Sage Intacct

Article Dean Dorton

Selecting accounting software may seem like a back‑office technicality, but for equine businesses, it’s often a strategic decision that directly shapes operational efficiency, data transparency, and long‑term scalability. The right platform can unlock meaningful insights and save hours of manual work; the wrong one can lead to costly rework, limited visibility, and operational complexity that grows over time. For equine business owners — whether launching a new venture or upgrading from a legacy system — this decision is more relevant than ever. 

Why Accounting Software Choice Matters More Than You Think 

Modern accounting platforms do far more than produce profit and loss statements. Today’s leading systems offer multidimensional reporting, automation, seamless integrations, and can consolidated views across entities — all critical capabilities for equine operations managing a farm, multiple departments, and an ever-changing horse roster. 

Here are some key features to look for as you consider the many options available today: 

Reporting That Mirrors Your Business — Not the Other Way Around 

The most powerful accounting platforms allow equine businesses to create reports that reflect the true complexity of their operations. With the right software, reporting goes beyond standard financial statements and opens the door to deep operational visibility. 

For example – Sage Intacct’s multidimensional reporting allows users to pull reports by department, location, or even individual horse — making it possible to analyze revenue, expenses, and performance in a way that aligns with how the business actually operates. For equine owners seeking to understand profitability by horse, location, department, or trainer, this level of granularity can be transformative. 

Multi‑Entity Abilities for Multi‑Entity Businesses 

Equine businesses often include multiple operations, each with unique financial needs. Choosing software that supports multi‑entity structures ensures you can easily consolidate operational and financial reporting. Systems designed for this complexity eliminate the manual spreadsheets and duplicate data entry that plague businesses using software not built for multi‑entity management. 

Software That Plays Well with Others 

In today’s tech environment, no single platform can do everything — and it shouldn’t have to. Picking software that integrates smoothly with specialized apps allows you to create a best‑in‑class financial ecosystem tailored to your operations. 

Our AFO Equine team frequently pairs accounting platforms like Intacct and QuickBooks with applications such as BILL, which provides advanced AP and AR capabilities and integrates seamlessly with both systems. Integrations like these enhance automation, expand reporting opportunities, and link operational data directly into your financial system — reducing errors and improving efficiency. 

Harnessing AI & Automation to Save Time 

Leading accounting software providers are investing heavily in automation and AI, which enables small accounting teams to work more efficiently. Examples include automated AP/AR workflows, smart document capture, and auto‑classification of transactions.  

Even third‑party tools are innovating rapidly — for instance, BILL’s automated W‑9 collection feature, which requests and reminds vendors to submit their documentation without requiring manual follow‑up from your team. These innovations free teams to focus on higher‑value work rather than repetitive manual tasks. 

The Hidden Cost of Choosing Wrong 

Switching accounting software is possible — but it is rarely painless. A transition often involves redesigning the chart of accounts, remapping historical data, re‑implementing integrations, and rebuilding reports to finally gain the visibility you needed all along. For many businesses, the time and money spent correcting a poor initial decision far outweigh the upfront investment of selecting the right software and setting it up properly. 

For equine business leaders, accounting software is more than a financial tool — it’s an operational backbone, a strategic insight engine, and a long‑term investment. The right platform strengthens decision‑making, improves efficiency, and scales as your business evolves. If you’re considering a software upgrade or starting fresh, our AFO team is here to help you think strategically, select the right system, and implement it in a way that sets your business up for long‑term success. 

Contact us today.

Article Dean Dorton

Grant management has changed significantly in the last ten years. What used to be mainly an administrative accounting task is now a strategic skill that affects compliance, funder trust, cash flow, and long-term viability. Nonprofits are no longer just asked to report how grant money was spent afterward, but to manage those funds carefully and openly in real time—often across multiple grants, programs, and funding sources simultaneously.

Yet many organizations still rely on outdated accounting systems that were never designed to address today’s grant management challenges. As expectations increase, these limitations become a significant operational and financial risk.

