Achieving CFO 4.0 with Sage Intacct

This article appears in our Q3 2022 issue of Finance Transformation Magazine. To download the issue, click here

Hannah Munro, Managing Director of itas, explains the advantages to the CFO of adopting Sage Intacct to successfully deliver Finance Transformation programs.

Today's CFO is facing an ever-changing landscape with more calls on their time and a need to do more with less. They are expected to be the right hand to the CEO, able to elevate themselves to focus on strategy all whilst leading a multi-disciplinary finance team and keeping the day-to-day wheels moving. The only way that they can do that is if they have the right tools to do the job.

Sage Intacct is a powerful multi-award-winning cloud financial management solution designed for growing and mid-sized businesses. It delivers best-in-class financial accounting capabilities including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation tools and has been rated No.1 in the mid market by G2.

Born and bred in the Cloud, Sage Intacct offers an alternative to the traditional legacy ERP approach with a best of breed strategy. This gives finance teams the ability to choose the tools they use and because of this, it can easy scale from startup to enterprise. Its largest customers are processing billions of transactions.

For CFOs who want to transform their departments and become one of the new generation of CFO 4.0 leaders, Sage Intacct is an ideal jumping-off point. It typically delivers 250% ROI, 79% quicker month end close and 65% productivity improvements!!!

What are the key things that a CFO needs to become that strategic forward facing CFO 4.0?

1. Leverage Integration Power

A true Cloud solution, Sage Intacct offers the security of scalability, disaster recovery, automatic
updates and close to 100% uptime. Its world class API connectivity and "Buy with Confidence" guarantee means that the smart CFO can choose its best-of-breed general ledger and reporting system, and then easily integrate with those specialist third-party applications to give them the bespoke system they need.

The Sage Intacct marketplace offers hundreds of pre-built integrations that you can leverage. The "out of the box" Salesforce integration not only allows you to use workflows to generate invoices and contracts directly from Salesforce, but you can also pop Sage Intacct screens from within Salesforce to see payment status, print documents and share messages between sales and finance.

Sage Intacct allows you to choose the systems that you want to use without compromising on reporting or data quality. Get the flexibility to upgrade your system capabilities as you scale, without changing your core finance system.

2. Effective Financial Reporting

One of the key requirements of the CFO 4.0 is the ability to impart complex, board-level information in an accessible manner. However, what if your system can't give you the basic information you need?

Too often financial systems have so-called 'Reporting' modules that require a degree in SQL programming to use!

Users report that the biggest benefits of Sage Intacct is the simplicity, transparency, and most importantly the usability of the reporting functionality. It has a suite of reporting tools including:

• Financial Report Writer: Leverage the power of dimensions to analyse your P&L across customer, project, product, division or supplier
• Interactive Visual Explorer: Explore your data with powerful layered visuals and the ability to build storyboards and presentations
• Global Consolidations: Run a consolidation at any time and in any currency. Automate your intercompany postings and consolidate both nominal and dimensional data
• SAAS Digital Board Book: Instant On-demand metrics including ARR, MRR, CMRR and Churn.

Sage Intacct gives CFOs reporting tools that they can actually use, alongside deep dimensional insight.

3. Rolling Close Automation

The holy grail of finance teams always used to be as short a month end close process as possible but for the CFO 4.0 that mode of thinking is outdated.

Instead, the concept of rolling close and always-ready information means that at any point reports can be run that don't need to be caveated because journals haven't been run or ledgers closed. It is predicated on a system that not only gives on demand access to drillable dashboards but also automates the collection and adjustment of data.

Sage Intacct has a suite of inbuilt modules that automate the correction of data so that you know your numbers are right all the time, not just at month end:

• Automate Revenue Recognition at point of entry with the ability to do date based straight-line, event driven or milestone-based revenue recognition
• Dynamic Allocation allows you to build rule based automated journals to split costs by division, entity, project, salesperson, and any other dimension you need. You can base these splits on fixed percentages or use dynamic variables such as FTEs, hours worked, or revenue earnt to calculate the values

· Sleep well and don't let mistakes keep you up at night with Sage Intacct's AI driven General Ledger
outlier detection that is always on the hunt for mispostings and potential issues as they happen

• Contract expense recognition module makes aligning cost and revenue easier.

Sage Intacct allows you to automate the collection, correction and reporting of your critical data and deliver on the dream of a continuous close; so you know exactly how your business is performing every day of the month and not just at month end.

Be CFO 4.0

So many CFOs say that they are hampered by systems and manual processes, that their expensive software actually becomes a blocker to growth rather than a driver for it.

The CFOs we speak with all have an ideal version of their current finance team that they can't achieve, usually down to outdated systems. The big benefit of Sage Intacct is that it allows the CFO to realise their ambitions for their team and to deliver real impact for their company.

I have seen the massive impact Sage Intacct can have on CFOs and their teams. When we implement Sage Intacct, it doesn't just change finance, it changes the way that the entire business perceives finance, enabling CFOs to dream big, deliver real transformative change and make that shift to having a proactive and strategic impact on their organisations.

About the author: Hannah Munro

Hannah is Managing Director of itas and Host of CFO 4.0 Podcast with over 10 years' experience helping CFOs drive financial transformation. She is passionate about using Sage technologies to reimagine the role of finance.