Most businesses rarely fit neatly into the way software expects them to work. This client was among them.
The company leases industrial sensors—the kind that attach to manufacturing lines and report machine performance in real time. It's a good business model. The problem is that "leasing" and "selling" look very different from an accounting standpoint, and most software is built with selling in mind.
When you sell something, it leaves your books. When you lease it, it doesn't. That sensor that’s out on a customer's floor still has value, and depreciates over time. You need to know where it is, who has it, what contract it's tied to, and what it's worth today versus what it was worth when it left your warehouse.
Multiply that by hundreds of devices, spread across multiple international locations, and you start to understand why their existing system of tracking everything manually in spreadsheets was quickly becoming an operational bottleneck.
The spreadsheet problem
Loose tracking works as well as loosely tracking your children at the waterpark—it works until it doesn’t.
For a while, the manual process was manageable. People knew roughly what they had and roughly where it was. But "roughly" isn't a great word to have in your asset management vocabulary when you're preparing for international growth and an IPO like this client was.
The problem was that even if their spreadsheets were in fact correct, nobody could be really be confidently sure, as devices could easily slip through the cracks, or fulfillments missed. On top of that, the value of assets in the field was more of an educated guess than a reliable figure. And as the business scaled internationally, the potential for error compounded faster than any manually updated spreadsheet could keep up with.
At some point, someone looked at the trajectory and said, “we can't keep growing like this.” (which is usually the beginning of a good conversation with us).
What they actually needed
The goal went beyond just better tracking, and extended into building a system where the business's actual model—lease an asset, track it through the life of the contract, depreciate it accurately, know exactly where it is and who has it—was fully supported inside NetSuite.
That meant when a sensor gets fulfilled on a sales order, NetSuite needed to automatically create a corresponding fixed asset. From there, the system would track that asset's value over time, tie it to the customer and contract it was associated with, and handle depreciation without anyone having to manually update a spreadsheet somewhere.
Anchor Group started with NetSuite's Fixed Asset Management SuiteApp as the foundation as it handles the core functionality well. But getting it to support the specific way this business operates required something beyond what it was set up to do out of the box. So Anchor Group set up a series of discovery conversations aimed at mapping the full process: how fulfillment worked, when depreciation kicked in, what the accounting impacts needed to look like, and where the existing SuiteApp left gaps.
Those gaps mattered, as filling them required custom scripting, and not filling them meant major accounting errors that would affect their underlying business and ability to generate accurate reporting.
The mid-build discovery (where the project could have gone sideways)
Partway through the build, the team identified a problem: the initial custom script only handled part of the needed flow. To fully support the fulfillment-to-fixed-asset process, a second script was required.
This is the kind of discovery that, at other firms, turns into a change order conversation: “Additional scope and revised timeline are needed.” “Budget increase is necessary.” (Mildly uncomfortable call with the client ensues.)
But not with us.
We built the second script without extending the timeline or requesting additional budget. The accounting implications—which the client understandably wanted to understand thoroughly before anything went live—were worked through carefully, step by step, until everyone was confident the implementation was both technically correct and financially sound.
What they have now
The system that came out of this project does exactly what the business needed it to do.
When a sensor is fulfilled, a fixed asset is created automatically. That asset is tracked through the full lifecycle of the contract—its current value, its depreciation schedule, the customer holding it, the contract it's tied to. Nothing falls through the cracks because nothing depends on a person remembering to update a spreadsheet.
The team can see, at any given moment, what's in the field, where it is, who has it, and what it's worth. For a company preparing for international expansion (and eventually, greater scrutiny from investors and regulators) that visibility is a prerequisite—not just a nice-to-have.
The client was able to keep using native NetSuite sales orders and invoices throughout, leaving workarounds and parallel systems as a bad dream rather than a reality. Just a software that now fits around the client’s business model, rather than the other way around.
If your business model doesn't fit neatly into what NetSuite gives you out of the box, that's not a problem—just a scoping conversation. We've had a few of those before.
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