The New Reality of Grant Oversight

Compliance Is More Complex—and Less Forgiving

Updates to Uniform Guidance, higher audit thresholds, increased cybersecurity scrutiny, and expanded oversight of subrecipients have elevated the standards for compliance. Nonprofits must consistently demonstrate proper controls, accurate cost allocations, and timely documentation. Relying on manual processes and static account structures makes this more difficult, leaving organizations vulnerable not only during audits but throughout the entire grant lifecycle.

Transparency and Real-Time Accuracy Are Now Expected

Funders expect continuous insight into how their funds are used—not just at the end of a grant period but throughout. While formal grant reporting might be done semi-annually or annually, grant drawdowns are often a monthly process, and outdated systems cause the greatest strain and risk during this time.

When finance teams rely on spreadsheets or manual reconciliations to prepare drawdowns, the process becomes slow, error-prone, and difficult to validate. In contrast, real-time visibility into allowable costs, remaining balances, and grant restrictions allows organizations to prepare drawdowns more efficiently and confidently, knowing the data is accurate and up-to-date.

Manual Processes Create Risk Around Cash Flow and Revenue Recognition

Legacy systems often face challenges with one of the most complex parts of grant accounting: revenue recognition for conditional funding, which represents the majority of federal grant revenue. Without the ability to accurately track expenses against grant conditions in real time, organizations risk recognizing revenue too early or too late, leading to compliance issues and inaccuracies in financial statements.

Modern grant management processes help ensure that revenue is recognized properly as conditions are fulfilled, while still clearly distinguishing between restricted and unrestricted funds. Achieving this level of precision is difficult—if not impossible—to sustain in systems that rely heavily on manual workarounds.

The Cost of Standing Still

Organizations that continue to operate on outdated accounting platforms face real consequences:

  • Increased compliance risk due to limited controls and manual drawdown preparation
  • Significant time spent each month preparing grant drawdowns and reconciling data
  • Greater exposure to revenue recognition errors for conditional grants
  • Reduced scalability, making it harder to manage multiple or overlapping grants without adding staff

Over time, these challenges can limit growth, strain finance teams, and hinder an organization’s ability to pursue new funding opportunities.

How Sage Intacct Supports Modern Grant Management

Modern cloud-based platforms like Sage Intacct are designed to support the entire grant management lifecycle—not just reporting at the end. Instead of requiring nonprofits to modify their processes to fit rigid account structures, Sage Intacct uses dimensional accounting to track grants, programs, funders, and restrictions in real time.

With Sage Intacct, nonprofits can:

  • Track grant activity and allowable costs continuously, not retroactively
  • Prepare grant drawdowns more efficiently using real-time, validated data
  • Reduce manual reconciliation by tying expenses directly to grant dimensions
  • Support accurate revenue recognition for conditional grants as expenses are incurred
  • Provide leadership and boards with clear, up-to-date visibility into grant balances and funding utilization

This approach shifts finance teams from reactive cleanup work to proactive grant oversight—reducing monthly effort, improving accuracy, and lowering overall risk.

Organizations that modernize their grant management processes often see measurable improvements. Some have cut grant-related preparation time from hours or days to just minutes, while others have increased their capacity to handle more grants without hiring additional staff—simply by gaining better visibility and control over their financial data.

Modernization Is a Strategic Imperative

In today’s funding climate, the ability to accurately manage grants in real time is essential for mission success. Grant drawdowns, compliance, revenue recognition, and transparency are no longer occasional issues—they are constant operational demands.

Switching to a modern platform like Sage Intacct provides nonprofits with more than just improved reporting tools. It boosts their confidence in data, streamlines monthly processes, and creates a financial foundation that supports growth, compliance, and lasting impact.

See the Benefits in Action

Join us for an upcoming webinar to discover how nonprofits are modernizing grant management to increase real-time visibility, streamline grant drawdowns, enhance revenue recognition, and reduce compliance risks. We will share practical insights and examples of how modern financial systems can better support today’s grant-funded organizations.

