Accounts Payable Software

Article credit: Sage 

Are you wondering if you should switch from Sage 200 Evolution to Sage Intacct? Read below to find out why customers make the switch with a side by side comparison of Sage 200 Evolution vs Sage Intacct.

Digitise your business to work anytime, anyplace and anywhere with Sage Intacct’s world-class technology removing your infrastructure burden. Increased levels of collaboration across your business, gives you the agility and flexibility around financial operations, freeing you to focus on your business and enabling strategic, data-driven decision making.

Sage Intacct’s innovative and award-winning applications are the preferred financial applications for American Institute of Public Accountants (AICPA) business solutions.

Article credit: Sage 

Table of Contents

Introduction
Cloud Financials Keep You Ahead
1. You can’t Afford to Delay Change
2. Business Demands to Know Now
3. Information Logjams Cost You Money
4. Automation Makes You Lean
5. Self-Service Helps You do More
6. You Have to Find Answers Faster
7. You Want to be Thinking Ahead
The Time to Act is Now
About the Author
About Sage Intacct

Introduction

THE FRENETIC PACE of modern business shows no signs of slowing down. If anything, it’s accelerating. Enterprises have to operate in an always-on, digital world in which we all expect results on demand. But their incumbent systems are letting them down.
Traditional financial systems were typically designed in an era when it might take days or even weeks to collect and process information. The mismatch to today’s high-speed expectations means the right answers don’t arrive when they’re needed.

Modern, ambitious businesses need a financial system that’s designed to operate the way they do–one that’s adaptable, responsive, and ready to deliver timely answers on demand.
It’s always tempting to postpone the necessary action – to put off change until another day.

But when colleagues don’t have up-to-date information, they risk missing crucial warning signals or remaining blind to developing trends. Margins stay under pressure because it’s so hard to chase down costs. Customer billing questions are left unresolved. Key performance indicators constantly lag behind the curve. Every month that passes is yet another missed opportunity. Don’t wait until a crisis forces your hand. The time to act is now.

Cloud Financials Keep You Ahead

A modern financial system can become ‘right-time’–not looking only at the past but also involved in what’s happening now and in the future. With earlier generations of technology, the only way to get things done was to run each function in isolation. The financial system kept to its core role of keeping a reliable historic transactional record. While that remains a crucial function, today’s robust connectivity makes it possible to break down those barriers and connect financials directly into day-to-day business operations.
Implemented in just a few months or even weeks, a cloud financial system is able to work in sync with the business. Instead of acting as a brake on progress, it embraces and facilitates change. It delivers financial data in a business context that shows the real-world impact of decisions. It supports speedy digital alternatives to error-prone, slow-moving paper processes. It has the connectivity and integration smarts to automatically consolidate business data. Rather than running in isolation from the rest of the business, it becomes an integral part of day-to-day operations, decision-making and strategic planning.
Fast-moving enterprises understand the importance of right-time information to compete successfully in a digitally connected world. They recognize the risks of delay and the rapid advantages a cloud financial system brings their business. There are seven reasons now is the time to move to cloud financials.

Here are 7 Reasons to Move to Cloud Financials Now

1. You can’t Afford to Delay Change

Businesses today need the flexibility to rapidly seize emerging opportunities or quickly deal with new challenges. But many are held back by disjointed processes and cumbersome systems that don’t easily adapt to new requirements. Conventional software packages can’t accommodate change without involving IT specialists. Multi-step manual processes can’t be altered without significant disruption and risk. Reports can’t be updated to track important new business metrics.
A cloud financial system supports business agility because it offers the freedom to adapt rapidly, at
the precise moment when it will be most impactful. Finance staff can easily reconfigure workflow
or data points without needing to call for IT help. Automation makes it easier to manage and modify
multi-step processes. Point-and-click menus allow employees to adapt reports and dashboards to
track and analyze new cost centres, revenue streams or other metrics. The business doesn’t have to hold back any more on new initiatives for lack of proper systems to support them.

2. Business Demands to Know Now

If the business doesn’t have a financial view of day-to-day operations, it can’t control spending or margins effectively. Keeping finance isolated in its own functional silo denies access to crucial transactional data that business managers need to inform their decision making. Every day that action is delayed has adverse effects on the bottom line, and impacts competitiveness in fast-moving markets.
When financials run in the cloud, the data is available in real-time to stakeholders wherever they are. Even more valuable is the ability to combine it with operational data and business metrics. Putting finance into a business context allows far more accurate monitoring of how the business is performing. Metrics can be as diverse as customer acquisition cost, dollar churn or even tracking specific assets or projects.

3. Information Logjams Cost You Money

Many organizations ‘make do’ with paper-based processes, time-consuming workarounds and spreadsheet consolidations–despite the waste of resources and increased risk of errors. The cost and disruption of upgrades and integration deter them from converting to a more automated system. But data that are waiting to be entered or consolidated can’t be made available where it’s needed. These information logjams have a hidden cost that’s growing all the time as the pace of business accelerates.
A cloud financial system that’s designed to work in sync with other business functions can eliminate the need for workarounds and spreadsheets. Cloud systems connect easily and securely to other applications, especially customer-facing systems such as CRM and eCommerce. These automated connections bring data directly into the financial system for end-to-end processing, manipulation and analysis. A cloud system also has the flexibility to run certain capabilities as built-in modules instead of requiring separate specialist systems. Examples include global consolidations, billing, travel and expense management and project scheduling and management.
Bringing all the data together in this way results in a cost-effective, integrated view of core financial and business metrics that cuts costs, saves time, delivers real-time insight and improves decision making.

