Over the years, we’ve talked with many customers that made the decision to come over to Sage Intacct. Through that process, five themes emerged as key drivers to move to the cloud. Let’s take a closer look at what they are.
1. You’re doing too much of your reporting in excel. Let’s start off by saying that the reporting that comes with Sage 50cloud is great at doing what it is designed to do. Financial statements and reports based on the chart of accounts? No problem. However, as the customers we spoke to developed a need for more complex reporting, they outpaced what Sage 50cloud provides. Additionally, they were unable to ‘slice and dice’ their data in the ways they needed, because they lacked dimensions and calculated fields.
Key sign: A significant amount of your reporting happens in Excel.
2. Your multi-entity consolidations take hours to days. Developed as an on-premises solution, Sage 50cloud wasn’t built to handle the needs of organisations that often have multiple business entities. Customers mentioned that starting up a new entity often felt like a new implementation. Customisations had to be reconfigured, the chart of accounts had to be rebuilt, and all the entities were siloed off from each other.
Key sign: Your closing of books takes several days and you have more than two entities.
3. You need to access your system remotely. Numerous customers touched upon the flexibility of being able to work anywhere, anytime, as a big advantage when migrating to Sage Intacct. Previously, they only had two choices; work from the office or set up a remote-access server. The former often led to long hours and weekends away from their families, while the latter meant investing in the infrastructure and additional IT headcount to keep it up and running. As an on-premises solution in Sage 50cloud, as the number of users and transaction volumes grew, the performance of the solution began to decline.
Key Sign: You’re forced to be in the office to work, your system has slowed to a crawl, or you’re not on the most current version.
4. Your integrations have been replaced by manual workarounds. A lot of small to medium-sized businesses aren’t looking to replace all of their business-critical solutions with an all-in-one suite. And, as is often the case, industries have specific needs that are only met by those best-of-breed vendors. When those systems aren’t able to communicate, integrations are replaced by manual workarounds.
Key Sign: Manual workarounds have taken the place of integrations.
5. You have unscalable, error-prone manual processes. It’s really easy for inefficient processes that work when you’re just starting out to gradually become ‘standard operating procedure’ even though they are unable to scale, often requiring you to hire additional headcount as your business grows. Without automation for processes like PO approvals, invoice generation, payment processing, and currency conversions, it’s easy to lose days of productivity to manual processes. These manual processes ultimately impacted their ability to grow efficiently.
Key Sign: Manual processes have become standard operating procedure.
This is a guest blog from X3 Consulting. They are exhibiting at Accountex Summit North 2021 on stand J10.