Saussy Burbank Cuts Month-End Close by Two Weeks with NetSuite + FullClarity
By: Rich Uphus | July 7, 2026
Introduction
Saussy Burbank has been building homes in the Carolinas since 1989. From Charlotte, Charleston and Myrtle Beach, the company has delivered more than 8,000 homes and townhomes and earned seven Best in American Living awards along the way.
Behind those homes sits a business that is more complex than it looks: four core companies that consolidate under one parent, a growing set of affiliated entities, completed-contract revenue recognition where every home is its own project, annual audits, and a construction bank line to manage. For 25 years, all of it ran on the same aging homebuilder software.
Headquarters: Charlotte, North Carolina
Industry: Residential homebuilding across the Carolinas
Environment: Four core companies plus affiliates; every home is a project; completed-contract revenue recognition
“The visibility into what is actually in that project or the job cost report is light years ahead of where we were.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
At a Glance
- Two weeks faster: Month-end close has shortened by at least two weeks, and the CEO noted in his board report that year-end financials had never been ready this quickly.
- 25-year-old system replaced: Journal entries saved as PDFs and 90-minute manual consolidations became drill-down reporting across every entity in seconds.
- A hire avoided at home start: Creating all of a home’s purchase orders in one step means the purchasing manager who expected to need another person now handles the workload himself.
- 5 new affiliates absorbed: Saussy Burbank went from managing four companies in one system and one in QuickBooks to nine-plus entities inside NetSuite, without adding accounting staff.
- Committed costs, tracked per home: The finance team now manages the construction bank line from its own numbers, and sometimes corrects the bank’s.
“We were literally having to save journal entries as PDFs. We could not consolidate; we had to manually consolidate. Once we were finished with month end, it would take at least an hour and a half to consolidate the information just to run our financials.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
The Challenge
By December 2023, Saussy Burbank had been on the same software family for roughly 25 years, and the vendor had stopped investing in it. Three problems stood out.
1. The information was locked away.
- Journal entries were saved as PDFs. Researching a transaction from two years earlier meant hunting through documents by hand, and working across companies meant logging out of one set of books and into another.
2. The structure had outgrown the system.
- Four core companies consolidate under one parent, with a GC entity doing all the building and homes transferring at sale. An affiliate ran separately on QuickBooks, and more affiliates were coming.
3. The field had no view.
- Project managers never looked into the old system. Purchase order completion relied on trades reporting their own work, and the finance team assembled margin reports manually in Excel, where errors hid.
“This was the one that worked well with NetSuite and gave us the capability to create and manage the business the way that we intended to.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
Why NetSuite + FullClarity
The team evaluated the construction packages most builders use, but wanted a platform whose owner would keep reinvesting as technology moved. Oracle NetSuite answered that. FullClarity, recommended during the NetSuite evaluation, made the homebuilding piece work.
Saussy Burbank’s finance leadership had run ERP at a national builder before, across three different configurations of the same tier-one system. The direct comparison: “This was much easier to learn. It’s more intuitive.”
“When we start the home, we have a budget. We’re going to have variances, and we need to know what those variances are.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
The Solution
Saussy Burbank went live October 1, 2024, with FullClarity’s job costing and purchase order workflows running inside NetSuite.
Job cost reports the whole business trusts.
- Total budgets and actuals per home, reviewed monthly, with every actual one click from its detail. Impact: variances against budget surface per cost code and per plan, so a wrong takeoff or a vendor pricing problem shows up as a trend, not a year-end surprise.
Home start in one step.
- An enhancement lets purchasing create all of a home’s POs in one action instead of releasing them one at a time. Impact: hours saved per home start, and a planned purchasing hire that never had to happen.
Field managers close their own POs.
- Instead of relying on trades to report completed work, field managers confirm it themselves, giving finance a three-way match of invoice, PO completion and sign-off. Impact: stronger internal controls, and more comfortable auditors.
Locked budgets by design.
- The old system made it easy to quietly adjust POs late in a build. For Saussy Burbank, the new discipline is a feature.
“The CEO, when he sent out the board report, made a comment that we haven’t had the year-end financials this quick. I don’t know that we’ve ever had them this quick.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
“Sometimes I feel like our reporting is better than our bank’s reporting, honestly. We’re able to fact-check their information, and it gives them the confidence in us to know that we’re able to manage our business and know exactly where we are.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO
“There’s no way I would have had time to address that amount of work with the old system. The problem wasn’t the information; we’ve got that in NetSuite. It was digging in the old systems that took the time. The reporting piece is night and day.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO
“You can’t eliminate human error. But what you can do is find where that human error is a lot easier, and correct it. I’m more confident in our financials each month.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO
The Results
1. Month-end close, two weeks faster
- Impact: Month-end close shrank by at least two weeks, and the year-end close that used to strain the team now clears the way for tax returns and the annual audit.
2. Answers in minutes, not days
- Impact: The CEO, a former CFO himself, got his first taste of the new pace at a company meeting two months after go-live, when he asked a question about sales and had the answer in about two minutes.
3. The bank line managed from their own numbers
- Impact: With committed costs tracked per home, the finance team manages its construction line from its own live numbers, and was ready when a capital partner came to the table at year end needing detailed information fast.
4. Errors that announce themselves
- Impact: A journal entry that wasn’t made, or $24,000 in committed costs reserved and never used, is caught at month end and recognized in the right period instead of discovered later.
“Until you haven’t had that ability to get to the detailed information, you don’t appreciate it. The amount of information we’re able to include in the system, and to access, that’s the real value.”
- Kelly Lew, CFO, Saussy Burbank
Moving Forward
Saussy Burbank keeps adding affiliated entities, and the finance team absorbs them without growing. The next frontier is AI: the finance team already feeds reports into AI tools for analysis and is now connecting its NetSuite data directly.
Homebuilders run complex businesses on lean back offices. NetSuite + FullClarity is built for exactly that. See it in action: book a walkthrough.