Register here: Grant Management in 2026: Why Outdated Accounting Systems Put Nonprofits at Risk

Article Danielle Camara

Nonprofit organizations today face increasing demands: limited resources, complex funding structures, and heightened scrutiny from funders, boards, and regulators. Many organizations, however, still rely on accounting systems that were never designed to meet the unique needs of mission-driven work.

As nonprofits grow in size and complexity, accounting software must evolve from a basic record-keeping tool into a strategic platform for transparency, compliance, and informed decision-making. Understanding what makes a system effective—and why traditional tools fall short—is essential for long-term sustainability.

The challenge with traditional nonprofit accounting tools

Many nonprofits start with systems built for small businesses or general use. While these tools may suffice early on, they often struggle to keep pace as organizations scale. Common pain points include:

  • Limited reporting capabilities, forcing finance teams to rely on spreadsheets
  • Rigid chart of accounts structures that become cumbersome over time
  • Manual workarounds for grant tracking and fund restrictions
  • Slow, resource-heavy month-end closes
  • Difficulty producing board-ready or funder-specific reports

These limitations can pull finance teams away from strategic oversight and into administrative maintenance.

What modern nonprofit accounting systems should offer 

To overcome these challenges, nonprofits need systems designed for their complexity. Here are key capabilities to look for:

1. Dimensional Accounting

Instead of overloading a chart of accounts with codes, dimensional accounting allows organizations to track funds, grants, programs, locations, and projects independently—and simultaneously. This enables:

  • Real-time visibility into financial performance by program or initiative
  • Accurate tracking of restricted and unrestricted funds
  • Easier response to funder and board reporting requests
  • Elimination of parallel spreadsheets

2. Grant and Fund Management

Grant-funded organizations often struggle with compliance and reporting. A strong system should support:

  • Grant budgets and spending controls
  • Time-based or milestone reporting
  • Visibility into remaining balances
  • Built-in compliance with fund restrictions

3. Financial Clarity for Leadership

Boards and executives need timely, actionable insights—not static reports weeks after month-end. Look for:

  • Dashboards and customizable reporting
  • Faster, cleaner closes
  • Consistent reporting across departments
  • Audit-ready transparency

4. Scalability and Integration

As nonprofits grow, merge, or diversify funding sources, their systems must scale. Cloud-based platforms (such as Sage Intacct) often provide:

  • Multi-entity support
  • Integration with donor, payroll, and reporting tools
  • Capacity for increased transaction volume

Turning finance into a strategic advantage

The difference between a basic accounting tool and a true nonprofit financial platform is impact. When finance teams spend less time on manual processes and more time analyzing data, organizations gain:

  • Stronger stewardship of donor and grant funds
  • Improved compliance and transparency
  • More confident leadership decisions
  • Greater organizational resilience

What’s next: preparing for the shift 

Moving to a more robust accounting platform raises important questions about readiness, implementation, and long-term value. Nonprofits should consider:

  • When to move beyond entry-level systems
  • How to design reporting that aligns with mission and strategy
  • What best-in-class financial management looks like in practice

Educational webinars, peer discussions, and case studies can help leaders make informed decisions about the future of their financial systems.

Contact your Dean Dorton advisor to learn more about strengthening your nonprofit’s financial systems and long-term reporting strategy.

Article Autumn Hines

Healthcare organizations are buried in data – patient data, claims data, financial data, operational data, and more – and that includes finance leaders, the finance team, and the C-suite. But just how much of all this data is being organized and leveraged for practice success?

Respondents to our recent Healthcare Finance Team Leadership Survey told us that manual, time-consuming reporting and a lack of real-time visibility into key metrics and performance were the biggest internal frustrations their organizations are facing today. Further, our respondents are overwhelmingly looking for automation when it comes to reporting – to enable turnkey, on-demand, self-service reporting so they can free up the finance team to spend more of their time on strategic work.

There’s clearly a need for data, so the question becomes: What do you measure? How? And what do you do with the insight? To answer these questions (and more), I sat down with Linda Pinion, Sage Intacct’s Principal Solutions Consultant (and resident expert on all things KPIs, dashboards and reports) to uncover tips and tricks for healthcare finance leaders looking to take measurement and reporting to the next level for practice success and how financial and accounting reporting for healthcare organizations can help with that.

