Case study
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Network Security
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Series D
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Santa Clara, CA
How Forward Networks modernized contract-to-cash operations
with Dimely.
A custom Salesforce-to-NetSuite script kept breaking at the worst possible time. Today, Forward's finance team runs a fully automated, auditable pipeline from opportunity to AR aging, and it just works.
Customer
Forward Networks
Industry
Network Security
Integrations Dimely connects
Salesforce · NetSuite · Slack
53%
Faster time to invoice
Over a week shaved off the gap between a closed-won deal and an invoice in the customer's inbox. No broken syncs, no manual rekey, no consultants on standby. Dimely pulls in contract details, drafts NetSuite sales orders the same day, and pings the team the moment they're ready for review.
1 week
Less time in AR
Because invoices go out a full week sooner, every open balance starts its clock earlier. Working capital that used to sit in pending invoices now lands on the balance sheet a week faster, every cycle.
100% / 97%+
Standard / non-standard PDF extraction accuracy
Custom models trained on Forward's documents. Standard formats with consistent layouts extract perfectly. Non-standard POs that vary doc-to-doc still hit 97%+.
Continuous
AR monitoring
Live AR dashboard pulled straight from NetSuite. Every open balance, filterable by customer, value, or days outstanding, refreshed in real time. Collections follow-up no longer waits on a monthly CSV refresh, and nothing slips through the cracks between aging cycles.
The problem
A finance team supporting complex enterprise contracts on a script that kept breaking.
Forward Networks sells into some of the most security-conscious organizations in the world: Goldman Sachs, Verizon, PayPal, Cox Communications, top global banks, telecoms, and U.S. federal agencies. The contracts span multiple years, products, and expansions, and these are customers who scrutinize every line item. Every invoice has to be right the first time.
​
And yet, the system tying their commercial workflow together kept failing, often during quarter-close. A custom script pushed closed-won opportunities from Salesforce into NetSuite as Sales Orders, and when it broke, Forward had to reach out to outside consultants paid by the hour, often hundreds of dollars per hour. It would take days, sometimes weeks, just to get the work prioritized, delaying invoices from going out and pushing back cash collection on the revenue flowing through the pipeline at the worst possible moment.
​
Even when the script ran, the team still had to pull Order Forms and Purchase Orders by hand and key billing details into NetSuite, introducing potential data-entry errors downstream invoices would inherit.
​
On top of that, AR aging lived in a spreadsheet. Someone had to refresh it manually every month by exporting CSVs from NetSuite and reconciling them line by line. There was no easy way to see what was outstanding at any given moment, which customer was late, or which invoice was about to age into a problem. Collections as a result could only be run once the analysis was completed.
“Dimely took the stress out of invoicing. We no longer struggle with broken syncs or manual PDF entry, and invoices go out cleanly and on time.”
Don Nguyen
Controller, Forward Networks
The solution
One platform for the entire order-to-cash flow.
The control plane
One auditable surface across Salesforce, NetSuite, and Slack, with a spreadsheet UI you can actually drive.
Contract-aware billing
Extracted contract terms keep invoices and AR aligned.
Audit trail
Every order and change, traceable end-to-end.
Real-time visibility
Invoice status syncs back from NetSuite into one live AR view.
Visibility in Slack
Every order draft, document, error, and status change posts to the team's channel with a link back to the source.
Forward replaced the brittle middleware with Dimely: a single, auditable platform that runs the whole motion from closed-won opportunity to collected invoice. Powered by AI agents that handle the configuration work, Dimely connected to Salesforce and NetSuite, mapped Forward's product catalog, and encoded their multi-year contract and consolidation logic with almost no lift on Forward's side.
​
Once live, every closed-won opportunity began surfacing in Dimely for the team to QA, then drafting into NetSuite as a Sales Order on approval, with a Slack notification linking back to Salesforce, the Sales Order, and the Dimely dashboard. Errors stopped being silent: if anything failed, the team knew within seconds and could see exactly why.
​
The spreadsheet UI made deal review feel native. Reviewing a closed-won opportunity, adjusting line items, or configuring how a contract should bill all happens in a familiar grid, with Salesforce line items and their NetSuite counterparts laid out side by side. The team can edit SKUs, adjust line items, and pull up the source Order Form or PO right next to the extracted data to compare without leaving the grid. And because SKU mappings live in the platform as configuration rather than code, when Forward's mix of software subscriptions and support services gets renamed, repackaged, or split apart, the mapping can be reconfigured in a fraction of the time it would take to ship a code change, with full visibility into how every line will land in NetSuite to keep invoicing clean and revenue allocation accurate.
​
AI-powered document parsing took the manual entry off the table. Order Forms and POs no longer needed to be transcribed by hand. Dimely extracts the structured data, shows it side-by-side with the source PDF, and lets the team review and approve in seconds. The work shifted from data entry to data review.
​
AR aging went from monthly snapshot to continuous monitoring. Dimely's AR dashboard pulls open invoices, payment status, and customer communications directly from NetSuite in real time, serving as the single source of truth across every delivery channel. Finance sees the same numbers the day they change, with no monthly CSV refresh in between. As My Hoang, a Staff Accountant on the team, put it: “Everything we need for AR lives in one live view now.”
​
Dimely absorbs the complexity Salesforce leaves behind. Idiosyncratic deal structures and edge-case logic that would normally require re-architecting Salesforce just to invoice cleanly all get handled inside Dimely. The clearest example: when a large enterprise customer has both an expansion and a renewal closing at the same time, Dimely automatically rolls the related Salesforce opportunities into a single NetSuite Sales Order. One PO, one invoice, exactly how the customer expects to be billed.
