The customers who shaped Coherence.
DocuLedger has been building accounting and operations systems for manufacturers and multi‑entity operators for nearly a decade. These are the stories that taught us what Coherence needed to be — and what it means to build a system that helps people steer.
A new product, built on a decade of customer engagements.
Coherence is a new product. The problems it solves aren't new, and neither is the team solving them. The case studies below are DocuLedger customer engagements that shaped the product — the real operational challenges, the workable solutions, and the lessons that got built into Coherence's foundation.
Each story reflects at least one of the three beats that now anchor the product: trending the numbers that matter, signaling what needs attention, and keeping the distance between seeing and acting as short as possible.
Every customer featured below was operating across multiple entities, multiple locations, or both. That pattern is where Coherence's weekly value shows up most clearly.
Customer names and quotes are used with permission.
Water treatment — FACT Water
Project revenue and cost tracking. Zero‑downtime migration with full historical fidelity.
Read story →Financial ops — NACHA & Positive Pay
Hundreds of monthly payments. Check volume down, fraud exposure down, reconciliation drag gone.
Read story →Stencil mfg. — FCT Solder
Customer ordering + accounting, purpose‑built, for a manufacturer on three continents.
Read story →Distributed org — unified accounting
Three teams, three systems, three versions of the truth. One source of record, real‑time dashboards.
Read story →Migrating to a new system without a single day of downtime.
The challenge
FACT Water needed a new Project Revenue and Cost Tracking system that could handle the specific complexity of delivering chemical products, managing projects across geographies, and coordinating field services — all while maintaining financial accuracy their clients and auditors expected. The hard constraint: no disruption to ongoing operations, and no loss of historical data from the outgoing system.
What we did
DocuLedger ran both systems in parallel during the migration window. Historical data came into the new system through a structured import process that preserved every transaction's audit trail and every project's cost history. Users adopted the new interface progressively, team‑by‑team, with targeted support rather than a big‑bang training event. By the time the legacy system was retired, every user was already working in the new one.
The outcome
Zero data loss. Zero operational disruption. A controller who had been prepared for a months‑long transition instead found the system running in the background while the team focused on water treatment projects.
The system just runs, and as I was quite busy in many Water projects, this was one I had to have relatively very little involvement in.
The "two spreadsheets and an afternoon" onboarding promise in Coherence — Chart of Accounts Import and Trial Balance Import that post historical periods in minutes — is how we productized the lesson from engagements like this one. If a customer can't start trending their numbers on day one, everything downstream falls apart.
Cutting payment volume and fraud exposure in the same project.
The challenge
An accounting department processing hundreds of payments per month wanted to reduce check printing, stuffing, and mailing — and take advantage of the bank's Positive Pay controls that pre‑authorize every payment before it reaches the bank. The existing workflow was a mix of manual check runs and ad‑hoc vendor payments with no structural protection against duplicate payments or unauthorized drafts.
What we did
DocuLedger introduced two integrated bank‑processing capabilities. First, NACHA batch file generation: a single upload to the bank's portal replaced the physical check run for ACH‑eligible vendors, collapsing hundreds of disbursed transactions into one reconciliation line. Second, Positive Pay file generation: every payment was pre‑authorized with the bank, so any unauthorized draft was automatically blocked.
The outcome
Dramatic reduction in check‑printing volume. Elimination of the reconciliation drag that hundreds of individual disbursements used to create. Structural protection against the most expensive AP errors: duplicate payments and fraudulent drafts.
The NACHA file feature has really saved me a lot of time.
The Payment Run feature in Coherence — smart‑select actions, live scoreboard, structural duplicate‑payment prevention — grew directly out of this work. More broadly, this engagement taught us that signals have to translate into action quickly or they don't matter. A flag on an AP dashboard is only useful if the workflow to act on it is one step away.
Purpose‑built ordering and accounting for a manufacturer operating across three continents.
The challenge
A leading SMT stencil manufacturer needed a customer‑facing online ordering system that integrated with a production‑grade accounting solution. Their requirements combined unique technical challenges in the product itself — custom tooling, complex specifications, staged production — with a customer service and support team geographically distributed across the US, Europe, and Asia. Off‑the‑shelf systems couldn't meet both the technical product requirements and the operational workflow requirements.
What we did
DocuLedger built a tailored solution on Microsoft Azure. Stakeholders from every operational area — sales, production, accounting, customer service — were interviewed before any development began. A test environment went up early and stayed live through the build, so users were reviewing real functionality on real data weeks before cutover. When the system went live, it did so without interrupting order production or accounting operations. Not a single order missed during the transition.
The outcome
A single, integrated ordering‑and‑accounting platform that replaced multiple disconnected systems. Production, accounting, and customer service working from the same data in real time, across three continents.
Finally, an ERP that gets manufacturing. We needed something more powerful than QuickBooks but couldn't stomach NetSuite's complexity and cost. DocuLedger gave us enterprise features with small business simplicity.
The "between QuickBooks and NetSuite" position Mike identified is exactly where Coherence sits at the multi‑entity level today. And the discipline of building surfaces that serve distinct teams — sales, production, accounting — without forcing anyone through somebody else's workflow runs through every part of Coherence, from the Portfolio view (built for decision‑makers) to Period Reports (built for the people producing the numbers).
Dashboards that answer real questions, systems that stop diverging.
The challenge
A stencil manufacturer with accounting, production, and management functions distributed across the country and the world found their several in‑house systems had diverged over time. The accounting team, production team, and management team were each running queries and reports through their own system of record — which meant reconciling the differences was a full‑time job, and leadership was making cost decisions from numbers that often didn't agree.
What we did
DocuLedger built a cloud‑based platform on Microsoft Azure with geo‑redundant data replication, daily incremental backups, and role‑specific portals for different operational teams. Accounting, production, and sales each got the view they needed — but the data underneath was one source of truth. Dashboards, both standard and custom, put operational metrics directly in front of leadership without requiring someone to run and reconcile a report.
The outcome
The three‑way divergence stopped. Leadership got access to real‑time operational dashboards they could act on. The system has run continuously since without major overhaul.
I'm a data-driven guy, and with the standard and custom dashboards I have everything I need to make clear, operational, cost-saving decisions.
Brent's quote is the thesis of the Portfolio view. Nine metrics. Lens‑based reshaping. Signal chips that surface what needs attention without a filter. The idea that a decision‑maker should never have to run a report to see what's moving — and should be one click from the transaction driving it — is exactly what the Portfolio view was built to deliver.
Four customers. Four industries.
One pattern underneath.
Four customers. Four industries. Four different technical challenges. One pattern underneath:
All four operate across multiple locations, entities, or geographies. All four needed one surface that spoke to everyone without forcing anyone through somebody else's workflow. That's the problem Coherence was built to solve at the portfolio level.
A leader who needed to know what was moving. A workflow that wasn't surfacing signals until it was too late to act on them. A gap between the numbers and the decision. And a system that — once it existed — closed that gap in a way the team could trust.
Trend.
History captured cleanly enough to see what was moving — from day one, not month six. The FACT Water migration is how that became "two spreadsheets and an afternoon."
Signal.
A surface that raises its hand when something deserves attention — before it costs something. The NACHA / Positive Pay work is how signals became one‑click actions.
Steer.
The distance between seeing and acting kept as short as possible. The FCT and distributed‑org engagements are how role‑specific views became the Portfolio and Period Reports split.
Ready to see what Coherence looks like
on your numbers?
Two spreadsheet uploads. An afternoon. No migration, no parallel run, no chart‑of‑accounts redesign.