Published on the 17/12/2025 | Written by Heather Wright

Data first, bots later…

When REA Group began an ERP overhaul more than a decade ago, the goal was straightforward: Replace its fragmented, end-of-life system with a platform that could scale as the business grew.

Fast forward 11 years and the ERP replacement has paid dividends, helping deliver new offerings to customers faster, with REA now eyeing an agentic future.

“You can see a new ERP platform with a lot of bells and whistles and get excited and lose direction about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.”

Back in 2014, the Australian digital property business whose brands include realestate.com.au, was grappling with a legacy, end-of-life Sage-based ERP platform that relied on multiple databases across each of REA’s businesses. Philip Moon, REA Group senior manager ERP, is blunt: It was constricting the business and severely constrained reporting capabilities.

“To get an overall REA Group picture for month end involved consolidating these databased up the chain until you got – sort of – a final overall picture. It was quite manual and high risk and took us three or four days to land at a final profit and loss for the month,” he told iStart.

A decision was made to move to NetSuite and a partnership with Netsuite partner Annexa.

Moon says REA took a ‘very disciplined’ approach to the ERP project. “You can see a new ERP platform and it’s got a lot of bells and whistles that you currently don’t have, and you can get excited about all these other things and go off path and lose a bit of the direction about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it,” he says.

REA focused on the clear key deliverables required to get things up and operating in the first phase.

“That allows you to focus and then it’s an easy conversation to have with stakeholders about what is not in phase one and what can come in a future phase.”

Phase one focused on core financials – payables, receivables and reporting – delivered through three months of proof-of-concept (“The view was, can we break NetSuite?”) followed by an 11-month implementation.

“It was a like for like to what we previously had, but on a new advanced, user-friendly platform. Can we pay our bills? Can we receive the money from our customers? Can we send customers statements and can we report the overall number in the first phase – that’s what we stuck to.”

As REA has grown, its ERP system has become a critical enabler of agility, helping solve complex business problems and respond quickly to new opportunities.

“This is probably where the value add is of the platform and a consulting team like Annexa,” Moon says. “It’s an ERP platform and can do journals and chart of accounts, vendor bills and the base expectations of a new ERP platform, but what we’ve been super-impressed with is that it has provided us with the ability to solve some of our complex business problems.”

One such example is the building of a customised, scalable, automated CapEx solution to capitalise staff costs on software and other projects. (Staff, Moon notes, are REA’s largest cost line.) The solution streamlines the process, ensures auditability and meets both internal and external compliance standards.

The company is also integrating NetSuite and the Stripe billing platform for another product currently in beta testing, enabling real-time transactions from the Stripe account to be pushed automatically into NetSuite.

As REA continues to grow – it had 1,500 staff when it moved to the new platform and now has ‘three or four times that’, along with multiple brands and business across three continents – Moon says the ERP is a critical factor in supporting that growth.

“You only ever talk about something when it is broken. There is an assumption our platform will continue to mee the operations of the business and that provides the confidence that if we come to a business challenge, or new product or requirement, we, with Annexa’s help, can navigate that.”

The AI – and agentic – imperative

Moon says AI is at the heart of everything REA does today. “And it’s not just the developers building the code that drives our websites. It’s also the other systems we have – our finance apps need to be thinking and planning for AI.”

Matthew Owens, Annexa director, says of AI in ERP: “It’s all about not just being more efficient, but being more effective in making decisions as we run a business and understanding data points and actions as they occur.”

He says there are many areas where AI in ERP can perform tasks for humans – with human oversight – but says at the moment, most use is around reporting analytics and forecasting, rather than more sophisticated use such as performing tasks. “It’s really just helping them look backwards a bit more efficiently, and that’s been there a while, then a few of the forecasting platforms are offering capabilities to use AI to predict what might happen, based on looking backwards.”

Accountants, he notes, are rightly, more risk averse given audit requirements, where there is no room for error – something LLMs are still prone too when it comes to predictions.

Moon, meanwhile, sees enormous potential in agentic AI – intelligent agents that can execute predefined processes, automate workflows and present results for human review.

“It’s something we are very excited about and thinking about how we can position ourselves now for that functionality… It’s going to be key. We see it as quite critical to continuing effectiveness and efficiency of the ERP platform.”

He says there are plenty of applications in the finance ecosystem performing functions such as vendor on-boarding, tracking requests, and bank account validation, all of which have data that may, or may not, be needed as part of the agentic platform.

“At the moment we’re doing a review about all the data and reporting capabilities in finance,” he says. “Is the data in the right spot? Does it have the right reporting on it? And can we deploy AI on that data to assist with analytics? And if we can’t, how can we architect it so it’s going to be in the right spot to take advantage of AI.”

This groundwork is essential for leveraging AI and agentic capabilities and for maintaining compliance and auditability in a risk-averse finance environment. “Our stakeholders would need to be very confident in the solution that we’ll build for them and also confident in the outcome it generates.”

Owens says the two companies are focused on building strong foundations for AI and agentic, by ensuring data is structured, secure and accessible, and fully understanding what REA is sharing with which AI services.

“There is a lot to be overlaid in terms of business requirements, compliance, data privacy, regulatory and audit, and then making sure the business value is there – that’s the journey we’re on now.”