Berry Companies Replaced Email and On-Premises FTP With a Finance-Run Files.com Data Room

Berry Companies is a family-held group headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, operating construction and material-handling equipment dealerships across the central United States. Its dealerships sell, rent, and service heavy machinery.

The group is deliberately decentralized. Each division operates and manages itself under its own local brand, while a corporate center in Wichita provides shared administrative services, including finance. That structure puts the corporate finance organization at the center of a constant exchange of sensitive documents. A dealership group that sells, rents, and finances heavy machinery lives on its lender relationships, and those relationships run on paper: bank statements, tax documents, borrowing-base reports, and audit materials moving between Wichita and financial institutions across the country.

Bank Statements Went by Email Because the FTP Server Stopped at the Firewall

Berry had one system built for moving files: an on-premises FTP server. It worked poorly for anyone outside the corporate firewall, and everyone the finance team needed to reach was outside it. Banks, investors, lenders, and auditors were never going to connect to a server behind the company’s network perimeter.

So the documents went by email. Bank statements, tax documents, and borrowing-base reports traveled across the country as attachments, and every send was a manual, per-message job for the finance staff.

The condition underneath the workload was worse than the workload. The documents where control matters most were traveling on the one channel with no controls at all. An emailed bank statement is an uncontrolled copy: it cannot be recalled if it reaches the wrong inbox, it gives identical access to everyone who receives or forwards it, and it leaves no record of who opened what. For lender reporting and audit collaboration, the finance team had no way to give one party less access than another, and no way to prove afterward what had been delivered to whom.

What a Channel for Banks and Auditors Had to Do

A better server behind the firewall would not have fixed this, because the firewall was the problem. Berry’s counterparties included 10 to 20 outside institutions, and a corporate finance department cannot put a bank on its network or dictate how an audit firm connects.

The replacement had to meet those institutions where they were. It had to be reachable over the web without requiring bankers or auditors to install anything, accommodate institutional security restrictions, give different parties different rights, and record every access. It also had to be simple enough for the finance department to configure and run itself.

Berry selected Files.com to be that channel—a finance-run data room that its Director of Finance configured himself, without an IT project, and that was carrying roughly 5 TB of files a month by mid-2022.

A Data Room the Director of Finance Built Himself

Berry’s Director of Finance configured the Files.com site personally, and the design holds each institution apart from every other. Outside parties are assigned through Files.com Groups, so a lender’s users see exactly the folders that lender is entitled to and nothing else. Granular folder- and action-level permissions carry the differentiated rights: view, print, upload, and download are granted separately, so a view-only institution and a printing institution sit in the same data room under different rules.

The security controls were set to match the institutions on the other end. Accounts carry two-factor authentication. IP whitelisting was configured to line up with the access restrictions Berry’s partner financial institutions apply on their own side, so the site accepts their connections on the terms their security teams already enforce. Every action lands in the audit history.

On the internal side, finance contributors post documents into the permissioned folders. When something has to go out one-off, they send a secure Files.com link in place of an attachment. The file stays on the platform under its permissions instead of leaving the company as a copy.

The rollout itself was treated as a trust problem. An unexpected invitation to a new document portal looks like phishing to exactly the kind of people banks employ, so onboarding of the outside institutions was staged behind a communications plan. By the time an invitation arrived, the recipient already knew it was coming and knew it was real.

Five Terabytes a Month Through a Channel Finance Controls

With the site in production, Berry replaced a firewall-bound FTP server and emailed attachments with one permissioned channel to its outside institutions.

The manual, per-message workflow changed with it. Finance contributors post documents once, and group notifications tell the appropriate party when new materials are waiting without an email carrying the file. When a question comes up about whether a lender received a document, the answer is a lookup in the Files.com audit history, not a search through sent mail. Adding the next lender or auditor is routine: clone an existing user, assign the group, and the folder rights follow.

By mid-2022, the site was carrying roughly 5 TB of files a month. It became the standing channel for sensitive financial exchange and external audit collaboration, running inside the finance organization as a low-maintenance system without an IT project behind it.

A Finance Project, Not an IT Project

What changed at Berry is who operates the connection between a multi-state dealership group and the institutions that finance it. A document going to a bank used to mean an attachment nobody could take back. Now it means a folder on Files.com that one institution alone can reach, under rights Berry chose, with a record of every access.

The portable lesson is in who did the work. Standing up a governed data room for banks and auditors did not take a managed-file-transfer program run by IT. The controls that made the channel acceptable to financial institutions, from differentiated rights and two-factor authentication to IP restrictions and the audit trail, were Files.com configuration, and the finance department that owns the documents configured them. The people accountable for Berry’s lender relationships now run the channel those relationships travel on.