Dean Dorton Helps Drive Financial Transformation with Sage Intacct
The Carolina Hurricanes, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, compete in the Eastern Conference of the National Hockey League. The Hurricanes are owned by a parent entity, Hurricanes Holdings, LLC, that also operates the PNC Arena, a merchandising store, food and beverage services, and more.
Dashboards, multi-entity reporting, dimensions, and better financial reporting were key selling points when the Hurricanes were looking at new ERP solution options. Dean Dorton worked with them to replace Sage Platinum (an unsupported product line) with cloud-based Sage Intacct that provided greater flexibility for reporting, dashboards for real-time data, and a paperless office environment.
THE CHALLENGE
Equipping the Financial Team to Succeed
Financial reporting and flexibility within the system were huge “must-have” items for the Carolina Hurricanes. They were struggling with Platinum due to the lack of a reliable reporting package that could produce real time reports.
The Arena reporting was especially cumbersome: they had no way to break out the event-based reporting (concerts, sports, wrestling, motorsports, etc.), which meant creating them manually after every single event.
The Solution
Success On & Off the Ice
By switching to Sage Intacct, the Hurricanes gained a flexible, cloud-based system that allows them to slice and dice data to see the financial performance of the various revenue streams associated with a single event. The dashboards allow them to disseminate information quickly and effortlessly.
High Level Performance in a Winning Solution
The Hurricanes accounting team appreciates the time savings Dean Dorton and Sage Intacct have provided them through the automation of financial reports for each event, as well as the dashboards that allow everyone easy access to financial numbers without the accounting department having to spend time putting together paper reports.
Sage Intacct has also allowed them to expand their financial reporting on the types of events each season such as hockey games, concerts, basketball games, family events, etc. This gives insight into what each event truly costs and how much it costs to switch between different types of events.
“We have created custom dashboards for the directors, VPs, and executives which allows them to have easy access to their budget versus actual reports. This eliminates the pushing around of paper. The dashboards also save time for the accounting team since they eliminate the need for a meeting to distribute the paper version of the report and saves the team time on the phone since they can easily drill down into the report if they want to know further information.”
– Shaun Nicholson, Director of
Finance for the Carolina Hurricanes
THE BENEFITS
Moving to Sage Intacct also gave the Hurricanes an easier to use User Interface, (UI), that has been one of the best benefits for their team. The simplicity and intuitiveness of the UI has allowed for a less painful transition for system users. And, the Sage Intacct UI made it easy to train new employees.
“With Sage Intacct, we are always up-to-date on the latest improvements for our ERP solution. I do not have to worry about not receiving the updates or if we are using the most recent best practices—unlike our previous on premise solution, where we would have to manually complete updates to stay current.”