The Top Five Signs You’ve Outgrown Sage 50
How do you know if you've outgrown Sage 50?
Many small and mid-sized businesses rely on Sage 50 to meet their organizations’ accounting and financial management needs. As one of the most reliable desktop accounting solutions, with a loyal base of customers, it’s easy to see why. For lots of businesses, it’s the first and only financial management solution they’ll ever need. However, as your business grows and evolves; you might start to push the limits of Sage 50.
As a member of the Sage family your success is at the heart of everything we do. We want to ensure that you have the right solution at every stage of your business. And for many Sage 50 customers, the solution has been to graduate to the cloud with Sage Intacct.
Built as a native cloud solution from day one, Sage Intacct has empowered thousands of Sage 50 customers to work anywhere, anytime; close the books up to 80% faster; get visibility into key metrics in seconds and consolidate all of their entities in minutes. But how can you tell if you have outgrown Sage 50?
Ask yourself, do I:
- Produce more than 40% of my reports in Excel?
- Manage 2 or more entities?
- Spend more than 10 days closing the books?
- Have difficulty accessing my system remotely?
- Rely on unscalable, error-prone processes?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, it could be time to consider upgrading to Sage Intacct. Read on to see the top five issues customers like you faced when they decided to graduate to Sage Intacct, and the benefits for their businesses.
The Top Five Signs to Graduate
1. You’re Doing Too Much of Your Reporting in Excel
Tipping Point: You’re producing 40% or more of your financial reports in Excel.
Sage 50’s base reporting is great at doing what it is designed to do. Financial statements and reports based on the chart of accounts? No sweat. However, as customers we spoke to needed more complex reporting, Sage 50 was unable to meet those needs.
They were unable to get real-time visibility into their data because they lacked dimensions and calculated fields. As a proxy for dimensions, some customers blew up their chart of accounts to over 15,000 lines. While this may have helped for reporting purposes, it led to data quality issues and difficulty correctly tagging GL entries. Without the ability to create calculated fields, they were unable to combine financial and non-financial data to easily see key metrics like revenue generated per sales rep.
2. Your Close Takes Too Long, Especially for Multiple Entities
Tipping Point: Your close takes more than 10 days or you have 2 or more entities.
Closes can take an extended period of time with Sage 50. Time-consuming activities like investigating anomalies and exceptions, performing manual reallocations, and reconciling bank statements can cause your close to exceed 10 days.
As businesses grow, they often add multiple legal entities, each of which requires a separate set of books. This can dramatically increase the time and complexity of consolidations and closes, as Sage 50 was designed for smaller, single-entity businesses. In Sage 50, each entity requires its own separate login and database instance.
Multi-entity consolidations can take hours to days to complete because the data from each entity has to be exported and manually combined in Excel. Closing the books requires a time-consuming review of all GL entries to identify and remove inter-entity transactions. Ultimately, this can easily push the close past 15 days, which leaves very little time before the next close starts.
3. You Need to Access Your System Remotely
Tipping Point: You’re forced to be in the office to work, your system has slowed to a crawl while you work from home, or you’re not on the most current version.
Many customers shared that they need the flexibility to work anywhere, anytime. With Sage 50, they had two options: work from the office or set up a remote access server. The former often led to long hours and weekends away from their families, while the latter meant investing in infrastructure and additional IT support to keep their servers up and running.
As an on-premises solution, Sage 50 was not designed to be multi-user, and the performance of the solution may decline as the number of users and transaction volumes grow. To improve performance, Sage 50 customers often need to invest in additional servers and IT headcount to set up and maintain their instances.
Lastly, the upgrade process is expensive, but often necessary to access new functionality. Upgrades can be expensive, especially since each entity instance may require costly re-implementation of customizations. As a result, customers often delay upgrading, leading them to rely on obsolete functionality and manual workarounds.
4. You’re Unable to Integrate with Other Business-Critical Systems
Tipping Point: Rekeying data has taken the place of integrations.
Most small to medium-sized businesses have several other systems that need to be integrated with their financial management or accounting system. However, since Sage 50 runs on a server or computer that is not always on, and changes can be made offline, integrations become more expensive and difficult to build because it constantly checks that all the systems are in sync. Smaller businesses often decide not to integrate their systems because of the high costs. When systems are unable to communicate, integrations are replaced by manual workarounds. Many of the customers we talked to manually rekeyed the same information into multiple systems. What they really needed was a better way to connect all their solutions without paying an arm and a leg.
5. You Have Unscalable, Error-Prone Manual Processes
Tipping Point: Manual financial processes, especially AR and AP, result in errors, create delays, and require more support staff to keep pace.
It’s really easy for financial processes that work when you’re just starting out to gradually become problematic. But those processes are not able to scale and often require lots of over-time or additional headcount as your organization grows. Without automated PO approvals, invoice generation, payment processing, and currency conversions, it’s easy to lose days of productivity.
For example, we talked to one Sage 50 customer who had to print out and physically walk PO’s around the office in order to get all the necessary signatures. Another had their DSO balloon to 50+ days because they were manually generating invoices. Ultimately, these manual processes negatively impact your ability to efficiently grow the business.
Why Sage Intacct?
While these are five common signs that a company has outgrown Sage 50, most migrate to Sage Intacct when they see one or two of these signs.
They also choose Sage Intacct because it is an award-winning product recognized by top industry associations and analysts. And your peers voted Sage Intacct number one in customer satisfaction on G2 (a software peer review website).
Multi-Dimensional Reporting
- Get the reports you need in seconds rather than days with calculated fields and unlimited dimensions
- Gain real-time visibility into key metrics with dashboards
- Reduce audit times by 50% with clear audit trails and direct auditor access to reports
Streamlined Multi-Entity Management
- Spend minutes instead of days consolidating dozens of entities within a single instance
- Close the books up to 80% faster
- Set up new entities in minutes without expensive consultants
Built for the Cloud
- Gain anywhere, anytime access with 99.8% guaranteed availability
- Get four feature-rich upgrades automatically delivered each year at no cost
- Employ modern cloud APIs for always-on integrations at not as 1/10 the cost
Automated, Scalable Financial Processes
- Grow revenue by 2-4x with little to no additional headcount
- Increase efficiency by 50-90% with automated PR, PO, and payment approval workflows
- Cut DSO by 30-60% and generate up to millions in free cash flow, with automated invoice generation and payment processing
Being part of the Sage Family means that your success and growth is at the core of everything we do.
With clear and measurable ROI, Sage Intacct offers finance organizations the solutions they need to gain new insights, simplify multi-entity management, work where and how they need to, and automate their key financial processes.
In a nutshell, that’s why so many organizations have already made the move from Sage 50 to Sage Intacct, our cloud-based financial management system.
If you’d like to learn more, please contact DeRosa Mangold Consulting to speak with one of our dedicated team members.
About Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct is the AICPA’s preferred provider of cloud financial applications.
Specializing in helping nonprofits of all types—including health and human services, NGOs, charities, trade and membership associations, cultural institutions, and faith-based organizations—Sage Intacct streamlines grant, fund, project, and donor accounting, while delivering real-time visibility into the metrics that matter.
Our modern, true cloud solution, with open APIs, gives nonprofits the connectivity, visibility, and efficiency they need to do more with less. At Sage Intacct, we help nonprofits strengthen stewardship, build influence, grow funding, and achieve mission success.
In addition to intuitive software solutions, Sage Membership provides members with access to actionable human advice from experts and peers through exclusive content and tools to help you make even better mission-critical decisions.
