6.7%
Phase I success rate, 2024
Life Sciences · Biotech & Pharmaceuticals
The financial infrastructure your pipeline deserves — and your auditors demand.
Clinical-stage biotech companies carry one of the most complex finance profiles in existence: CRO accruals calculated outside the ERP, milestone revenue that lives in spreadsheets, and pre-IPO audit readiness built on goodwill. Archer configures NetSuite so the numbers are as rigorous as the science.
15+ days
Avg. pharma close cycle
$356B
GTN bubble (2024)
>70%
Of accruals still in spreadsheets
SOX-Ready
Control framework
Where finance gets complicated
Clinical-stage finance is a different discipline entirely.
Most biotech finance teams manage their most critical estimates — CRO spend, trial accruals, milestone recognition — entirely outside their ERP. That gap between the system of record and the actual numbers is where audit surprises, board misalignments, and restatements originate.
CRO accruals calculated in spreadsheets
Finance teams estimate trial progress from CRO data — site activation rates, patient enrollment, lab services — and translate those estimates into accruals manually. The methodology is defensible until auditors ask for it in writing.
>70% of clinical-stage companies calculate accruals outside their ERP
Milestone revenue that doesn't recognize itself
Collaboration agreements, licensing deals, and grant income each carry ASC 606 recognition triggers that must be evaluated at inception and remeasured each period. Without automated schedules in NetSuite, this is a close-cycle bottleneck every month.
Manual revenue schedules add 3–5 days to the average biotech close
Pre-IPO SOX readiness built on approximations
As companies approach public markets, auditors systematically test controls that were never formally documented. Segregation of duties gaps, missing approval trails on JEs, and undocumented accrual methodology become findings — at exactly the wrong time.
SOX remediation post-IPO costs 3–5x more than building controls pre-IPO
Multi-entity consolidation done manually at close
Subsidiaries, intercompany activity, and currency translation are managed through spreadsheet consolidations by teams that should be spending their close cycle on analysis, not reconciliation.
Finance teams lose 30–40% of close time to manual consolidation steps
Purpose-built for regulated pharma operations
The modules that eliminate the manual workarounds.
Archer's purpose-built modules address the specific workflows that generic NetSuite configuration leaves to spreadsheets — deployed during implementation, not retrofitted after your next audit finding.
Archer Module
Accruals Management
Automated accrual calculations and journal entries for CRO spend, milestone prepayments, and trial-phase costs — with documented methodology that satisfies Big Four auditors and removes the spreadsheet from the close cycle entirely.
Archer Module
Contract Lifecycle Management
End-to-end management of collaboration agreements, CRO master service agreements, and licensing contracts — with ASC 606-aligned revenue schedules, milestone tracking, and renewal workflows built directly into NetSuite.
Archer Module
Approvals Workflow
Configurable, multi-level approval routing for POs, vendor bills, journal entries, and SOW amendments — with immutable audit trails across every transaction type that satisfy SOX control expectations from day one.
Archer Module
21 CFR Part 11 e-Signature
FDA-compliant electronic signatures with full audit trail across financial approvals — enabling the documented, role-based authorization chain that regulators and auditors expect from a public or pre-IPO life sciences company.
What becomes possible
A finance infrastructure that closes faster, audits cleaner, and scales with your pipeline.
When accruals, revenue recognition, and controls are automated inside NetSuite — not maintained alongside it — the entire finance function operates at a different level.
50%
Faster monthly close
Close cycles cut in half
Automated accrual schedules, pre-built revenue recognition, and intercompany elimination reduce close cycles from 15+ days to under 7 — giving leadership real numbers faster and your team its time back.
Zero
Audit surprises on accrual methodology
Auditors sign off without surprises
Documented accrual logic, automated JE approval trails, and SOD-compliant role configuration mean your auditors review a clean environment — not a remediation plan.
3×
Faster pre-IPO readiness
Pre-IPO preparation becomes a process, not a scramble
Companies with controls built into their ERP from the start reach SOX readiness in a fraction of the time — without the six-figure remediation cost that comes from building it under an S-1 filing deadline.
Get started
Ready to run finance as rigorously as you run science?
Schedule a discovery call with Archer. We'll assess your current environment and show you what a SOX-ready, scalable NetSuite implementation looks like for your pipeline stage.