Managing the finances for one business can be complicated enough. Add another company, location or legal entity and things can get considerably more interesting. Suddenly you're dealing with separate sets of accounts, intercompany transactions, different bank accounts and month end processes that seem to involve an ever growing collection of spreadsheets. Then somebody asks for a consolidated view of the whole group... ideally by this afternoon.
If that sounds familiar, the problem may not be your finance team. Your accounting system might simply be making them work harder than they need to.
It usually happens gradually. A business grows, another company is acquired, a new location opens or the structure changes.
Before long, finance teams can find themselves logging in and out of different companies, exporting figures and manually bringing everything together elsewhere. There may also be intercompany balances to reconcile and adjustments to make before anyone can see what is happening across the group.
None of those jobs are unusual, but they can take an awful lot of time.
This is one of the areas where Sage Intacct takes a very different approach.
Sage Intacct is designed to manage multiple entities within one financial management system. Rather than treating each company as a completely separate island, finance teams can work across the group and produce consolidated information without rebuilding it manually every month.
Sage's multi entity financial management includes automated consolidations, intercompany transactions and the ability to report across entities while still drilling back into the individual company when you need the detail.
That could mean less time preparing the numbers and more time actually looking at what they're telling you.
We have nothing against Excel. In fact, we're rather fond of it. The problem starts when a spreadsheet becomes the only way your business can produce important financial information.
Sage Intacct uses Dimensions to let you analyse transactions by the things that matter to your business. That might be company, department, location, project or another area you want to track.
Instead of creating increasingly complicated account codes or exporting data to manipulate elsewhere, you can use those dimensions when producing reports.
There are also financial reporting and dashboard tools that let different people see the information that's relevant to them.
No. Sage 50 Accounts can support multiple companies and remains absolutely suitable for many businesses.
The question is really about complexity.
If you're comfortably managing your companies in Sage 50 and getting the information you need, there isn't a prize for replacing it with something bigger!
But if consolidation is becoming increasingly manual, your reporting requirements are getting more complicated or your finance team is spending a growing amount of time manipulating information outside Sage, it's worth asking whether your requirements have changed.
We've already looked at some of those warning signs in our Have You Outgrown Sage 50? blog.
That's another option, and an important one.
For some businesses moving on from Sage 50, particularly those with more involved stock and commercial requirements, Sage 200 may make more sense.
For others, the cloud based financial management, reporting and multi entity capabilities of Intacct may be more closely aligned with what they're trying to achieve.
Sage has a useful overview of its wider financial reporting solutions, and we've also compared the two products in our Sage 200 vs Sage Intacct blog.
If you're managing several companies, don't start by asking which new accounting system you should buy.
Start with the annoying bits.
How long does consolidation take? How much information lives in spreadsheets? Are intercompany transactions creating unnecessary work? Can managers see the figures they need without asking finance to produce another report?
Once we understand that, we can work out whether Sage Intacct, Sage 200 or even your existing system is the sensible answer.
If month end currently involves several spreadsheets, a lot of copying and pasting and at least one person muttering at their screen, show us what you're doing. There may be a much easier way 😊
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