How much time do you spend in Excel each month? "Too long" is probably the answer if you rely on it to handle your entertainment company's accounting. Many organizations are in this boat.
Indeed, as part of Microsoft Office, Excel has almost universal penetration in accounting departments. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales once found that 98 percent of its members used the spreadsheet app. Plus, Excel is commonly used with Word as part of solutions for use cases such as document management and business reporting.
However, its numerous limitations should have you thinking about upgrading to a superior system such as Intacct. Here are three reasons why you should switch to cloud financial software so your finances are ready for primetime:
1. Excel is hard to use for even basic reporting
Advanced use of Excel requires programmatic knowledge of formulas and filters, along with constant tweaks to template settings to ensure that your reports are accurate. These barriers to use make it difficult for most teams to generate basic reports, much less meet the complex reporting requirements in the entertainment industry, which often must cover multiple taxable entities, business structures, and project stakeholders.
With manual processes, you're more likely to encounter costly errors.
2. There is too much room for error
Excel requires extensive manual manipulation of data. All of this keying and re-keying of items requires precious time and also raises the risk of a costly error. A single corrupted cell could delay your already overlong monthly close, complicate your workflows for processes such as accounts payable, and demoralize your finance team. Errors are common; almost 90 percent of all spreadsheets have errors, according to numbers compiled by a University of Hawaii researcher.
"Intacct offers many flexible and intuitive reporting options."
3. Your Excel data is mostly siloed
As you work on a film or advertising project, you'll likely juggle several applications to keep track of intellectual properties, business contacts, time, and fees. Ideally, you would have financial management software that seamlessly integrated with applications like Salesforce in addition to other add-ons. But relying on Excel means that a lot of your data is isolated and must be tediously cross-checked before it is used in any other workflows.
Prepare your accounting for the spotlight with Intacct
Unlike Excel, Sage Intacct offers deep automation, many flexible and intuitive reporting options, and tight integrations with a broad ecosystem of third-party apps. Supported by scalable cloud infrastructure, Intacct is perfectly positioned to adapting to your evolving requirements and new projects.
RKLeSolutions, an Intacct Premier Partner, can give you the guidance and implementation assistance that you need to get off to a great start with your Intacct deployment. RKL has years of experience in the entertainment industry in particular and knows how you can best modernize your accounting system for today's world.
