Texas-based Varsity Brands is a team sports platform that provides a range of services and solutions for sports, cheerleading, dance, band and yearbooks. It supports athletic programmes, schools, gyms and teams with customisable uniforms, gear, competitions, experiences, training and education.
Through its 150,000 customers the company reaches more than eight million athletes and students across the United States. It has long-standing relationships with global athletic brands such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armour and New Balance. Earlier this year, global investment firm KKR acquired Varsity Brands from its previous private equity owners Bain Capital and Charlesbank.
Having emerged from the consolidation of three separate entities – BSN SPORTS, Varsity Spirit and Herff Jones – Varsity Brands faced numerous challenges in its treasury processes.
Manual and siloed approaches caused inefficient use of cash resources and liquidity and predicting cash flow was imprecise, leading to unreliable business projections. Funds were left unused – missing out on potential investment opportunities and revenue streams – while multiple systems led to a lack of integration, hindering a unified view of enterprise-wide cash positions.
The company has a four-strong treasury team located in Farmers Branch, Texas, consisting of a treasurer, treasury manager, treasury analyst and assistant treasurer, Kristin Teply.
In the wake of the business consolidation, they had to log into seven different banking platforms to gain visibility into cash balances, send payments and look at positive pay activity. “It took a few hours for our team to be able to get our total cash balances each day,” explains Teply. “We also had multiple debt and hedging instruments that were all tracked in Excel.”
Having recognised the need to overhaul its treasury processes, Varsity Brands selected Kyriba to redefine and optimise these operations.
“Implementation started in December 2022 and the new platform was live in May 2023,” says Teply. “We continue to find ways to develop the platform and streamline processes. For example, we created an auto batch process to launch payments first thing in the morning, for payments approved the night before.”
The company worked with an implementation consultant, Elire. Teply says the thinking behind that decision was that they would have the tools, knowledge and best practices to get the platform set-up quickly with less reworking later and that the implementation might not have been as successful if an external consultant had not been engaged.
“They gave us options on set-up, presenting the pros and cons of options which allowed us to have the system work best for our needs,” she says. “If we had done the project ourselves, I think our go live would have been three to four months later than it was with the consultants.”
The key objective of the project was to be able to get bank balances and complete wires quickly and on one platform. The company also wanted a better system for bank account management.
In addition to achieving 100% cash visibility and zero idle cash, cash forecasting accuracy has risen to 90% and cash management productivity has increased by 85%, saving almost 240 hours of processing time every month.
“The platform gives us a better way to keep track of opened, closed and account signer changes that helps us with our audits,” says Teply. “Looking ahead, we are working to get the accounting entries flowing to our ERP system to help accounting with daily cash journal entries. We are also developing our forecast reporting for more efficient variance analysis.”
