The top five reasons to migrate

Over the years, we’ve talked with many customers that made the decision to come over to Sage Intacct. Through that process, five themes emerged as key drivers to move to the cloud. Let’s take a closer look at what they are.

1. You’re doing too much of your reporting in excel. Let’s start off by saying that the reporting that comes with Sage 50cloud is great at doing what it is designed to do. Financial statements and reports based on the chart of accounts? No problem. However, as the customers we spoke to developed a need for more complex reporting, they outpaced what Sage 50cloud provides. Additionally, they were unable to ‘slice and dice’ their data in the ways they needed, because they lacked dimensions and calculated fields. As a proxy for dimensions, some customers significantly increased their chart of accounts’ lines. While this may have helped for reporting purposes, it led to data-quality issues and difficulty tagging GL entries correctly. Without the ability to create calculated fields, they were unable to combine financial and non-financial data to easily see information such as revenue generated per sales rep. For these reasons, more and more of their reporting moved out of Sage 50cloud, until 60-100% of their reports were built in Excel. This caused delays, and in some cases missed deadlines, when generating reports for executives and the board. A position no one wants to find themselves in.

Key sign: A significant amount of your reporting happens in Excel.

2. Your multi-entity consolidations take hours to days. Developed as an on-premises solution, Sage 50cloud wasn’t built to handle the needs of organisations that often have multiple business entities. Customers mentioned that starting up a new entity often felt like a new implementation. Customisations had to be reconfigured, the chart of accounts had to be rebuilt, and all the entities were siloed off from each other. Because of that, inter-entity transactions had to be manually keyed in to ensure the books were balanced. Consequently, consolidations could take hours, if not days, to complete because the data from all the entities had to be exported and combined in Excel. These delays ultimately impacted the speed with which they could close the books.

Key sign: Your closing of books takes several days and you have more than two entities.

3. You need to access your system remotely.Numerous customers touched upon the flexibility of being able to work anywhere, anytime, as a big advantage when migrating to Sage Intacct. Previously, they only had two choices; work from the office or set up a remote-access server. The former often led to long hours and weekends away from their families, while the latter meant investing in the infrastructure and additional IT headcount to keep it up and running. As an on-premises solution in Sage 50cloud, as the number of users and transaction volumes grew, the performance of the solution began to decline. In order to try and improve performance they invested in additional servers and IT headcount to set-up and maintain them.

Key Sign: You’re forced to be in the office to work, your system has slowed to a crawl, or you’re not on the most current version.

4. Your integrations have been replaced by manual workarounds. A lot of small to medium-sized businesses aren’t looking to replace all of their business-critical solutions with an all-in-one suite. And, as is often the case, industries have specific needs that are only met by those best-of-breed vendors. When those systems aren’t able to communicate, integrations are replaced by manual workarounds. Many of the customers we talked to needed an easy way to connect all their solutions without the high costs often associated with this. Since Sage 50cloud runs on a server or computer that isn’t always on, and changes can be made offline, integrations become more expensive and difficult to build because it’s having to constantly check that all the systems are in sync.

Key Sign: Manual workarounds have taken the place of integrations.

5. You have unscalable, error-prone manual processesIt’s really easy for inefficient processes that work when you’re just starting out to gradually become ‘standard operating procedure’ even though they are unable to scale, often requiring you to hire additional headcount as your business grows. Without automation for processes like PO approvals, invoice generation, payment processing, and currency conversions, it’s easy to lose days of productivity to manual processes. For example, one customer we talked to had to print out and physically walk PO’s around the office in order to get all the necessary signatures. While another had their DSO increase to 50+ days, because they were manually generating invoices. These manual processes ultimately impacted their ability to grow efficiently.

Key Sign: Manual processes have become standard operating procedure.