How will AI impact the future of SaaS finance?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping how SaaS companies conduct business and revolutionizing SaaS finance leaders’ approach to practically every accounting workflow.

The next few years will represent a crucial period of change in finance and accounting, and you’re either sprinting ahead or falling behind.

If you want to learn how to make the most of this incredible new technology and position yourself on the right side of SaaS finance history, this post is for you. 

Here’s what we’ll cover

How is Sage AI changing SaaS finance?

Sage AI solutions are changing the game for SaaS CFOs, Controllers, and RevOps managers.

Automation allows finance professionals to achieve more with less and improve process efficiency across the entire department.

Sage AI solutions are helping finance teams do more work, more accurately. 

Let’s dive into some specifics.

Simplifying business

As a SaaS finance leader, you know just how tedious and tangled manual accounting can become.

Between reconciliations, the month-end close, compliance audits, revenue recognition, and much more, a staggering amount of tasks must be done at any given time. 

Sage AI solutions enable SaaS CFOs and other accounting leaders to automate these crucial workflows, drastically simplifying your department’s financial operations. 

Cloud-based accounting tools that leverage AI can help you:

• Centralize key data with role-based dashboards

• Tame chaotic workflows like revenue recognition
• Enable real-time SaaS forecasting and more
• Devote more time to high-level strategic goals and initiatives

The last point is especially important. SaaS accounting can grow so complex and time-consuming that you lose focus on the strategic aspects of your role.

You should see that as a huge liability because your strategic contributions are what will move the company forward.

Sage AI tools can help you offload the busywork so you can focus on what truly matters for your organization.

Unlocking business insights

Once a SaaS company starts to scale, its accounting department will process massive quantities of financial and customer data. This is both a blessing and a curse.

On one hand, you have a tremendous wealth of performance-boosting insights hiding just below the surface of that data.

On the other hand, extracting profitable observations from all those numbers can be a mountainous undertaking.

Sage accounting AI goes beyond automating SaaS companies’ financial reporting and forecasting.

Once your reports and forecasts have been assembled through traditional AI, machine learning and generative AI, Sage Intacct can leverage predictive analytics to supply actionable insights and customized business strategies.

Whether it’s a customer segmentation possibility that you’ve overlooked or an untapped cross-selling opportunity, there are areas for improvement you haven’t considered yet.

Humans are better than computers at implementing business strategies. But when it comes to mining vast quantities of information for actionable insights, AI is the clear winner.

On top of all this, Sage is taking AI in new directions. 

Step into the future with Sage Copilot

Sage Copilot is an AI productivity assistant that can revolutionize your department.

It operates within the products you already know and love, acting as your AI wingman to simplify, organize, and streamline your workflows.

It maps onto your internal business environment and delivers actionable advice that improves as you feed it more data over time.

There are plenty of AI productivity solutions on the market, and many of them perform at quite a high level.

However, Sage Copilot stands alone in being specifically built for CFOs, accountants, HR leaders, and other enterprise users.

What sets Sage Copilot apart?

Sage Copilot is equipped to understand your business at a deep level.

Unlike other solutions on the market, it understands how your data structures actually operate within your ledger, how your invoices are coded, how long customers usually take to pay, and much more.

It then uses this information to:

• identify potential savings,
• process efficiency improvements,
• strategise to increase recurring revenue,
• and other suggestions that will be unique to your circumstances.

Sage Copilot is a specialized assistant that works around the clock to make your life easier.

It’s also a breeze to integrate into other software products you already use.

Sage Copilot in Microsoft apps

Sage Copilot meets you where you’re at by directly connecting to your data in Excel, Outlook Teams, and other popular Microsoft products.

Other companies tend to take a “walled garden” approach to their accounting software.

This means that their products operate within a closed ecosystem, and their AI can’t connect to third-party solutions.

That’s a huge problem for most finance departments.

When a company opts for the walled garden strategy, the implicit assumption is that you won’t utilize tools other than theirs.

At Sage, we realize that accounting teams use many different SaaS products to maximize their profitability.

Sage Copilot effortlessly integrates with Microsoft apps and other third-party software for maximum flexibility.

The AI opportunity

When first introduced in business, AI focused on simple task automation.

This was centered around rule-based protocols that allowed AI to accomplish specific and constrained functions within a given work process.

For example, a simple AI task in finance might involve coding an invoice appropriately.

AI has grown exponentially since its introduction.

Moving into the future, AI, machine learning and generative AI (GenAI) tools will work together to empower finance teams.

GenAI will rely on AI and machine learning in order to surface results from the data in the product.

Sage Copilot lets you automate entire workflows while maintaining human control.

That’s essential because automation technology can’t yet operate a business without human oversight–and won’t be able to for quite some time, possibly never.

Sage Copilot lets you take advantage of AI’s tremendous operational power without sacrificing any degree of control over your workflows.

You still have the final say on everything that gets done. 

Continuous insight

Until now, accounting has been backward-looking in nature. You had to wait to close your books at the end of the month to get the full story on your finances.

Depending on how long it takes to close your books, you might not even have the data for your last reporting period for several weeks.

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, any delay in analyzing your financial data for insights and improvements is a liability.

Sage AI technology continuously closes your books, supplying real-time visibility into your finances for more effective decision-making.

Sage’s AI solutions enable:

• Continuous real-time accounting
• Continuous assurance through rigorous product standards and in-built accounting domain expertise
• Continuous insights via AI forecasts, predictive analytics, and more

The magic of AI is that it’s always there in the background, updating your books in real time and delivering business intelligence.

AI won’t replace you–it’s not meant to.

But if you keep an open mind, it could revolutionize the way you operate at work.

Learn even more at the Modern SaaS Finance Forum

The future of AI is bright and only getting brighter.

On June 5th, Sage Intacct hosted the Modern SaaS Finance Forum, where 2,000+ industry leaders, investors, and experts digitally gathered to discuss AI and other accounting topics.

The conference had three different learning tracks for CFOs, RevOps managers, and controllers at SaaS, AI, and high-tech organizations, each consisting of 20-minute sessions.

Not everyone could block off a whole day to attend the event, so we’ve made the webinar sessions digitally available.

You can listen to as few or as many as you’d like, featuring industry insiders like Jeff Epstein at Bessemer Venture Partners, Seema Amble at Andreessen Horowitz, and many others.

Access the forum sessions here