformations

Owens sees three lessons from Kieser that are applicable to other organisations facing similar complex transformations.

The first lesson is to map the structural complexity at the start. It is vital to understanding how structure, ownership and management of different entities within the larger organisation.

The second lesson is that spreadsheet dependency points to business rules being held outside the system. The real work is translating those rules into the ERP so the journals and allocations run automatically across the group.

“New tools layered on top of unresolved rules just shift the problem around,” he said.

The third lesson is around data silos and over-customisation, which are two sides of the same coin. Silos trace back to architecture decisions, or the absence of them.

“A consistent chart of accounts, consistent entity structures and defined data flows before go-live made our lives meaningfully easier on Kieser,” he said.

Over-customisation is the opposite problem: replicating workarounds inside the new platform that the new platform didn't need.

“The balance is to invest deliberately where the business actually requires the functionality and resist customisations that just preserve old habits,” he added.