4. Automation Makes You Lean

Up-and-coming businesses gain a significant competitive edge when they harness digital connectivity to streamline productivity and enhance outcomes. More established incumbents find it hard to respond because their processes are rooted in a history of passing paper forms and documents from one department or organization to another to get things done. These manual processes constantly burn up money-wasting productive employee time on repetitive data input, and then on copying, faxing, and physically storing documents that create complex, time-consuming audit trails. Going paperless instantly saves costs, improves efficiency and streamlines processes.
A single, connected system that integrates easily with other cloud-based systems helps an enterprise eliminate time-consuming manual processes and take full advantage of the connectivity and digital features of today’s smart devices and applications. Introducing automated, digital processes for functions such as timesheets, expense claims and billing can quickly improve efficiency, enhance accuracy, cut costs and prevent revenue leakage.

5. Self-Service Helps You do More

Improving access to information helps manage change and tune the performance of business operations.
But many finance systems require specialist expertise to develop or customize reports, turning the
finance department into a bottleneck that slows down the availability of critical analysis. Unable or
unwilling to wait for answers, business decision-makers either abandon the attempt or turn to inefficient,
unreliable workarounds to extract the information they need. This adds to costs every day and inhibits
the effectiveness of the business.
Self-service access to reports and user-friendly editing tools are familiar characteristics of cloud
financials. A cloud-native system includes a robust access management infrastructure to control who
has access to create reports and the data they are authorized to view. Finance teams can easily create
reports and make them available to others in the organization for rapid access to up-to-date financial
and business metrics. These may be created and maintained by finance or delegated to
other departments.

6. You Have to Find Answers Faster

Everyone is trying to get more done in the working day and we are all less willing to wait for answers.
Connecting processes and data within your organization puts the foundation in place but automation
only goes so far. The picture is not complete until your people can communicate efficiently to
co-ordinate and react promptly when exceptions arise.
Online collaboration is a natural fit for a cloud-based financial system. When conversations happen in the
context of the transactions and documents they refer to, people have the information in front of them
to be able to resolve questions quickly and accurately. There is a direct cash benefit to the business as
collections improve and orders turn into invoices more quickly.

7. You Want to be Thinking Ahead

In today’s fast-moving, digitally connected world, enterprises have to be on top of their game to survive
and thrive. Not just lean and efficient at what they do, but ready to adjust their business strategy in
response to new opportunities or challenges that can spring up at any time. The finance team has a
pivotal role to play in this strategic thinking. But that’s a big ask when resources are tied up in the day-to-day
firefighting and meaningful metrics are sparse and slow to arrive.
Cloud financials provide flexible automation that frees up resources while right-time reporting delivers
appropriate business metrics. Decision-makers and finance teams are spared time-consuming
administrative tasks, becoming free to focus on timely, well informed strategic analysis and planning.

The Time To Act Is Now

The challenges–and opportunities–facing businesses today aren’t getting any easier. This is no time to be saddled with inflexible systems that can’t adapt to change and growth or aren’t able to deliver timely information flows. Every day that passes without making the move to right-time financials adds to the mounting waste of resources and missed opportunities.  Fortunately, a cloud financial system avoids the long-term disruption and implementation risk of conventional on-premises software projects. It can be rolled out incrementally, replacing core financial functions in the first few months or weeks. Later on, new modules, reports and connections to other systems can be added according to need and resource availability.
As soon as the new system is in place, the finance team can begin to take advantage of the self-service and automation features to free up time while delivering more meaningful reporting to business colleagues. Further value can be delivered once more functions and connections are added, breaking through earlier barriers that prevented financials from contributing to day-to-day business operations. Most important of all, a cloud financial system brings fresh agility to adapt to a connected, digital world in which change is the only reliable constant. It can deliver the capabilities, information and insight that a modern business needs to face the future with confidence.

About the Author

Phil Wainewright is CEO of strategic consulting group Procullux Ventures and a trusted thought leader in enterprise computing. He is best known for his long-running Software as Services blog on ZDNet, and more recently as a co-founder of diginomica, the tech media site for business decision-makers engaged in digital transformation. He is a frequent speaker and advocate for Frictionless Enterprise, showing how the adoption of cloud applications and platforms transform the way people work and do business and helps enterprise leaders meet the challenges of today’s global, 24×7, connected world.

About Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is the innovation and customer satisfaction leader in cloud
Financial Management. With the powerful combination of Sage and Intacct, the Sage Business Cloud offers the best capabilities of both companies. Bringing cloud computing to finance and accounting, Sage Intacct’s innovative and award-winning applications are the preferred financial applications for AICPA business solutions. In use by organizations from startups to public companies, Sage Intacct is designed to improve company performance and make finance more
productive. Hundreds of leading CPA firms and Value Added Resellers also offer Sage Intacct to their clients. The Sage Intacct system includes accounting, cash management, purchasing, vendor management, financial consolidation, revenue recognition, subscription billing, contract management, project accounting, fund accounting, inventory management, and financial reporting applications, all delivered through the cloud.

What distinguishes Sage Intacct most is the company we keep—the employees, partners, and customers that come together to inspire continuous innovation and success. Contact us today for a free quotation.