Linda’s advice? Focus on a few key areas for the most impact:

What to Measure? Everything!

Linda urges healthcare finance leaders to go beyond traditional revenue and expenses when thinking about measurement. Dig into the details! Consider comparing supplies versus equipment, or direct versus indirect expenses. Compare provider performance or location against location, revenue by insurer, or the profitability of certain treatments or services over others. Challenge yourself and your team to look beyond the “standard” financials and explore how things like capital improvements, revenue, and expenses related to patient care and procedures, participating in new payment models, or offering new products and services, will impact the bottom line.

Sage Intacct customer Paige Oldham, CFO of Health Solutions, did just this, and now enjoys more visibility and streamlined efficiencies, telling us, “We can combine different kinds of KPIs all in one report for a much clearer picture of what’s going on with the business. I have [everything] all in one place and can drill down as needed, which helps immensely.”

The lesson learned? You won’t know until you measure.

Communication & Collaboration

What good is measurement if it’s done in a vacuum? Practice success hinges on everyone working towards the same goal and clearly understanding the health of the business today, and where it is trending for the future. Linda recommends that healthcare finance leaders find ways to enable members of your team and broader members of the practice to access tailored dashboards and reports. That way, whether it’s a specific provider, department, entity, location, or other functional area of the business, they know where they stand, what they are accountable for, and how they directly impact and influence practice success.

If you have a means to communicate and collaborate in an automated way within your finance system, that’s even better – your team will spend less time creating reports and more time on strategic work that will help move the practice forward.

Go Beyond the Financials

While strong financial reporting is critical, don’t underestimate the power of combining financial, clinical, and operational data to uncover a deeper level of understanding and a more sophisticated way to measure the success of your practice.

Consider how Virginia Jones, PhD, and COO of Village Family Dental, took reporting to the next level:

“The system identifies which offices or service lines are making money (or not), so we can decide which lines of business to expand or reduce. Expanding on pediatrics and OR cases and reducing certain insurance carriers has increased revenue by as much as $40,000 per month. After we started offering frenectomies and sleep apnea services, it was simple to evaluate each one’s profitability and determine contributing factors.”

Perhaps your providers want to see revenue or expenses by patient, per visit, or procedure. Perhaps executives want to understand profitability by provider, the impact of entering a value-based contract, or the potential revenue from adding a new service like Virginia and her team at Village Family Dental. Combining financial, clinical, and operational data all in one place enables healthcare finance leaders to move away from simply reporting on the events of the past and shift gears to strategically predicting the future of the practice.

Authored by Melissa O’Dowd

Melissa is a leader within the Healthcare practice at Sage Intacct, having spent the last 18 years working within the healthcare industry, helping healthcare technology, consumer health, medical devices and diagnostics, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology companies change the lives of the patients they serve.

Article Autumn Hines

The financial stability of any K-12 school directly impacts its educational mission. Now, more than ever, academic institutions need tools that provide visibility and help plan for the future. Effective accounting systems should balance core financial functions with specialized reporting needs unique to educational institutions. Selecting appropriate accounting software is a crucial decision that affects the administration, teaching staff, and students.  

So, what are the things K-12 schools should be looking for in an accounting system? 

Cloud-Based Accessibility

You need financial tools that work wherever you are. Cloud-based solutions give you secure access from your office, home, or even while traveling to that education conference. This means your administrative team, department heads, and board members can all see the financial information they need when they need it. 

Multi-Dimensional Reporting

Let’s face it – school finances can be complicated. K-12 schools have complex financial structures that require sophisticated reporting tools. Effective accounting software should offer multi-dimensional reporting across: 

  • Departments and programs 
  • Campus locations 
  • Restricted and unrestricted funds 
  • Grants and endowments 
  • Capital projects 

This functionality is essential to allow schools to track how resources are allocated and maintain compliance with donor restrictions and reporting requirements. 

