5 Reasons Why Sage Intacct is Better for Your Construction Company Than QuickBooks

In the highly competitive construction industry where the power of information can be a real advantage, it pays to invest in a top tier financial management solution.

There are many good options out there and making the right choice can be overwhelming. It’s important to choose an accounting product that not only meets your needs today but can scale to support your growth tomorrow.

Here’s 5 reasons why it’s better for your construction company to use Sage Intacct over QuickBooks.

Reason #1: Life is Better in the Cloud

Instead of continuing to invest in antiquated, on-premises systems, leading construction businesses have turned to SaaS and cloud-enabled software because they need flexible and agile financial applications that are relatively easy to implement, configure, and update.

Demand for cloud-based financial applications continues to grow because of the ability to access and analyze massive amounts of data in real time. For example, in the cloud, project managers can log in from the job site and access up to date data.

Being in the cloud means:

• Upgrades are deployed and managed by the vendor with no IT resources needed
• Fast deployment and virtually zero unplanned downtime
• Always-on integration with leading business-critical applications
• An accounting system that is scalable and can easily accommodate additional users, transactions, and entities
• Access your data from any device anywhere, anytime.

Learn more about Sage Intacct for Construction and Real Estate.

Reason #2: Easily Manage Multiple Entities

If your multi-location construction company deals with complexities—such as decentralized payables, inter-entity transactions, multiple currencies, global consolidations—Sage Intacct can do so much more for you than QuickBooks.

With Sage Intacct for Construction, you can set up new entities with configurable rules for inter-entity transactions, bank accounts, and more. You can choose to have new entities inherit your existing lists, process definitions, and charts of accounts. 

Sage Intacct customers can consolidate hundreds of entities in minutes, instead of days, without exporting and combining data in Excel—enabling them to shorten closes by up to 80%.

It gets even better: our platform for multiple entities automates financial consolidation activities including currency conversions, inter-entity transactions, local tax reporting, and more.

Reason #3: See Things Your Way with Multi-dimensional Reporting

Things move fast in the construction business and there are many, many aspects of operations to keep an eye on.

Sage Intacct’s dimensional general ledger provides construction companies with a flexible and powerful accounting foundation because you can track financial data based on multiple dimensions such as projects, locations, departments, or cost centers. Tagging transactions—as well as operational data—lets you quickly view your data from any angle.

You can add specific business context to your data, while maintaining a lean chart of accounts. You can create role- or task-based dashboards that leverage KPI scorecards and dimensional filters that give your key decision makers access to the information they need on-demand.

“With Sage Intacct, we save about 15 hours a month on the reporting process.” —Debora Hester, Business Manager, GeoTechnologies

Reason #4: Free up Time by Automating Manual Processes

With QuickBooks, companies can lose valuable time managing manual processes that instead should be automated. With Sage Intacct, you can automate daily processes like revenue recognition, invoices, and bills.

And, with automation, your finance team can stop spending hours, or days, on painful consolidations in Excel—and slash your close time by up to 66%.  In fact, your construction company may never again perform a multi-entity consolidation in Excel.

Creating that kind of extra time frees your team to work on other, more strategic aspects of the construction business.

By taking advantage of automation, Tandem HR saved 500 hours a year and freed up more time to keep their business flowing.

“Sage Intacct has proven invaluable in giving us a single version of the truth, insightful and actionable, as opposed to financial data stuck in spreadsheets and different accounting software packages,” explains Tanya Yakhins, Controller at Tandem HR.

Reason #5: Make Better Decisions with Real-time Dashboards & Reporting

Ill-informed decisions can cost your construction company time, money, and opportunity. For example, imagine using outdated labour costs when quoting a bid.

Sage Intacct offers a wide range of customizable financial reports, dashboards, and visualizations, enabling construction businesses to track key performance indicators, identify trends, and make data-driven decisions.

From the minute you login to Sage Intacct, you will see the most up-to-date data so you can know what’s going on with your construction business. You can set up project managers with custom dashboards so they can see current information to help them do their jobs.

Everyone in your business will gain real-time insights into financial performance—something QuickBooks wasn’t built to manage.

“Their visibility on transactions is light years above where it was prior [with QuickBooks]. And, I think it’s a competitive advantage for us.” —Thomas Cochran, CFO, Orion Properties

Final Thoughts

Your construction business deserves better.

Sage Intacct offers robust financial management, real-time insights, and scalability that surpasses QuickBooks Contractor Edition. With advanced reporting, automation, and multi-entity and integration capabilities, it will help streamline your operations, enhance productivity, and facilitate better decision-making for your growing firm.