Organizations are typically not excited to change software. It takes time, costs money, and can be disruptive and challenging to fit it in amidst many competing priorities. However, upgrading your financial management software can have a transformative impact on the accounting department and the entire organization while delivering significant return on investment, too.
Below are five of the most common reasons organizations begin considering migrating from Sage 500 to Sage Intacct. For more reasons to start planning your Sage 500 migration, see our Life After Sage 500 Blog Series
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Sage 500 vs. Sage Intacct
1. Excel spreadsheets can’t deliver the real-time insight their growing organization needs.
Sage 500 offers a variety of reporting solutions, but clients are often frustrated with the tools' lack of flexibility and/or technical complexity. As a result, they spend far too much time dumping data into Excel, manipulating, pivoting, filtering, sorting information, and manually formatting required reports, charts, and graphs.
Sage Intacct offers built-in dashboards, interactive reports, and intelligent analytics that can significantly reduce and often eliminate the need for Excel-based efforts. Updated in real time and configurable for each user, dashboards and business intelligent reports give instant visibility and enable timely, data-driven decisions.
2. Manual processes are reducing organizational effectiveness and profitability.
Sage 500 offers a robust set of financial modules, but it has not been architected or optimized for certain types of industries (e.g. software & SaaS, professional services, associations, media and entertainment, not-for-profits). Organizations forced to adopt manual workarounds for processes such as contract management, revenue recognition, project accounting, fund management, etc. will be far less effective as employee productivity decreases, customer service sags, and profitability suffers.
Sage Intacct provides robust capabilities for automating key processes such as opportunity to cash, project accounting, and fund management that can facilitate automated processes and cost-effective growth. Sage Intacct is purpose-built for industries without distribution or manufacturing requirements.
3. Multi-entity / location organizations need greater flexibility from their financial management software.
The 1990s gave us many good things (e.g. the Internet, Sony Discman, Windows 95, Rollerblades, and Y2K to name a few), and Sage 500 was a cutting edge solution when it was released. While still a solid product in many ways, Sage 500 can tend to struggle with the demands of modern organizations.
In contrast, Sage Intacct was architected for the cloud and offers significant flexibility and benefit for today’s organization. Consider:
- Multi-entity management – automatically consolidated financial and operational reports, intercompany transactions, allocations, shared chart of accounts (COA), customers, and vendors
- Dimensional accounting – rather than relying upon the chart of accounts and a single reference code, Sage Intacct offers the ability to track and analyze an unlimited number of data dimensions.
- Multi-book accounting – track and report on an unlimited number of books (e.g. accrual, cash, tax, GAAP, etc.)
4. “Best-in-class” is a better approach going forward.
When Sage 500 was released in the 90s, the prevailing wisdom was that a suite of modules from a single vendor was the best way to provide required functionality across the organization and simplify integration, support, and the occasional upgrade. The problem is, no single suite of applications provides all the functionality an organization needs. Further, only part of the suite represented the ideal solution, forcing the rest of the organization to compromise with sub-optimal features.
Most organizations these days have moved or would like to migrate away from the limitations of a single vendor suite and have invested in “best-in-class” solutions – Salesforce, Workday, Avalara, and ADP, to name a few. Sage Intacct is a perfect fit for a “best-in-class” organization. It integrates with over 200 leading cloud solutions, with APIs that are 12+ years backward compatible, ensuring that integrations won’t break during product updates. As a result, clients can utilize the tools they want for each line of business and have confidence that the entire solution will work together seamlessly.
5. Embrace the cloud to drive strategic focus and success!
More and more organizations are looking for concrete ways to reduce the burden on internal IT, free up internal resources to pursue more value-added activities, and improve their employees’ ability to spend their time serving clients, thinking strategically, and driving the company’s mission forward.
Sage Intacct's cloud solution provides access from anywhere, anytime, on any device. The annual subscription includes 4 hassle-free updates/year and all hosting, backups, and data security. It helps your accounting, finance, and IT teams make the best use of their time and be a more strategic resource for the entire organization.
