How PwC UK and Sage are empowering finance teams to navigate complexity and accelerate performance

Finance teams in mid-sized UK businesses find themselves at a crossroads. Their responsibilities have dramatically evolved: they now drive strategic growth, innovation, and competitive advantage, not just manage compliance and reporting. But many still operate with fragmented legacy systems, manual processes, and limited real-time insights, all against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and fast-paced digital change.

These challenges slow finance teams down, restricting their capacity to proactively guide their organisations at a crucial time.

A people-first approach to finance transformation

Recognising that successful finance transformation is about far more than just technology, PwC UK and Sage have created a strategic partnership that prioritises people, processes, data, and intelligent innovation.

PwC’s unique transformation model combines deep business acumen, a people-first approach, and advanced technical know-how. They don’t just deploy technology; they co-create tailored finance operating models to match each client’s business goals, empowering teams with new skills and stronger insights.

PwC has already completed over 400 implementations of Sage Intacct, Sage’s AI powered cloud accounting platform, consistently delivering outcomes up to 35% faster and 50% more cost-effectively than traditional approaches. They even use Sage Intacct themselves at the PwC Foundation.

“Our role is to help finance teams do more than just adopt technology. We empower them to lead change. We blend proven strategies with advanced tools and deep industry insight, enabling finance teams to navigate complexity efficiently and become strategic leaders within their businesses,” said Tom Pulling, PwC UK Partner.

Transforming finance into a strategic advantage

PwC’s finance transformation expertise combined with Sage Intacct’s cutting-edge technology delivers immediate and sustained benefits across sectors such as Professional Services, Financial Services, SaaS, Not-for-Profit, Real Estate, Wealth Management, and Recruitment.

Through this collaboration, finance teams have seen clear and measurable results, including:

• Real-time consolidated and dimensional reporting (such as Profit & Loss by location or project), providing enhanced insights and eliminating time-consuming manual reconciliations.
• Automated month-end processes that reduce close cycles by up to 50%, freeing teams to focus on strategic analysis and business guidance.
• Seamless integrations with existing project management and third-party systems through Sage Intacct’s robust APIs, giving finance teams holistic visibility across their entire organisation

Customer success stories:

• Lifeworks: Achieved near real-time financial reporting, cutting data availability from 4 weeks to 2–3 days. Finance team efficiency doubled, and audit queries significantly reduced, streamlining operations and improving decision-making across the charity.
• Pizza Pilgrims: Cut month-end close from 10 days to 5 and saved at least half a day per month on board report creation. Gained real-time sales and financial insights, empowering faster, more strategic decisions across 20 pizzeria locations.
• The Royal Foundation of St Katharine: Reduced financial reporting time by two days per month. Delivered more accurate and easily interpretable data for senior leaders, increasing confidence in financials and enabling clearer cost management.
• Transforming PLC: Halved month-end close time by managing 12 entities from a single login. Gained consolidated, real-time financial visibility and automated cash management, despite a one-person finance team.
• UKAT (UK Addiction Treatment Centres): Shortened month-end close by 3 days and streamlined deferred revenue management. Improved multi-entity reporting and freed up staff time through automation, supporting operational efficiency and planned growth.
• Untold Studios: Reduced monthly reporting time to just one hour and enabled one-click consolidation across global entities. API integrations and real-time insights enhanced financial agility for a fast-growing, multi-location creative business.

“Finance teams need insights that go beyond standard reporting. They need the ability to predict, advise, and shape decisions proactively. Our collaboration with PwC helps them do exactly that, transforming finance from a reactive function into a driver of growth, innovation, and competitive advantage,” said Paul O’Riordan, VP Medium Segment, UKI, Sage

AI and automation: redefining what finance teams can achieve

PwC believes the future of finance is intelligent, automated, and insight-driven. Leveraging AI capabilities directly within Sage Intacct, PwC is reshaping the role of finance to become more forward-looking, data-driven, and impactful.

PwC’s teams use AI themselves to enhance client outcomes and streamline finance functions, including:

• Automating first drafts of financial reports and management packs, drastically reducing manual workloads.
• Using natural language processing to explore financial data, extract key insights, and highlight trends and anomalies,
• Building interactive, visual dashboards, providing finance leaders with real-time analytics at their fingertips.
• Analysing stakeholder feedback, pinpointing strategic insights and identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Detecting financial risk patterns early, enabling proactive and preventative strategies.

Why this matters now: enabling high performance in an uncertain economy

PwC and Sage see the ability of finance teams to adapt, collaborate, and harness technology as central to navigating the economic uncertainty ahead. Finance teams that adopt intelligent, automated, insight-driven tools are the ones who will lead their organisations through change, not merely survive it.

By embedding advanced automation, AI-driven reporting tools, and specialised templates built on Sage Intacct’s robust platform, finance teams can overcome traditional constraints and confidently guide their organisations to sustainable success.

“AI and automation aren’t just making finance processes faster; they’re fundamentally reshaping what finance teams can achieve. By integrating these intelligent capabilities into our finance transformations, we help finance teams shift from reporting on the past to actively shaping the future,” said Tom Pulling, PwC UK Partner.

Looking ahead: co-creating the next generation of finance

This strategic collaboration, which formally expanded through Sage’s Managed Services programme in 2023 with PwC as the UK's first adopter, continues to evolve. PwC and Sage are co-creating sector-specific solutions, building more advanced AI-driven capabilities into their platforms, helping finance teams confidently lead their organisations through continued disruption.

“We see enormous potential ahead, particularly as finance teams look to AI and digital innovation to solve increasingly complex problems. Our partnership with Sage positions us to help finance teams not just meet these challenges but thrive in them,” said Tom Pulling, PwC UK Partner.