Real-Time Visibility

You can’t manage what you can’t see. Key stakeholders need accurate, up-to-date information to make informed decisions and ensure financial sustainability. Your accounting software should give you: 

  • Dashboards that you can customize for different roles 
  • Educational-specific performance indicators 
  • Quick comparisons of budget vs. actual spending 
  • Financial metrics based on enrollment 
  • Analysis of per-student costs 

With these tools, you’ll spot trends early, address problems quickly, and make decisions based on live data. 

Process Automation

If you’re part of a small admin team, you probably wish you didn’t have to do the same repetitive tasks over and over. Accounts payable and receivable, bank reconciliations, and expense management are all vital, but they take time. Automating these routine tasks reduces the likelihood of errors and frees time to focus on mission-critical activities. 

Integration Capabilities

Your finances are interconnected, so your accounting software should be, too. You need it to integrate with things like: 

  • Fundraising tools 
  • Tuition management software 
  • Payroll 

When these systems communicate, you eliminate duplicate data entry, improve accuracy, and get a complete picture of your operations and finances. 

What to Consider When Choosing

As you evaluate different options, look for software that addresses these key requirements. A solution like Sage Intacct checks all these boxes – providing education-specific functionality, scalability, appropriate access controls, strong security, and measurable ROI. The right accounting platform will become a foundation that supports your financial operations and educational mission, giving you the insights you need to help your school thrive. 

Article Dean Dorton

For managed service providers (MSPs), the devil is in the details. This is a fact that Stacey Neideffer knows all too well. Before joining Dean Dorton as a Sage Intacct consultant, Stacey served as the CFO of an MSP. There, she found that despite her accounting acumen and finance expertise, she spent much of her time doing data entry. Was it time for an accounting software replacement?

Their accounting software at the time was QuickBooks. To get data into the system, they had to batch information together and wait for large files to transfer. Batching was slow and cumbersome. It meant the information in the accounting system was often outdated and irrelevant. Most of all, it kept Stacey from more important responsibilities. She realized that the company had outgrown its accounting system and saw first-hand how much trouble that created. When she made the case for upgrading to superior software, the rest of the leadership agreed. The upgrade, Sage Intacct, exceeded expectations, and the MSP thrived as a result. 

This is Stacey’s story—but at a recent conference of MSPs featuring Stacey as a panel discussion leader, she learned her experience is a familiar one. Many providers are struggling with their accounting, wondering if their software is the problem, and thinking about what an upgrade would mean. 

To anyone in the same boat, the panel was an enlightening one indeed. Here are some of the key takeaways to emerge.

Batching is bad for business

A common refrain during the panel was the disruption that batching caused. Everyone who used QuickBooks dealt with it. And everyone agreed it was a constant drain on their time. More than that, it was a dangerous limitation to their financial visibility and control. If the panel had a consensus conclusion it was this: batching indicates the accounting function has outgrown the software supporting it. 

QuickBooks loses its luster

Another commonality between the panel and the participants was the struggle to make QuickBooks work for service providers. That was especially true once they grew into multi-entity organizations. Cheap, easy, and adequate, QuickBooks looks great for providers eager to start serving clients, but those benefits quickly become obstacles. The MSPs at the conference who had already left QuickBooks made something quite clear: if you haven’t outgrown it already, it’s coming sooner than you expect.

Software selection isn’t easy

Another sentiment was echoed throughout the panel. Even when the need to upgrade accounting software looks obvious, concerns over picking the wrong replacement or disrupting the accounting process keep many MSPs from taking action. Stacey and others stressed the importance of integrations between the accounting software and other business tools. This helps eliminate batching, and also creates shared data sources and overlapping toolkits to make each piece of software stronger.

What comes after QuickBooks?

With expertise spanning technology, accounting, and the MSP ecosystem, Stacey has a rare skill set that makes her a unique asset to service providers that have outgrown their accounting software. That came through in the panel—and it comes through to clients who recognize Stacey as someone who’s been in their exact same situation before.  

Make the right replacement by relying on the right partner. Contact Dean Dorton.