Withum
Catalyzing Growth and Success

For long, organizations across the globe have resorted to cynicism around consulting. As such, this growing cynicism among executives has earned the consultants a bad reputation. The majority believes that consulting firms are focused on ‘landing and expanding,’ and aggravating the ‘shiny object syndrome’ in organizations, which often does not pan out as the problems at hand are never solved. As a result, consultants are viewed as transactional people rather than trusted advisors.

However, Joseph R. Riccie and Walter Merkas are changing this narrative. As highly motivated and experienced consultants, Riccie and Merkas temper their pursuit of perfection by consistently “walking the talk” and leading by example. When it comes to NetSuite consulting services, these consultants draw on their years of experience and deep expertise in ERP consulting to lead their team at Withum in successfully deploying hundreds of integrations and implementations. Withum provides a full suite of NetSuite consulting services to organizations of various sizes. “At Withum, our mission is to be our clients’ catalyst for growth and success. This vision permeates our organization, wherein every person is committed to the growth and success of the clients and helps them to think through their business issues. We are predicated on being practical business people first to help clients solve for their people, process, and technology problems,” says Riccie, Partner, Withum.

As a forward-thinking, technology-driven advisory and accounting firm, Withum empowers its clients with NetSuite consulting services that cover all the components of NetSuite ERP solutions. Besides a seamless system upgrade, the company puts in the hard yards to enable NetSuite migration/ integration without disrupting the business. The Withum team brings in NetSuite optimization and customization to ensure that client-specific requirements are met and that they conform with the modern practices in the digital world. The company takes a business-first approach and strives to clearly understand the client’s existing state, collaborates on the future state to have an accurate and feasible technology roadmap.

What makes Withum unique as a consulting firm is its take on the practical business. “More than just helping clients with NetSuite implementations and optimizations, we help firms with projects that renovate their core business practices and achieve their goals,” states Riccie. The company delivers not only a technical project but also a complete solution, as well as change management, which impacts the organizations positively.

Merkas, Advisory at Withum, adds, “We follow a talentdriven approach and a go-to-market strategy that put the right people on the jobs at the right time, thereby meeting our objectives to modernize systems, reduce complexity, and more. We seek to understand the problems and requirements first and then align the right services with the same. Instead of advising the clients that they need ‘everything,’ we believe in leading by example and driving our projects through success and not revenue streams.”

At the core, Withum is sharply focused on bridging the gap of seamless inventory management in businesses. Be it manufacturing, selling or recording a product or even complying with revenue recognition, tax requirements and financial reporting in accordance with various accounting standards and government regulations, a single, integrated ERP system, such as NetSuite, plays an instrumental role in managing core processes, from anywhere and at any time. “Our go-to-market strategy is around solving a problem that exists in many industries; we call it Anything Inventory. As a CPA firm, we have auditors who have a profound understanding of revenue recognition.

In some instances, when we attack an inventory problem, we are also able to bring audit expertise for revenue recognition, or transfer pricing,” informs Riccie. Revenue recognition is one of the most common challenges that the clients approach Withum with. Withum allows successful adoption of revenue recognition accounting and compliance process by drawing on its experience and qualified knowledge of accounting and financial reporting policies, processes and systems. This is usually done through implementing NetSuite’s awardwinning financials software that simplifies the complexities of evolving revenue recognition mandates, empowering users with revenue intelligence.

At Withum, our mission is to be our clients’ catalyst for growth and success

Putting theory into practice provides several successful examples of the Withum approach and rich expertise in action. A global software company—worth $125 million— in the fintech space was faced with a digital inventory challenge. Alongside, the client was also experiencing transfer pricing and consolidation issues. The software company had 19 legal entities running multiple sets of books that needed to be GAP, tax, and localization compliant. Withum had to work through all of the differences in the nuances of what was GAP compliance versus what needs to be reported on from a management level to get to product-based p&l for driving more informed business decisions. The client also needed a financial planning and analysis tool for prompt reporting. With the right talent and data, the team at Withum altered the processes and helped the client understand the impact of the change being placed forward. The massive project to enable a modernized solution ultimately allowed for both transfer pricing and revenue recognition to get to a product-based p&l.

This wherewithal to help clients grow and succeed by overcoming their most pressing challenges is a byproduct of years of experience that Riccie and Merkas have garnered over the years in NetSuite practice. With over 35 years of financial, human capital, operational and technology management experience while working in the private and public accounting industries, Riccie specializes in NetSuite consulting and has assisted companies across a variety of industries in managing programs, leading change enablement and enterprise transformation programs. This expertise has been instrumental in leveraging people, process, technology and information to drive performance and deliver key business objectives with tangible results. On the other hand, Merkas is a NetSuite Certified Consultant specializing in technology assessments and strategy, technology roadmap strategy, organizational transitional management, business system architecture, business case development, business system and vendor selection, project management and system implementation, onpremise, cloud or private cloud-based.

Predominantly an East Coast firm, Withum has expanded into the West Coast over the last six months. Moving ahead, the company has no plans of slowing down. Withum is currently working with one of its clients in the auction sector and is upskilling itself to equip other clients in the same sector. NetSuite and Withum are working together in the marketplace with labor unions and multi-employee benefit plans, which is an untapped market and is likely to enable them to assist the labor union marketplace. “NetSuite employed us competently and in a positive light to even spend marketing money with us to help solve industry problems inside the labor unions,” concludes Riccie.