Business Growth

Why Upgrade from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct

  • Finance, Healthcare, Home, Sage Intacct, Services

As a valued member of the Sage family, we prioritise your growth and success above all else. As your business expands and evolves, you may find yourself pushing the boundaries of Sage 50. Our main goal is to ensure that you have the perfect solution to position yourself for success in every stage of your business journey. For many of our customers, the ideal solution has been transitioning to the cloud with Sage Intacct.

Created as a cloud-based solution right from the start, Sage Intacct has enabled countless Sage 50 users around the world to work flexibly and effortlessly. But when should you start thinking about making the switch from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct?

5 Signs your business has outgrown Sage 50

1. The need to access systems remotely 

With Sage 50, you are limited to just two options for accessing your business’s systems: working from the office or setting up a remote-access server. Unfortunately, the former often results in long hours and weekends spent away from your loved ones, while the latter requires investing in infrastructure and additional IT personnel to keep it running smoothly. Not being able to access systems from anywhere, at any time, puts strain on the business’s operations and how efficiently they work.

2. You have unscalable, error-prone manual processes

It’s incredibly easy for inefficient processes that may have worked when you first started out to gradually become the “norm” even though they can’t handle growth and expansion. This often leads to the need for hiring more staff as your business grows. Without automation to streamline operations, you risk losing valuable time to manual tasks. Plus, there’s an increased chance of errors when manually inputting data, which can further hinder progress. These manual processes ultimately effect your business’s ability to thrive, causing you to fall behind and miss out on valuable opportunities.

3. You’re doing too much of your reporting in excel

As your business continues to grow, it becomes increasingly important to have a comprehensive reporting system in place. Unfortunately, Sage 50 lacks the ability to create calculated fields, making it impossible to combine financial and non-financial data for easy analysis, such as tracking revenue generated per sales representative. This limitation often leads to delays and, in some cases, missed deadlines when generating reports for executives and the board. Needless to say, this is a situation that no one wants to find themselves in.

4. You are experiencing integration issues

Integrating Sage 50 with other software or third-party applications can be quite challenging, resulting in issues with data consistency and the need for manual data entry. Many industries have specific requirements that can only be met by top-notch vendors. When these systems are unable to communicate effectively, it often leads to the adoption of manual workarounds, which can be both costly and time-consuming.

5. Your multi-entity consolidations take hours to days

Because Sage 50 was designed as an on-premises solution, it may not meet the needs of organizations that have multiple business entities. This can result in the need for manual entry of inter-entity transactions to ensure balanced books. As a result, consolidations can become time-consuming, taking hours or even days to complete as data from all entities must be exported and combined in Excel. These delays can have a significant impact on the speed at which books can be closed.

Reasons to upgrade to Sage Intacct

Improved visibility

Sage Intacct offers useful reporting and analytics capabilities, giving you real-time insights into your financial performance. You can customize dashboards and reports to track important metrics, budgets, and KPIs, making it easier to make informed decisions. With Sage Intacct, understanding how your business is performing becomes effortless, enabling it to thrive and succeed. Plus, you’ll have the ability to generate the reports you need in just seconds, thanks to calculated fields and unlimited dimensions.

Improved accessibility

Sage Intacct, being a cloud-based platform, offers the flexibility and accessibility you need to access critical financial information and perform tasks on the go. This supports a remote work environment and enables real-time collaboration, ensuring that your business can keep up and seize every opportunity without any time being wasted.

Scalability and profitability

Sage Intacct offers the scalability and flexibility that businesses need to adapt to their changing needs. It efficiently manages increased transaction volumes, multi-entity operations, and complex financial structures, supporting your business’s expansion. By automating manual tasks, reducing errors, and optimising financial operations, Sage Intacct can lead to significant cost savings. This ultimately translates into increased productivity and improved financial management, providing a strong return on investment for your business.

The software offers a complete audit trail and meets all auditing requirements. This simplifies the auditing process, ensuring accurate data and compliance during audits. As a result, it saves valuable time and money associated with audits.

