A Software That Grows With Your Business
Being at the forefront of a rapidly growing software company brings with it a unique blend of challenges and thrills. The satisfaction of witnessing your company’s products gain market traction, delighted customers, increased revenue, coupled with the responsibility of driving financial stewardship, creates an environment that is both exhilarating and demanding. From managing the intricacies of subscription-based revenue models to navigating the complexities of project accounting, the financial landscape of a growing software company comes with many hurdles.
As we explore the financial landscape, we introduce Sage Intacct as a sophisticated solution—a strategic partner designed to empower financial leaders in navigating complexities and optimizing the trajectory of growth. Using Sage Intacct allows your business to start with just the basics and add-on as you grow, helping to avoid a future ERP implementation. What does this trajectory look like? Today, we’ll walk through how Sage Intacct can grow along-side your software business.
Phase 1: Start Simple
At the very beginning, the system requirements are relatively simple and due to relatively low volume easily managed with Core financials in Sage Intacct. Basic system requirements might include:
- Paying vendors
- Invoicing and collecting payments from customers
- 1099 management
- Payroll processing
- Financial reporting & dashboards
- Real-time cloud based system
It’s important at this stage to start your journey in Sage Intacct with a strong foundation: chart of accounts and dimensions. This is where our teams can help – having a sound structure to build upon based on best practice recommendations, makes growing and scaling with the software simple.
Included with Sage Intacct’s Core, are the following modules:
Dashboards and reports, though not specifically called out above, are also core to Sage Intacct and allow for reporting needed for quick decision making, real-time access to your data, and investor reporting.
It’s also important to note, along with Sage Intacct as your ERP, you’ll likely also be considering marketplace partners for Payroll, Expense Management, and other functions. The beauty of a system like Sage Intacct with an open API is the number of marketplace partner solutions available. So while Intacct may be your home for all things finance and accounting-related, you can completely customize your technology stack and in identifying partner solutions, other teams who lead up those functions can have their own say in a software they prefer.
Phase 2: Growth
At this phase, volume has increased and processes that could previously be easily managed in Excel, from creating quotes for customers to keeping track of revenue recognition schedules, are now adding hours to your days. You may have hired a sales team and they could really benefit from a CRM that standardizes your sales processes. You also want to be sure you are serving your customers long-term through support and customer success. You may also be considering adding to your accounting team to keep track of those revenue recognition schedules and other more complex accounting functions. That’s where Sage Intacct coupled with Salesforce (or other CRM) step in. CRM helps to automate and standardize customer relationship management throughout all points of the customer lifecycle and Sage Intacct helps to automate the billing lifecycle from invoicing, to revenue recognition, to collections. Instead of adding to headcount at this point, it’s worthwhile to take a step back to evaluate if now is the right time to enhance your use of Sage Intacct by implementing Contracts (more on the Contracts module in this blog post), Project Costing & Billing, Avatax for automating tax, and Revenue Management coupled with a CRM like Salesforce.
Your technology both within Sage Intacct and the surrounding marketplace partners, grows as your grow:
Phase 3: Expansion and Beyond
As your company expands and grows whether through IPO or mergers and acquisitions, Sage Intacct grows with you. You’re able to easily add on both US and non-US base currency entities, multi-currency transacting, and global or domestic consolidations while ensuring your meet reporting and local compliance requirements along the way.
Below is an example of a company consolidated income statement with entities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, and United Kingdom.
What’s Next
If you are interested in growing with Sage Intacct, no matter what phase of the journey you might be on, or have a friend that you would love to bring over so you can have someone other than your friends and family who might be tired of hearing about the most exciting new Sage Intacct releases, we’re here to help with either new implementation or post-implementation services so reach out to our CLA Sage Intacct team!.
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with seven years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.