Workflow
Before
With
Sales orders drafted the day deals close
Custom Salesforce → NetSuite script that broke at close; outside consultants on retainer to fix it
Closed-won opps surface in Dimely for QA, then draft into NetSuite as Sales Orders on approval
The solution
One platform for the entire order-to-cash flow.
The control plane
One auditable surface across Salesforce, NetSuite, and Slack, with a spreadsheet UI you can actually drive.
Contract-aware billing
Extracted contract terms keep invoices and AR aligned.
Audit trail
Every order and change, traceable end-to-end.
Real-time visibility
Invoice status syncs back from NetSuite into one live AR view.
Visibility in Slack
Every order draft, document, error, and status change posts to the team's channel with a link back to the source.
Forward replaced the brittle middleware with Dimely: a single, auditable platform that runs the whole motion from closed-won opportunity to collected invoice. Powered by AI agents that handle the configuration work, Dimely connected to Salesforce and NetSuite, mapped Forward's product catalog, and encoded their multi-year contract and consolidation logic with almost no lift on Forward's side.
​
Once live, every closed-won opportunity began surfacing in Dimely for the team to QA, then drafting into NetSuite as a Sales Order on approval, with a Slack notification linking back to Salesforce, the Sales Order, and the Dimely dashboard. Errors stopped being silent: if anything failed, the team knew within seconds and could see exactly why.
​
The spreadsheet UI made deal review feel native. Reviewing a closed-won opportunity, adjusting line items, or configuring how a contract should bill all happens in a familiar grid, with Salesforce line items and their NetSuite counterparts laid out side by side. The team can edit SKUs, adjust line items, and pull up the source Order Form or PO right next to the extracted data to compare without leaving the grid. And because SKU mappings live in the platform as configuration rather than code, when Forward's mix of software subscriptions and support services gets renamed, repackaged, or split apart, the mapping can be reconfigured in a fraction of the time it would take to ship a code change, with full visibility into how every line will land in NetSuite to keep invoicing clean and revenue allocation accurate.
​
AI-powered document parsing took the manual entry off the table. Order Forms and POs no longer needed to be transcribed by hand. Dimely extracts the structured data, shows it side-by-side with the source PDF, and lets the team review and approve in seconds. The work shifted from data entry to data review.
​
AR aging went from monthly snapshot to continuous monitoring. Dimely's AR dashboard pulls open invoices, payment status, and customer communications directly from NetSuite in real time, serving as the single source of truth across every delivery channel. Finance sees the same numbers the day they change, with no monthly CSV refresh in between. As My Hoang, a Staff Accountant on the team, put it: “Everything we need for AR lives in one live view now.”
​
Dimely absorbs the complexity Salesforce leaves behind. Idiosyncratic deal structures and edge-case logic that would normally require re-architecting Salesforce just to invoice cleanly all get handled inside Dimely. The clearest example: when a large enterprise customer has both an expansion and a renewal closing at the same time, Dimely automatically rolls the related Salesforce opportunities into a single NetSuite Sales Order. One PO, one invoice, exactly how the customer expects to be billed.
Workflow
Before
With
Sales orders drafted the day deals close
Custom Salesforce → NetSuite script that broke at close; outside consultants on retainer to fix it
Closed-won opps surface in Dimely for QA, then draft into NetSuite as Sales Orders on approval
Invoice data pulled straight from the PDF
Order Forms and POs manually keyed into NetSuite, line by line
100% accuracy on standard formats and 97%+ on non-standard POs that vary doc-to-doc, all reviewed in a custom spreadsheet UI alongside the source document
Robust support for custom logic
Hardcoded SKU mappings and rigid tools; product or process changes blocked invoicing until engineering shipped a fix
Flexible structures for SKU mapping, deal structures, and consolidation logic that adapt as the business evolves
AR visibility in real time
CSVs reconciled in Excel monthly; collections follow-up delayed until a manual data refresh could be run
Live AR dashboard from NetSuite. Filter by customer, value, or days outstanding
Errors surfaced as they happen
Errors dropped silently, often surfacing at month-end
Every failure and status change posts to Slack instantly with a link to the source
Same-day support over Slack
Tickets over email, fixes in days or weeks
Direct Slack channel with the Dimely team. Same-day resolution
The result
A finance org that gets invoices paid faster.
Cash velocity, end to end
Time to invoice
53%
faster
Over a week shaved off the gap between a closed-won deal and an invoice in the customer's inbox.
Time in AR
1 week
less
Invoices that go out a week sooner spend a week less in AR. Working capital lands on the balance sheet earlier, every cycle.
Forward Networks now runs the entire path from a closed-won opportunity to a collected invoice on a single, auditable platform. The accounting team has visibility into every order, every invoice, and every open balance, in real time, in a UI that feels like the spreadsheets they already trust.
​
And the working capital impact is real. On a $10M month of revenue, getting invoices out a week sooner pulls roughly $2.3M of cash forward by a full week, every cycle. Money that used to sit in pending invoices, now on the balance sheet earlier.
​
What used to take weeks of email back-and-forth with outside consultants (a broken sync, a failed update, a stale report) now resolves in a Slack thread with the Dimely team directly. Quarter-close stopped being a fire drill. AR aging stopped being a siloed, manually refreshed spreadsheet. And as Forward's contract volume grows, the workflow grows with it without adding people.
“Everything we need for AR lives in one live view now. Invoices, payment dates, communication dates, delivery methods, internal notes. No more piecing it together at month-end.”
My Hoang
Staff Accountant, Forward Networks