Streamlined multi-entity management

With Sage Intacct, your business can effortlessly consolidate hundreds of entities in just minutes, eliminating the need for days of manual work. Additionally, setting up new entities can be done in a matter of minutes without the expense of consultants. This ensures that your valuable resources are not wasted on manual data entry, allowing for seamless updates with Sage Intacct. As a result, delays are reduced, and your business can experience accelerated growth.

Why upgrade to Sage Intacct with Envisage

Ultimately, Sage Intacct offers a comprehensive solution that greatly enhances your business’s financial processes. By automating tasks, ensuring accuracy, and boosting efficiency, this accounting system can truly transform how your finance team operates. With its exceptional advantages specifically designed to address the diverse needs of different industries, investing in Sage Intacct is a wise and strategic decision.

If you’re interested in learning more about Sage Intacct, feel free to reach out to our team at Envisage. We would be more than happy to assist you in determining if it’s the right solution for your business and help with the software implementation. Our commitment is to provide you with an efficient end-to-end service, and we would be delighted to have a no-obligation conversation with you.

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Simplifying Business Operations with Unified Software Solutions

Enhancing Planning and Budgeting Capabilities with Sage Intacct

Simplifying Business Operations with Unified Software Solutions
  • Finance, Healthcare, Home, Sage Intacct, Services

Accurate planning and budgeting are critical components for the long-term success of any business, regardless of size or industry sector. With advancements in technology, organisations now have the opportunity to move beyond traditional methods of budgeting and embrace more sophisticated tools. Replacing your spreadsheets with Sage Intacct can revolutionise how you budget and plan ahead for the future.

Below we have explored this modern accounting software in more detail, highlighting how it can enhance budgeting capabilities and streamline processes for finance departments.

How Accurate Budgeting Supports Business Success

Budgeting isn’t just an exercise that financial teams undertake at the beginning of the fiscal year, it’s an ongoing activity that’s the backbone of decision-making and financial management. Accurate budgeting allows organisations to allocate resources where they are most needed, which can boost efficiency and drive growth.

Some of the key benefits of precise budgeting include:

Strategic Alignment – Accurate budgeting aligns financial resources with organisational goals, ensuring that every euro spent contributes to achieving the strategic vision.

Risk Management – Predicting revenue and costs allows companies to set aside a contingency fund, helping mitigate risks and uncertainties in the future.

Cash Flow Optimisation – Well-planned budgets help to maintain optimal cash flow levels, ensuring that a business can meet all its obligations.

Performance Tracking – Comprehensive budgets become a baseline for evaluating actual performance against expected outcomes. This allows for real-time adjustments, supporting the changing needs of a business.

Spreadsheets v Sage Intacct

While spreadsheets have been the go-to tool for budgeting and planning for many years, they come with several challenges. From limited data integration and manual data entry errors to scalability issues, spreadsheets aren’t always the best option for day-to-day budgets.

For businesses looking to enhance their budgeting and planning capabilities, Sage Intacct accounting software is an effective alternative to spreadsheets for many financial tasks. This comprehensive solution can meet all of your financial management needs and reduce your reliance on inflexible, traditional tools like spreadsheets.

Automation

Automation is one of Sage Intacct’s standout features that provides tangible benefits for budgeting and planning. By automating complex or repetitive tasks, you can remove the need for manual data entry, freeing up time to focus on data analysis and strategic planning. Automation can reduce the risk of human error too, ensuring you get the accurate insights you need to drive your business forward. Enhancing the efficiency of your finance teams and increasing the reliability of your data will enable you to deliver financial insights much easier.

Real-Time Data

In today’s fast-paced business world, real-time data access is crucial for making informed decisions. Sage Intacct offers real-time insights to a wide range of departments, allowing collaboration across the entire organisation. This efficient accounting software enables you to make timely adjustments to your budget and strategy too. You can see the whole financial picture, so you can act quickly to seize opportunities or mitigate problems as they arise. This gives you a competitive edge in a saturated industry.

