How to assess the perfect cloud core financial solution for your midsize enterprise

Gartner, the world’s leading research and advisory company, has published the 2021 Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities report covering cloud core financial management suites for midsize, large, and global enterprises.

The 2021 Critical Capabilities report scored products and services along 15 capabilities. Gartner defines lower midsize enterprises as: “Organizations with annual revenue of between $50 million to $500 million, and that have headquarters and the majority of their operations in a single country.”

The launch of the report provides decision makers driving digital transformation in medium and large industries, with a benchmark to choose which top tier financial management suite would be the best return on investment.

You can access the report here.

Here are the three critical areas where your financial management platform should score highly.

1. Lower midmarket scalability

One of the key areas of success that products like Sage has achieved since its launch,  is the ability to help growing businesses achieve midmarket scalability. Modern CFOs are tasked with more responsibility when it comes to driving digital transformation in their organization and will also play a key role in scaling the business. To achieve these goals they require a financial management platform that is easy to integrate, and flexible enough to work with other cloud-based systems.

This was an area where Gartner recognized Sage Intacct’s high achievement.

“Sage Intacct offers a scalable core financial system with good flexibility and functionality. It is well-targeted at lower-midsize organizations, but has the capacity to scale upward when accounting processes are not overly complex. Many Sage Intacct customers said they had little need for IT involvement post-implementation.”

2. Customer satisfaction

One of the ways in which Gartner puts together its overall product score is by talking to the people that matter most, the customer. One of the aspects of Sage Intacct that impressed customers the most was fast deployment. When a business makes the decision to upgrade or switch their core financial suite, it’s critical that their is little friction or downtime, Sage Intacct allows businesses to start keeping track of their financials as soon as possible.

“Sage Intacct scored above average with respect to overall product capabilities, meaning that it provides appropriately targeted functionality to the user base to which it is marketed. Its subscription billing scored highly among customers, with capabilities that support linear and nonlinear schedules, usage-based billing, volume discounts and tiered billing capabilities.”

3. Product capability

With the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP as competitors,  it’s no surprise that the top scoring software providers in the product capability category need to drive a robust platform bursting with features that can satisfy the needs of organisations across a number of verticals. Among the standout features that were recognized were Sage intact’s tiered billing capabilities.

“Sage Intacct has a strong vision for how to use the cloud and new technology to support improvements to finance processes. This includes using AI to eliminate the financial close by enabling continuous audit to detect anomalies, and rich interactive analytics to visualize and gain real-time insight into financial and business performance. Sage has its own in-house FP&A solution — Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning — seamlessly integrated, which is also intended for lower-midsize enterprises.”

Product Score

Although any platforms will selectively highlight areas in industry reports where they score highly, Sage Intacct sits above the rest when it comes to product score.

Sage Intacct received the highest product score (4.58 out of five) in the Core Financials for Lower Midsize Enterprises Use Case in the 2021 Gartner report Critical Capabilities for Cloud Core Financial Management Suites for Midsize, Large, and Global Enterprises. This continues a streak of five straight years Sage Intacct has scored highest for that use case.