dashboards

When it comes to sports franchises and the professional sports industry as a whole, there are a handful of factors to manage on the accounting side. In Part 1 of our Hat Trick Blog Series, we discussed the compelling challenges of manual data entry, spreadsheets, and lack of real-time visibility that sports CFOs and Accountants may face on a daily basis.

The 3 part series continues with the next two accounting curveballs faced by the sports industry: Managing expenses and having to use multiple systems to track data. Find out how cloud accounting technology is overturning these challenges and providing top solutions to efficiently manage your finances.

Chaos of Travel, Time, and Expense Management 

The sports industry is a whirlwind of expenses. Did your team travel from city to city and what was the cost? Was there a fundraising campaign used this week to increase ticket sales? With so many different directions of revenue streams and multiple expenses to track, your chart of accounts might be two miles long. Managing all these expenses manually, along with your daily accounting, is a migraine in the making.

The Solution: Customizable dimensions and the time and expense module

With Sage Intacct, you can improve your reporting with dimensions and simplify your chart of accounts. You can easily “tag” transactions, as well as operational data, with dimension values. This allows you to add business context to your data instead of assigning transactions to hard-coded individual accounts. Once you create a dimension, you can use it for any transaction- general ledger, receivables, payables, time, revenue management, and more. As your data and business changes, add the dimensions you need to easily track what’s important to your business.

With the Time and Expense module, you can:

• Access real-time project and team information
• Have flexibility for your time and expense entry
• Get real-time visibility to project tracking, billing and costing

take the pain out of time and expense management: check out our data sheet

Using Multiple Systems to Track Data 

How many different systems do you need to glance at to gather all the data you need for one report? You look at Ticketmaster to see revenue from ticket sales, but then you have to make sure the payroll for that day is accurately allocated, and also plug in all your time and expenses. This can mean hours of manually importing and exporting data from other software systems to keep up with reporting demands. In the business of sports, finance teams are in critical need of better technology.

The Solution: Consolidate your data with system integration.

Sage Intacct’s ability to integrate with countless other systems, including payroll, time and expense, sale tracking software, and more allows for easier access to all your financial data in one place. It’s time to ask yourself if your team is seeing the full financial picture. For more information on Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting software and tools that will help your sports accounting team, contact us!

This 3-part series will continue with the next two curveballs that the sports industry experiences in accounting and financial management. Stay tuned for more…

view our recorded webinar “the sports of cfo: scoring big through dashboards, dimensions, and automation”

Whether you’re a fullback running for the end zone or you’re a batter hoping to knock the ball out of the park, or you’re a CFO simply trying to equip your management team with the information they need to make data-driven decisions, everyone has one thing in common– they’re trying to score big.

We all know the endless responsibilities and number crunching that your typical accountants deal with on an every-day basis. But what about the complexities for accountants in sports- one of the largest, most evolutionary entertainment industries in America?

Behind the scenes, CFOs, Controllers, and Accountants for sports teams are scrambling to keep up with budgets, inventory for merchandise, ticket sales, payroll, contracts and sponsorships, managing cash flow, and more.

Don’t let your financial reports be your team’s biggest foe. Check out the accounting challenges that the sports industry is facing today and why Sage Intacct’s cloud financial technology is your best defensive player when it comes to reporting.

1) Manual Data Entry 

We know spreadsheets are the easy, go-to route for budgeting, reporting, and keeping track of all your business financials, but how many hours are you spending keying in data and trying to avoid numerical mistakes at all costs?

For a sports franchise, accounting is a more complex process than just plugging in numbers into Excel- you have to sort and manage ticket sales, sponsorships, contracts, merchandise inventory, payroll, expenses, and so much more. Single-user, error-prone spreadsheets are the serious obstacle when it comes to financial productivity and tracking accurate data.

The Solution: Reporting flexibility and automation.

Sage Intacct lets you click out of those 50+ tabs you have open in Excel. With the ability to streamline your business financials and automate processes such as procurement, fixed assets, and intercompany transactions, you can say goodbye to your spreadsheets for good.

Sage Intacct’s flexible and customizable workflows let you get your finances efficiently processed without the risk of error-prone spreadsheets.

datasheet: flexible reporting and dashboards

2) Lack of Real-Time Visibility 

Click. Click. Click again. How many tabs and pages have you navigated just to find that one report you needed? Financial leaders in professional sports organizations want quick data extractions, trend summaries, and financial analysis. You want the ability to pull the data from last week’s game to see why ticket sales were so much higher than a month ago. You may want to see how much of the year’s budget has been spent on travel expenses so far. If this data is buried somewhere in your accounting system, your reporting processes have essentially lost all functionality.

The Solution: Up-to-the-minute, comprehensive dashboards.

A cloud-based solution like Sage Intacct gives you deep insight into your organization’s financials- all in real-time. With customizable capabilities, you can choose which reports you want to see, from any period of time, with just one click.

Sage Intaccts’s financial visibility lets you get the specific metrics you want at the executive level- anywhere and anytime.

It’s time to ask yourself if your team is seeing the full financial picture. For more information on Sage Intacct’s cloud-based accounting software and tools that will help your sports accounting team, contact us!

This 3-part series will continue with the next two curveballs that the sports industry experiences in accounting and financial management. Stay tuned for more…