Scalability

Scalability is a significant factor to consider whenever you’re selecting a budgeting and planning tool for your business. Sage Intacct financial management software is designed to scale with your business, ensuring you don’t outgrow the software or need to make constant adjustments to fit your needs. With multi-currency reporting and additional functionality available, it’s a long-term solution that will serve you well regardless of what the future holds. Not to mention, Sage Intacct integrates with a variety of other applications too.

Customisation

Sage Intacct offers robust customisation features that allow you to tailor the software to meet your specific business needs. Whether you’re operating a small start-up, a large enterprise or a growing business, you can configure Sage Intacct to align perfectly with your budgeting and planning requirements. This level of customisation provides a more user-friendly experience, ensuring that the tool serves as an extension of your financial team. With features like rolling forecasts and what-if scenario modelling, you can use what’s most beneficial to you.

Cloud-Based

One of the most compelling features of Sage Intacct accounting software is that it’s cloud-based, offering unparalleled flexibility and accessibility. Regardless of your location, cloud accounting solutions allow you to access your financial data anytime. This level of convenience enables your team to collaborate more effectively and streamlines the decision-making process. You will be able to adjust your budget and planning strategies as and when needed, without being tied to a specific physical location.

Straightforward Use

One critical factor when choosing a budgeting and planning solution is the ease in which it can be set up and used by finance departments. Sage Intacct offers an intuitive point-and-click setup, allowing your financial team to be up and running in no time. The tours and walkthroughs make the various functionalities easy to use from the get-go too. This means less time spent on training and troubleshooting, so your team can focus on what matters most; strategic financial planning and effective budgeting.

Integrating Sage Intacct

Ultimately, Sage Intacct provides a comprehensive solution that enhances planning and budgeting processes. By providing automation, accuracy and efficiency, this accounting system can revolutionise how your finance team operates on a day-to-day basis. With its unique benefits tailored to meet the challenges of different industries and business types, it’s a great investment. By integrating Sage Intacct into your operations, you can not only gain a competitive advantage but also position your business for sustainable growth.

If you’d like to learn more about Sage Intacct in Ireland, don’t hesitate to contact our team at Envisage. With the most experienced Sage technical team in-house, we can confidently say we ‘know our stuff’. We have assisted a variety of clients with their accounting and finance system needs and have developed creative solutions to their unique challenges.

You can find out more about our approach on our website and if you have any questions at all about Sage software, we will happily answer these for you.

We’re delighted to be exhibiting at this years ERP Head to Head where we’ll be showcasing Sage Intacct and the benefits of this solution.

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Enhancing Business Efficiency with Sage 200 Features

A Sage Guide for Accountants and Consultants

Enhancing Business Efficiency with Sage 200 Features
  • Finance, Home, Sage 200, Services

The digital age has revolutionised the way businesses operate, but it isn’t always easy to know which type of software can be used to improve efficiency and performance. As an accountant or consultant, you may find yourself in a position where you notice your clients would benefit from upgrading their current accounting applications to something more advanced. However, you might not know what modern software to recommend.

Sage accounting software can benefit businesses of all sizes and it’s worth exploring in more detail, regardless of who your client is, the size of their business or what industry they operate in. Our teams at Envisage and Pimbrook are working together once again to provide advisory services to accountants and consultants so they can match their clients with the best Sage solutions, helping them to overcome the challenges they’re currently facing.

Below we have explored Sage software solutions in more detail and touched on the importance of choosing the right Sage partner to guide you towards the best products for your clients.

An Overview of Sage 50, Sage 200 and Sage Intacct

The Sage product range caters to businesses of various sizes, industries and complexities. While Sage 50 is an ideal fit for small businesses, Sage 200 is often better suited to medium-sized businesses. On the other hand, Sage Intacct is the go-to choice for advanced financial management and accounting needs.

