Outgrowing Sage 50?7 Signs It’s Time to Step Up to Cloud Accounting

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It’s rare you run into a company that isn’t strategizing for growth. The notion of “if you’re not growing as a company, then you’re dying” is powerful. And in this age of everything moving at hyperspeed - growth can happen faster than you have time to react. Suddenly you might find yourself mired in systems that are preventing you from reaching your potential or worse, sending you backwards.

Let’s talk scenarios. You’re selling overseas in different countries with different currencies from your own, new foreign entity. You have fast paced sales cycles to manage, complex contracts, recurring subscriptions, professional services, HR and increasingly complex supply chain issues that you didn’t have six months ago. And your Sage 50 system just can’t keep pace. So the voids that Sage 50 leaves behind seem to get spontaneously filled with spreadsheets, email and other “solutions” that make your auditors shake their heads and wag their fingers. Your growth slows, or just stops. And we all know what happens if you’re not growing...

How do you know when it’s time to move off Sage 50 and upgrade to cloud accounting? Check out these top signs to find out:

Sage 50 can be a good starter system, but for growing companies, it just doesn’t cut it. As your company grows, transaction volumes rise, the organization becomes increasingly complex, controls become more important, and reporting becomes more critical, making the entry level bookkeeping system insufficient to scale and support growth.

Your company is growing and you want to keep it that way

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“We have been using FinancialForce for over two years now after moving from Sage and it increasingly supports more areas of our business as we develop the applications further. We have derived numerous benefits over the journey the key ones being visibility of where the business is at any point in time and improving our invoicing cycle by over 2 weeks.” – Richard Jarvis, CFO, Information Risk Management PLC

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Has your reliance on spreadsheets run through the roof? Are you spending more time outside of Sage 50 than in it? Do you lack the automation and the ability to adapt the product to manage increasing workloads? If the answer is “yes”, then you’re due for an accounting system upgrade. Companies that run on Sage 50 typically resort to manual rekeying and time-intensive reconciliations within spreadsheets. It’s a recipe for disaster, especially for growing companies.

You have too many spreadsheets and one giant headache

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“Month-end reduced from 6 weeks using Sage to less than 10 days using FinancialForce Accounting” – Perry Offer, Global CFO, Dialogue Group

Most companies rely on a solid compliance operation to ensure they’re abiding by certain rules and guidelines when it comes to financial reporting. For Sage 50 users, it’s difficult to segregate duties, secure transactions from editing and maintain accounting period transactional integrity and control (e.g. voiding a check from a prior period). If you’re using Sage 50, don’t expect to score any points with your auditor any time soon.

Your auditors are saying you need tighter internal controls

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“We have found FinancialForce Accounting extremely user friendly and have significantly reduced the time for administrators to get information back to Management and Agents on commissions and revenues generated by products, information we simply didn’t have before with Sage.” – Melissa Conners, Operations Accountant, Olympia Benefits

More companies are adding new and diverse revenue streams including multi-element arrangements on a single transaction. Accounting rules require that each of these elements be recognized and treated independently. For companies with complex revenue models, Sage 50 falls short on functionality, and finance teams have to resort to over-utilizing spreadsheets that lack appropriate controls and visibility of recognized revenue.

You have complex reporting and revenue recognition requirements

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“FinancialForce Accounting has proved very cost effective for us. We have saved a lot of money on consulting fees incurred through our use of Sage, and saved time through reduced data entry and improved reporting.” – Mark Hallett, IS Manager, Sciemetric Instruments

Companies with multi-entity / multi-currency operations tend to experience added complexity in their accounting process, which is often a catalyst for moving off Sage 50 as the growing organization has an obligation to report on each entity in accordance with local and international standards.

Your company speaks many languages - your accounting system doesn’t

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“With FinancialForce Accounting our processes have become streamlined giving us full visibility into the business. Personnel in our offices across the globe are able to view account information and track activity on accounts. As soon as an opportunity is won, our Accountants know to start billing, a process which was often missed or delayed with our previous Sage system.” – Melissa Griffin, Global Head of IT, Apex Fund Services

Do you have more than one customer record to maintain? Can you generate invoices in a single click? Is your accounting system hooked into things like CRM, HR and operations? It’s more important than ever to have your apps share information and work together to drive business value. You need comprehensive views into the “whole account”, across multiple departments to answer real-time questions in context and make smarter decisions.

Accounting is an isolated function

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“The functionality provided by the FinancialForce application compared with Sage has significantly increased the productivity of our accounts department, materially reduced the time it takes to create our monthly Board pack and provides an up to the minute view of how the business is performing.” – Gary White, CEO, White Springs

Growing organizations have needs for financial reporting, forecasting and visibility into operations. Recording financial transactions is only one piece of the operational puzzle. Developing KPIs that cut across departmental boundaries is only possible if departments share a common platform for their applications. Imagine being able to see financial reports, customer service metrics, sales forecasts, revenue recognition event dates, project personnel resource utilization and HR performance metrics all represented on one single dashboard. Good luck trying to accomplish that with Sage 50.

You need real-time visibility into financials and beyond

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Don’t let the shortcomings of Sage 50 impede your path to success. Passing the baton to FinancialForce Accounting allows you to get out in front of the “slow growth/no growth” hurdles that you’re bound to encounter. That in turn gives you an edge over your competitors. Sage 50 has helped you begin your venture, let FinancialForce.com complete your journey.

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Conclusion

FinancialForce.com delivers ERP at Customer SpeedSM. Built on the Salesforce1 Platform, FinancialForce ERP equips customer-centric businesses with a unified cloud platform and all the applications necessary to grow both the top and bottom line. Our Financial Management, Human Capital Management (HCM), Professional Services Automation (PSA), and Supply Chain Management (SCM) apps allow businesses to increase the speed in which they operate and be more responsive along every touch point of a customer’s journey. Founded in 2009 and headquartered in San Francisco, FinancialForce.com is backed by UNIT4 and salesforce.com.

So what are you waiting for? For more information about FinancialForce Accounting, visit: www.financialforce.com/accounting or call +44 1423 532832.

FinancialForce Accounting is a simple, yet powerful, accounting application that is straightforward to learn, easy to implement and trouble-free to maintain. It enables your finance team to use the latest cloud based services to serve the accounting needs of your entire business. You eliminate the costs and risks of synchronizing transactions and master data across different systems and platforms.