ThinkEquity Partners LLC is a researchcentric institutional investment firm dedicated to providing focused insight, advisory services, and capital to institutional investors and corporate constituents in the knowledge economy's key growth verticals, including technology, healthcare, media and consumer business services.
200 Employees
Offices in San Francisco, Minneapolis, New York, Boston and Chicago
July 2006 NASDAQ (NNM) Autex Trading Rank #24, per Autex
“Not only did we like what [AIS] had to offer, but we liked their personalities too. Jim was honest and straightforward about the capabilities and limitations of the system.”
– Brian Endres,
ThinkEquity’s controller
Case Study
AIS HELPS THINKEQUITY DO A BETTER JOB
OF TRACKING
EXPENSE DATA
Overview:
ThinkEquity Partners offers targeted research and investment banking services for institutional investors and corporate clients. Founded on three core principals—the power of growth, the power of focused knowledge, and the power of people—ThinkEquity specializes in understanding the key growth trends that impact healthcare, technology, media/education, and business/consumer services.
Among the company’s advisory services are raising capital for public and private companies, institutional brokerage and trading, asset management, wealth management, and strategic counsel. ThinkEquity has raised over $7 billion in 69 equity deals and has completed 20 IPOs and 21 secondary offerings since its inception. It also has 271 companies under coverage and was the first publisher on many new issues, including Google and Audible in 2004.
Challenge:
Over 200 professionals and staff work at the company’s five offices in major financial centers across the United States. Microsoft Dynamics GP, formerly known as Great Plains, provides the core accounting functions ThinkEquity requires to keep its business humming. The company recently discovered, however, that it needed to start tracking expenses incurred against new business deals.
Brian Endres, ThinkEquity’s controller, wanted to implement a system that integrated with Dynamics, so that expense data required only one point of entry and was captured at a granular level. He also needed costs captured and analyzed on a per-deal basis.
Solution:
The AIS Group quickly entered the picture, determining that ThinkEquity needed Dynamics GP Project Accounting, which features the ability to enter expense data through a Web browser-based interface. AIS recognized the firm’s complex accounting needs and balanced them against the impact of the new system on its 200 nationwide users.
“Not only did we like what they had to offer,” explains Endres, “but we liked their personalities too. Jim was honest and straightforward about the capabilities and limitations of the system.”
AIS also created a custom-designed notification system that alerts managers via email when an employee has submitted an expense report for review. None of the work AIS performed added to ThinkEquity’s overhead, but it gave the financial folks access to key data that they could easily manipulate and analyze from within Dynamics. Endres hasn’t measured the ROI, but the convenience factor alone has made the implementation well worth the cost.
AIS continues to work with ThinkEquity on other projects, such as helping the IT staff back up the accounting systems so that no vital information is ever in danger of being lost. They’ve even come in and swapped out servers when needed so that ThinkEquity’s infrastructure never misses a beat.
AIS also performs ongoing maintenance, ensuring that ThinkEquity upgrades to the newest version of Dynamics every year. AIS is always there when ThinkEquity needs them.
“They’ve been a consistent and steady partner,” Endres says.