professional services

Article Dean Dorton

Finance pros in professional and technical services companies who use Sage Intacct financial management software know what makes them happy—a modern, project-centric accounting solution that offers the automation, scalability, and visibility they need.

Just ask Debora Hester, business manager at GeoTechnologies, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina. “GeoTechnologies was using Microsoft Great Plains as its accounting software package prior to going to Sage Intacct,” she says. “It was a challenge as far as reporting on a project level and on a client level. It required exporting a lot of the data out to Excel multiple times and then merging that data together to be able to get the reports that we actually needed. That was a very cumbersome task.”

Sage Intacct users have many reasons to be happy. For project managers, there are four essential ones:

1) Increase business agility with a modern accounting architecture. Sage Intacct adapts to your optimal business structure and workflows, so you don’t have to re-implement software or rewrite custom code. Plus, Sage Intacct gives you the ability to manage, analyze, and present your financial information the way you want—without the external tools or complications to your chart of accounts.

Thanks to Sage Intacct, the folks at GeoTechnologies, Inc. have much greater flexibility and can work much more efficiently than before. “With Microsoft Great Plains, the reporting process was very tedious,” Debora says. “Now with Sage Intacct, we likely save about 15 hours a month on the reporting process. Our project managers can look at data in real-time now, instead of waiting for me to export all of that information out of Great Plains like I did before.”

2) Gain visibility through accurate, detailed project costing. Modern, project-centric accounting solutions like Sage Intacct let you track detailed project costing, so you understand the true cost of projects, see emerging trends, and budget properly. This information also helps you price projects and negotiate with vendors.

Sage Intacct’s dashboards feature is essential in gaining this visibility. “We have a dashboard made for each individual project manager, so that way they can not only look at their project information and see that they’re on track with what they need to be doing, but we also created financial dashboards and dashboards for collections so they can also keep up with the overall health of the company as well,” says Debora.

3) Automate project billing. When customers have precise billing requirements, you spend countless hours with numerous spreadsheets to track when to bill and how much. And if there are errors and delays, you’re at risk of revenue leakage, negative cash flow, and customer dissatisfaction. Sage Intacct delivers a flexible, configurable project billing process that integrates time and expense data, automatically captures billable and non-billable data, generates unified invoices, separates billing from revenue recognition, and other essential features.

4) Make informed decisions with project profitability insights. Sage Intact provides in-depth, real-time insight into the business, so you can capitalize on new opportunities or quickly take corrective actions. With a thorough picture of your financial performance, you’ll be able to identify the most profitable clients, true project costs, or costs per billable and non-billable employee. Features such as multiple operating dimensions make this possible.

If your business requires project accounting, consider Sage Intacct. “Being a cloud-based application, [Sage Intacct] was was a real selling point for us,” Debora says. “We actually moved our entire IT portfolio to the cloud, which saved us an enormous amount of money.”

read the full geotechnologies, inc. case study here

Article Dean Dorton

MSPs and professional services companies that work heavily in project management are constantly juggling complex and detailed tasks.

By sending out bids, multiple ongoing projects to manage, and more in the pipeline, your company needs to work as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.  However, in this environment, team members can easily become overloaded with tasks.

To work smart, you and your teams need the perfect lineup of resources and tools at your company’s disposal to make the most of everyone’s time and effort.

The biggest drain on project management resources comes from searching for information you need to do your job and populating data into multiple disconnected systems.

Project management teams spend countless hours digging up who’s best for the task at hand, inputting key details into CRM, documenting where projects are in the process, or sleuthing out new ways to save on already tight margins.

These tasks create productivity bottlenecking weaknesses and that eats into your budget.

High productivity MSPs and professional services companies that work with subscription models see the most benefit from using project management tools that can automate as many tasks as possible to keep costs within margins.

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution, helps service-based companies manage the complexities of subscriptions with design features that also support project management. Sage Intacct offers:

Strong integrations with your CRM solutions to see into financial and non-financial data in one place, without having to re-enter it into multiple systems.

Automated subscription support for billing by offering detailed customization options for unique billing formats and tracking milestones, schedules, and upcoming renewals, to speed the process and eliminate spreadsheets.

Fast revenue recognition with easy click-of-the-button contract modification, templates to simplify the recognition process, and entire transaction history tracking for cleaner audits.

Resource management tools like automated talent and schedule tracking, and routing rules to notify team members of pending actions, placeholder resources for standardized bids, and T&E report notifications that go straight to team member dashboards.

Deep insights using the cloud from your dashboard, featuring customized KPIs and a comprehensive look into the quote-to-cash project cycle, with reporting wizards for financial statements, operational reports, and utilization reports.

Sage Intacct handles your project management accounting from beginning to end and all of the fine, but important details in-between.

We are here to help you find the right solution to bring more zen to streamline the way you do things.

Contact us to learn about the best resources that will help calm the chaos to support productivity and growth.

how service businesses benefit from cloud-based project accounting

Article Dean Dorton

Whether it’s the complexities of service agreements, managing a spectrum of billing variances, or aiming to provide the best service you can amidst growth, these factors can take a toll on your labor costs, your productivity, and your compliance. For MSPs’ greatest growth pains in their various forms, we have solutions.

Challenge: Keeping track of the services you’ve provided is time-consuming enough when you’re also struggling to track complicated tiered pricing in your service agreements.  Making sure you are billing, outlining and allocating your services correctly while maintaining accurate valuation controls, can seem like an impossible task. This is especially true when you add in the increased workloads brought on by reallocations with the new ASC 606 guidelines.

Solution: More automation in your contract and service detailing:

  • A software solution like Sage Intacct is designed to flag contracts that have non-standard terms, and stay up to date with ASC 606 and IFRS 15 guidelines to improve revenue recognition and reallocations. This means faster, more compliant allocating, smoother audits, and greater compliance.

Challenge: Operating costs can dig deep into an MSPs budget, and if not kept in check, it can throw quality of service, and ultimately growth, off-balance.

Solution: MSPs can most effectively streamline costs – especially labor costs, with increased automation and customizations to boost reporting accuracy:

  • Sage Intacct offers robust reporting that exports directly into Excel, and can be integrated with products like Salesforce and ConnectWise PSA.
  • Customizable MSP growth metrics deliver critical data to decision-makers with top-notch cloud accuracy, right to their dashboards, to keep an eye on short and long-term metrics, whether it’s operations, recurring revenues, contract lifecycle management, or Service Level Agreement numbers. 24/7 updated accuracy means ongoing control and stronger growth strategies.

Challenge: Billing for MSPs can get beyond tricky with complex pricing setups and large projects with detailed milestones.

Solution: Again, for MSPs, the more automation and integration, the better.

  • Sage Intacct’s unique contract and subscription billing features offer customizable and automated invoicing uniquely designed for contracts. This means your teams can have complete control over how frequently you invoice, whether it’s monthly, yearly, in milestones, or with varying rates.
  • The automatic renewals feature in Sage Intacct’s billing module can trigger your contract renewals as they are approaching their end dates to ensure you keep your customer’s agreements right on track.

Sage Intacct is a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution that boosts efficiency, accuracy and growth for MSPs by automating and streamlining the areas they need it most.

Growth doesn’t have to be painful! Let us help you step into a faster, easier way to manage your financials.

Move Forward in the Future

Check out this Sage Intacct case study on Cameo Global, a Fortune 500 IT Service company that shortened global consolidations from several months to just a few weeks by switching to the cloud.

Download the Case Study