How to spot when your growing business is ready to graduate from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct

For a lot of businesses, Sage 50 is the first and only financial management solution they’ll ever need—which is understandable, because the software is great at what it was built to do.

However, as your organization grows in size and complexity, it could be necessary to transition to a cloud-based financial management solution such as Sage Intacct that can scale along with your business.

Finance works best when there is seamless collaboration between other departments and functions. Some accounting systems often aren’t well-integrated with other enterprise-level tools and systems. These limitations can leave you trapped in manual processes, spreadsheets, cumbersome workarounds, and slower workflows as you manage conflicting formats and rekey the same data in multiple systems.

Is it time to move on from Sage 50? Check the following signs:

1. More and more of your reporting is being done in Excel

As your business grows and develops a need for more complex reporting, it may simply outpace what Sage 50 provides.

For example, you may not be able to ‘slice and dice’ your data in the ways you need, because the software lacks dimensions and calculated fields. As a proxy for dimensions, some customers blow up their chart of accounts with many additional lines. While this can help with reporting purposes, it can lead to data quality issues and difficulty correctly tagging GL entries.

Without the ability to create calculated fields, you may be unable to combine financial and non-financial data to easily see information—such as revenue generated per sales rep.

For these reasons, many of your reports are being built in Excel—and that takes time.

2. You’re missing reporting deadlines

If 40% to 60% of your reports are being built in Excel, you may be experiencing delays (and in some cases missed deadlines) when generating reports for executives and the board.

Today, more people in your organization need better reports, and they expect those reports faster than ever in real-time dashboards that show key metrics and enable you to drill down for details.

3. The close takes more than 10 days and you’re managing more than 2 entities

Developed as an on-premises solution, Sage 50 wasn’t built to handle the needs of organizations such
as SaaS and Financial Services companies that often have multiple business entities. As a result, standing up a new entity may feel like a new implementation. Customizations have to be reconfigured, the chart of accounts has to be rebuilt, and all the entities are siloed off from each other.

Because of that, inter-entity transactions have to be manually keyed in to ensure the books are balanced, and consolidations take hours to days to complete. These delays ultimately impact the speed you can close the books, making it feel like a never-ending cycle.

4. You need to access your accounting system remotely

With on-premises software, you have two choices—work from the office or set up a remote access server. Given the current business climate, with so much uncertainty over when everyone will be returning to the office, your team needs to work remotely.

Truly cloud-based software gives you and your team the ability to work anywhere, anytime.

5. Your business is scaling but Sage 50 struggles to keep up

While it likely helped you to build the business, you may find Sage 50 is unable to keep pace with your current growth.

As you add business units and expand into new markets and geographies—or even add entirely new lines of business—you may feel your existing accounting software is holding you back. For example, you may be handling new subsidiaries with more currencies, tax jurisdictions, regulatory frameworks, sales channels, and product costs.

6. Manual processes have become standard operating procedure

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. When those systems aren’t able to communicate, integrations are replaced by manual workarounds.

In summary, Sage Intacct can pick up where Sage 50 leaves off

Sage Intacct offers your organization the solution it needs to gain new insights, simplify multi-entity management, work where and how you need to, and automate key financial process.

When the time is right for your organization, you may want to consider moving on from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct. You’ll gain real-time visibility into financial data, better insight into operational KPIs and faster decision making—with self-service access, dynamic dashboards, intuitive reporting, slice/dice dimensional capabilities, and drill-down to source analysis.