Could Sage 300 be Holding You Back

5 Signs why now may be the time to move.
Sage 300 has served as a capable solution that benefited many organizations for years but may no longer the right solution for the growing business.

These 5 signs may be telling you that it’s time to move to a cloud-based solution like Sage Intacct. By being proactive you can ensure a smooth transition to a new core financials solution with little disruption to your operations.

1. Over-Reliance of Spreadsheets
“We were doing a $23 million budget in Excel and you cannot imagine how painful that is.”

For finance managers in a growing business this can be an all too familiar situation. Over time, scaling organizations need to adopt accounting practices like revenue recognition and multi-entity consolidation. Unfortunately, Sage 300 was not purpose built for these developing business needs. This puts pressure on the finance teams to develop cumbersome workarounds to fill their reporting gap. For some businesses, this burden is often accompanied by:

• Exporting data to multiple spreadsheets
• Creating additional journal entries every month
• Using a third-party tool that is not integrated.

These workarounds lead to entry errors that may be material, outdated data, process inefficiencies, wasted time and resources, and a lack of control and compliance.

2. Excess Manual Data Entry and Re-Entry
“Our true volume of transactions was much higher than we realized. Right now, we have a team of three rock stars doing the work of seven people, but that’s not sustainable. We need a solution that helps us work smarter, not harder.”

One of the downsides of working with a system that wasn’t designed to automate tasks is the mountain of recurring, manual entries that finance teams must process. Manual integrations involving exports & imports, or rekeying data are OK with small transaction volumes, but as a business scales, these types of workarounds can become unsustainable.

Organizations are under increasing pressure to make data-driven decisions to maintain a competitive advantage. By eliminating these manual processes, Sage Intacct frees up more time for the finance team to analyze the data, making them a more strategic partner in the business.

3. A Lack of Dimensional Reporting
“We knew we had to say goodbye to heavy segmenting with no consistency and say hello to an organized dimensional system that allows us to slice and dice the information any way we see fit.”

Before the cloud, core financials and accounting solutions were limited to canned reports without roll-specific dashboards. That meant that the business had to fit their financial reports around the programs’ limitations and not on the requirements of their organization.

The multi-dimensional nature of Sage Intacct allows for the easy creation of role specific reports ensuring users will see what’s important to them without the extra “stuff” they don’t need to see, nor care about.

A configurable workflow is becoming a fundamental requirement for businesses seeking a solution that can help them scale. It allows you to enforce process while eliminating any extra work.

By leveraging a financial system that incorporates both a multi-dimensional general ledger and report writer, you can transform your analysis and become a strategic partner who generates insight to answer the big questions facing management.

4. Limited Access to Data and Inadequate Controls Around Financial Processes
“Once we moved to Sage Intacct, it was like going from looking at a 2D image of our financial business to a 3D comprehensive view of our business with a clarity you wouldn’t expect. It’s liberating.”

Before graduating from Sage 300, businesses that are ready to scale can be hindered by data access limitations that impact their financial processes. When the finance team is the gatekeeper that must first crunch the data before it’s useful, they become the bottleneck. Sage Intacct allows team members from different areas of the organization to access the same data, in real time, which leads to increased efficiency, improved accuracy in reporting, quicker and better decisions.

5. Difficulty in Adapting to New Business Requirements
“Before, when I wanted to really drill down into something, I would need to have so many reports and modules open that my computer would just crash.”

One of the classic signs that an organization is ready to move from their existing solution is a noticeable slowdown across the system. The menus and screens, that were once so quick and responsive are now slow to load and react as the system struggles to keep up with data volume and intensity of calculations. Report-printing takes forever and you half-expect the lights to dim as you run queries.

Not only are these issues annoying, they are potentially a warning of impending system failure and data loss. Periodic restarts of the application is not a viable workaround. It’s a potential disaster waiting to happen. Without a plan to migrate to a solution that can handle the organization’s process load, it could mean a permanent loss of critical financial data.

The Next Wave of Financial Management Technology
If you’re experiencing any of the signs discussed above, we’re here to help. Organizations that have migrated to Sage Intacct now enjoy real-time data and processes, flexible reporting, and role-based dashboards. We’ve helped organizations increase productivity and improve accuracy through accounting automation, extensive integration and user-defined workflows. More importantly, these companies can scale with Sage Intacct.

Book some time on my calendar to explore Sage Intacct as your future financial accounting solution. If you’d like to see the software – join us for a quick coffee break demo.

The Sage Intacct customer quotes in this article were provided by Stephanie Kolibaba, Director of Finance at the Family Centre. The Family Centre is an Edmonton-based nonprofit serving children, youth & families to foster healthy families in healthy communities.