How OnMessage Cut Annual ERP Software Costs by 48% Moving from NetSuite to SoftLedger
OnMessage moved its day-to-day accounting off NetSuite and onto SoftLedger, cutting recurring ERP software cost by approximately $21,000 a year, a 48% reduction, without giving up the multi-entity structure, job-level reporting, or financial controls its finance team runs the business on. The finance team stopped using NetSuite in August 2026, months before its contract term ended.
About OnMessage
Founded in July 2005, OnMessage is a Virginia based team of creative professionals with 30+ employees and clients in 5 states and the District of Columbia. As a strategy firm they focus primarily on political campaigns, they also provide a wide array of marketing and advertising services including TV, web and radio spots, campaign graphics, polling, online presence, social media and fundraising.
The Challenge
For many years, OnMessage was using NetSuite after having been implemented
incorrectly, not receiving the support they had requested from NetSuite services they were paying for, and overall paying high fees to maintain a system that wasn’t working for them.
The finance team wanted a lower-cost platform without losing the accounting outcomes it depended on: separate books and reporting by legal entity, customer and job-level visibility, accurate AR, AP, and cash, billable vendor and employee expenses tied back to client work, intercompany receivables and payables with consolidated eliminations, and client-facing invoices that presented complicated activity clearly.
The requirement was specific, and it is the requirement that stops most NetSuite
replacements before they start: prove the new system produces the same accounting answer. Not the same screens. The same answer.
Why SoftLedger
SoftLedger fits because it delivers what OnMessage actually used: multi-entity general ledger, dimensional reporting, intercompany with automated eliminations, AR/AP. All at a fraction of the platform cost of NetSuite. The open API mattered as much as the price. It was straightforward to work with and well enough documented that Altanash’s developers were able to build and deliver a working Concur integration in a matter of weeks.
The Solution
Altanash implemented SoftLedger around one principle: SoftLedger did not need to look like NetSuite. It needed to produce the same correct accounting answer. What OnMessage got was the accounting it depended on, an integration NetSuite had never delivered, and a support model that stayed through the transition.
• Multi-Entity Accounting Without the Enterprise Overhead. Eight related entities
keep separate books and roll up to consolidated reporting, with intercompany
eliminations handled automatically.
• The Same Accounting End States. Entity and account treatment, GL-based job
costing through customer and job dimensions, customer and job-level reporting,
traceable AR, AP and cash, intercompany balances, billable-expense linkage, and a
reviewable audit trail.
• Dimensional Reporting Built In. Reporting runs on the dimensions that actually
drive the business — entity, customer, job, cost center, vendor, employee, and
billable status.
• An Open API That Delivered a Real Integration. SoftLedger’s API enabled
OnMessage’s expense reporting platform, Concur, to connect directly to the ledger,
built and delivered in weeks. The time came back immediately: the accounting team
recovered at least an hour on the very first batch it ran through the integration,
against a NetSuite process in which preparing a monthly file for import had taken
hours before anyone could even attempt to load it.
• Implementation Support That Ensured Success. Daily working sessions through cutover, an open support line during go-live week, and on-demand, hands-on training for every member of the accounting team.
The API Advantage: Expense Data That Moves Itself
OnMessage runs corporate card spend across 30+ cards — roughly 800 to 900 transactions in a monthly cycle — through SAP Concur. Under NetSuite, none of that data moved on its own. The team closed the batch, exported it, and then reshaped that export by hand into the format NetSuite would accept. It was hours of work before anyone could
attempt the import, and more time afterward chasing the rows the import rejected.
Built against SoftLedger’s API, approved expenses now post on batch close and land in SoftLedger as draft journals ready for review. The transformation work is simply gone. Nobody rebuilds a file, nobody reshapes an export, and coding errors surface as correctable drafts rather than rejected rows.
That is what an open API buys a finance team: an integration shaped to the way OnMessage already works, delivered in weeks.
The Results
• 48% lower annual ERP software cost. OnMessage reduced its annual ERP
software cost by roughly $21,000 — a 48% reduction against what it had been
paying NetSuite. At current rates that compounds to more than $100,000 in avoided
software cost over five years.
• Reporting Efficiency. Pulling an entity’s balance sheet in NetSuite meant hunting
through the subsidiary list and waiting on a refresh. In SoftLedger it is a location
picker and a saved report view, with a posted/draft toggle that lets the team see an
entry’s impact before committing it — cutting the time to produce the reports
OnMessage needs by roughly 90%.
• Balanced Parallel Systems. OnMessage ran NetSuite and SoftLedger side by side
for a month. Cash, accounts receivable, and accounts payable were reconciled
entity by entity until the finance team could see the two systems agree — and then
made the call to stop using NetSuite, months before the contract expired.
SoftLedger is a modern accounting platform for multi-entity finance teams. Altanash delivers SoftLedger implementation, migration, integration, training and ongoing support.
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