There is always a next step within the Sage product portfolio too. So, clients can start small and move up the range as they scale up and expand their operations. Here is an overview of the Sage software offerings:

Sage 50

Sage 50 is the ideal product for smaller businesses, giving a complete view of finances and inventory. It includes financial management tools, such as invoicing, billing and inventory management, and can simplify day-to-day operations for accounts departments. With a user-friendly interface, Sage 50 software is also ideal for businesses with in-house bookkeepers or accountants who need to simplify basic processes such as invoicing and financial management along with more complex business accounting tasks. The financial reporting and forecasting capabilities can be tailored to business-specific needs, and will support cash flow management too.

Sage 200

Sage 200 suits growing, medium-sized businesses and there are two options to choose from; Sage 200 Standard or Sage 200 Professional. This solution can support various business processes and help to manage both customers and suppliers. With detailed reporting and analytics, it has the capability to handle more complex financial structures, and Sage 200 software can be integrated with a host of integrated applications. It’s ideal for driving efficiencies through automation and can simplify day-to-day operations.

For businesses that need a scalable solution, Sage 200 is an excellent choice. It can support more users, transactions, internal departments and warehouses, and can be tailor-made to meet specific needs.

Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is the latest cloud-based Sage accounting software. It’s a powerful financial management solution that’s suited to medium to large organisations. Sage Intacct provides real-time financial and operational insights, and has impressive functionality. With multi-entity and multi-currency support, it’s ideal for businesses operating both globally and locally. Although it offers best-in-class accounting functionality, it has a simple and modern interface making it straightforward to use and can streamline manual processes.

This solution is perfect for organisations that are looking for a modern and agile solution to help accelerate their growth. Sage Intacct is trusted by financial professionals from a range of industries to drive their successes.

The Importance of Choosing the Right Sage Partner

Choosing the right Sage product for a client’s unique needs is just the first step. To truly harness the power of Sage software, it’s crucial to find the best partner. A Sage Partner can help turn complex scenarios into simple solutions.

Sage Software Knowledge – An experienced Sage partner will have the skills and knowledge to recommend the right software to transform day-to-day operations. They can support you in your conversations with clients and ensure you’re making the best suggestions. They will stay up-to-date with the world of software, so you don’t have to.

Customised Implementation – Every business is unique and a credible partner will ensure that a Sage solution is tailored to your client’s specific needs. They offer efficient and hassle-free implementation services to remove the stress associated with introducing new software. Regardless of how big the project may be, it will be handled by an expert team and support will be provided every step of the way.

Software Training – To maximise the benefits of any Sage software, the accounting team needs to know how to use it effectively. A good partner will provide comprehensive training sessions to your clients and their employees, answering any questions to ensure they’re making the most of the available functionalities.

Ongoing Support – A dependable Sage Partner won’t just assist with the initial setup but they will provide ongoing support, ensuring smooth operations and timely updates. They can make using Sage software solutions an enjoyable experience and will be on hand to help whenever may be required. They can provide advice as a business grows too, ensuring their software remains suitable for their everyday needs.

Searching for a Sage Partner in Ireland?

Ultimately, Sage offers a spectrum of products that are designed to meet diverse business needs. By understanding the basics about each product and partnering with a reputable Sage Partner, accountants and consultants can equip their clients with the tools they need for success. Should you require any guidance in selecting the best Sage solutions for your clients, our team at Envisage and our partner Pimbrook is here to assist you.

Envisage and Pimbrook have worked in collaboration for several years to ensure that clients’ are accurately matched to the right Sage products. Our expert Sage consultants work with like-minded accountants and consultants to achieve the common goal of delivering the best possible solutions for their clients. You can rely on both Envisage and Pimbrook to deliver a high-quality project, and ensure that your clients have a positive experience throughout.

Sign up for this interactive panel-style webinar, where you’ll learn:

– Advice and Best Practices for Advising Clients on Finance/ERP systems
– Use Case Scenarios
– The Distinguishing Features of the Sage Product Range