Call us: 
Sage 300 Could be Holding you Back. 5 Signs why now is the right time to move to the Cloud.
For many businesses, Sage 300 has served as a capable solution that benefited their organizations for years but is perhaps no longer the right solution for the direction the growing business is headed.
By recognizing these five telltale signs that indicate that a business is ready to move to a cloud-based solution such as Sage Intacct, proactive decision makers can ensure a smooth transition process to their new core financials software with little interruption to their business operations.
1. Over-Reliance of Spreadsheets to Support Financial Processes and Reporting
“We were doing a $23 million budget in excel and you cannot imagine how painful that is.”
For finance managers in a bustling business this may be an all too familiar situation. Many scaling organizations develop accounting requirements such as revenue recognition and multi-entity consolidation, but unfortunately, Sage 300 was not purpose built for these emerging business needs. This puts pressure on the finance teams to design cumbersome workarounds to fill their reporting gap. For some businesses, this burden is often accompanied by the following challenges.
• Exporting data to multiple spreadsheets
• Creating additional journal entries each month
• Using a third-party tool to report revenue that doesn’t integrate with the primary accounting solution.
These workarounds lead to entry errors, incorrect or outdated data, process inefficiencies, wasted time and resources, and a lack of control and compliance.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 main downsides of working with a system that wasn’t designed to handle automated tasks, is the mountain of manual entries that finance teams have to endure. Manual integrations involving CSV dumps, or rekeying etc. might suffice when volumes are small, but as a successful business scales, these types of workarounds can become unsustainable. What’s more, organizations are under increasing pressure to make data-driven decisions to keep up with their competitors - by reducing the number of manual processes, Sage Intacct frees up more time for stakeholders, giving them the space to analyze the data.
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 advent of the cloud, core financials and accounting solutions were limited to canned reports without catch-all dashboards. This means that businesses that still rely on this software are fitting their financial reports around the programs’ limitations and not on the requirements of their organization. Sage Intacct allows for heavy customization of reporting, thus ensuring users can pull reports that only contain data that is relevant to their organization. A configurable workflow is no longer ‘a nice to have’, it’s a fundamental requirement for businesses seeking a solution that can power their journey to scale.
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 insights that answer the bigger 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 become impaired by limitations data access and the financial processes this affects. One related challenge is when the organization has just one designated gatekeeper that is tasked with delving through the trove of spreadsheets to provide stakeholders with the data that matches their query as closely as possible. Sage Intacct allows team members from different areas of the organization to access the same data view in real time, which leads to increased efficiency and improved accuracy in reporting.
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, now have lengthy delays as the system struggles to keep up with data volume and calculations intensity. Report-printing takes forever, and queries seem to dim the lights.
These critical limitations are risky at best. It can force you to periodically restart the program just to maintain data files. This is not a workaround, it’s a disaster waiting to happen. Without an eventual migration 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
We’re here to help businesses move from Sage 300 to Sage Intacct. The 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. Critically, these companies can scale with Sage Intacct – as the business grows, they can increase transaction volume and easily add new entities.
Give us a call or shoot us an email if you’d like 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.