Financial pros weigh the real cost of quickbooks

How do you know when the low-price solution is costing you more than you’re saving? A few weeks ago, I interviewed two financial professionals who moved their organizations off QuickBooks and started seeing a big payback.

Both webinar guests work with companies that have graduated to Sage Intacct and made great strides in building automation and visibility into their accounting processes. Both guests also have extensive backgrounds in finance, leading back to early career positions with big accounting firms. The two companies they work for have very different business processes and focuses, but both found that the flexibility built into Sage Intacct allowed them to adapt the finance system to their ways of doing business.

Consolidated financials for multi-entity restaurant management

In the webinar, Pam Bakker of Laird Management was the first to tell her story. Laird Management runs more than 30 Burger King restaurants across Arizona. As you might imagine, Pam had huge requirement needs around multi-entity functionality and cash processing. She talked about the need to manage purchasing from the top level to take advantage of the scale of their business when ordering everything from food to cleaning supplies. They continue to grow, and Pam likes that she can add entities in minutes at any time without IT support.

Prior to moving to Sage Intacct, she spent days building out reports in Excel to the business owner’s specifications. After moving to Sage Intacct, she went into the financial report writer and built out all the reports she needed, in the format the owner required, using only Sage Intacct’s built-in help system. Now she has a reporting package that helps her add strategic insight into company growth decisions by having key metrics at her finger tips.

Streamlined insurance claims payments

Kristy Facchini, with AutoClaims Direct, talked about the need to automate expense processes. Her goal was to achieve a paperless process for the more than the 700 claims that they pay each month. Between the custom integration from their claims system to Sage Intacct and ACH payment functionality, she reduced the time to process payments from a full day to a couple of minutes. She now runs payments on the 15^th and last day of the month like clockwork in just 5 minutes. And her team has time to strategically analyze the business and help guide growth.

She talks about the enablement process and how her IT staff was able to easily integrate their claims system by simply mapping fields, saving them three days each month in finance. They added custom fields specific to their business into Sage Intacct transaction documents to capture vital, claim-specific details on payment remittance. These fields also allow them to do more in-depth reporting than they were ever able to do with QuickBooks, allowing the company’s leadership to monitor key trends such as profitability and revenue by customer by month. Facchini even built a personalized Sage Intacct dashboard for the company’s CEO, with metrics he monitors daily to track indicators like year-to-date revenue measured against prior results and current targets.

Find out for yourself

The panel discussion includes answers to questions around how to increase visibility to better inform company decisions, replace unscalable manual processes like multi-entity consolidations and bulk payment processing, and cut the time to close by 50% or more. Panelists even field questions from listeners on the specifics of switching to Sage Intacct.

Talking to Sage Intacct customers helps me remember why, year after year, Sage Intacct continues to be #1 in Customer Satisfaction on G2 crowd.