spreadsheets

Article Dean Dorton

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”

Article Dean Dorton

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.

Intacct dashboards

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…

Article Dean Dorton

We all strive for perfection, especially when it comes to our financials. Outdated and on-premises systems that at one time were lifesavers are now growing liabilities for today’s modern businesses.

Outdated reporting systems can wreak havoc on your data accuracy, productivity, and your team’s sanity.

The Horror is Real

We hear about accounting teams spending countless hours on Excel spreadsheets. One company had to compile and work from a master Excel spreadsheet with no less than 56 tabs – one for each entity, spanning 3 alphabets wide.

We’ve seen productivity bottleneck to a halt as one company struggled to manage 300 financial statements per month.

The nightmares of cascading errors threading through a company’s data are very real.

They happen all the time and are almost always due to manual entry and re-entry on Excel spreadsheets, most often relied upon by companies managing their financials with on-premises systems.

While on-premises systems may work in theory, in practice they can cause productivity, accuracy, and data integrity breakdown:

  • Data on spreadsheets are prone to errors from heavy manual sorting, and data entry.  This kind of reporting only offers one snapshot in time. Reporting that relies heavily on Excel spreadsheets does not have the accuracy and real-time visibility of reporting done in the cloud.
  • Multi-entity companies require workarounds to manage all of the data between them, forcing accounting departments to spend endless hours clicking between entities, managing their transactions, then performing global consolidations manually each month.
  • Productivity grinds to a halt when your teams need to navigate tedious workarounds and endless checking and double-checking, wondering at night if they made a mistake.

Don’t let these horror stories happen to you…

Write Your Own Ending

Sage Intacct, a best-in-class cloud-based financial management solution streamlines, integrates and customizes your accounting processes for greater speed, accuracy, and productivity.

  • According to a recent case study on one Sage Intacct customer, Tandem HR, they saved 500 labor hours by eliminating their reporting workarounds.
  • Because it integrates with other popular solutions, like Nexonia, HRPyramid, and SalesForce, Sage Intacct significantly reduces manual entry and increases data accuracy.
  • Teams can use customizable reporting features to create and send current-to-the-minute data with deep drill-down capability to the source transaction, and options to add notes on journal entries for faster closings and cleaner audits.
  • Sage Intacct’s unique chart of accounts tagging system means faster organizing in the GL, and less manual entries.
  • One-click consolidations. Skip tedious manual consolidations, regardless of how many entities your company has.

If your company is still relying on Excel and manual entries for reporting, don’t wait until you encounter a data disaster. Re-write your story now! We can help you find the right solution to make your financials work for you.

You’ll gain a clear understanding of:

  • The risks and limitations of spreadsheets within financial processes
  • How cloud ERP software accelerates the monthly close, improves time and expense management, and automates revenue recognition processes including preparation for the transition to ASC 606
  • Practical steps organizations can take to eliminate spreadsheets and operate more efficiently

Good Riddance to Spreadsheets

Download our free whitepaper “Eliminating the Cost of Spreadsheet Errors”

get the whitepaper

Article Dean Dorton

There’s no doubt, QuickBooks and QuickBooks Online are massively popular accounting solutions for solopreneurs and small businesses. The solutions are inexpensive and easy to navigate – almost all businesses started with QuickBooks.

One clue that your company has outgrown QuickBooks is an ever-increasing number of spreadsheets necessary to manage the business.
Spreadsheets to assist in ad-hoc reporting.  Spreadsheet to track customer subscriptions.  Spreadsheets to track revenue recognition.  You get the picture.

This multiple spreadsheet workaround is both burdensome and prone to human error. What results is a slowing of business operations: your top staff becomes bogged down in manual oversight tasks instead of focusing on value-added projects that promote growth.

So, if you’d like to free yourself from spreadsheets and other manual processes and focus on business viability and growth and profitability, here’s why Sage Intacct makes sense:

1) It’s automated and accurate, promoting transparency and effective decision-making.
2) It can be used by any type of business, from start-ups and small business to large enterprises.
3) QuickBooks Online may let you create and manage custom invoices, but Sage Intacct includes more robust features: it allows you to centralize accounts payable/receivable, facilitates multi-currency management and multi-entity consolidations, and (through its general ledger system) captures real-time business performance through dimension values.
4) If you have multiple entities, Sage Intacct lets you oversee them in one location. With Sage Intacct’s Root and Entity accounting system, you can set up each entity according to its unique features, e.g, different currencies for different entities.
5) Sage Intacct lets you control user access to sensitive business data. For example, employees can be provided self-service access to the sales order page but be blocked from the reports or purchasing pages. Managers can also call up departmental reports without being given access to the entire company’s financial data.
6) While both Quickbooks Online and Sage Intacct provide dashboards, Sage Intacct’s can be customized according to user preferences or roles. With Sage Intacct, you can use either pre-determined components from the list or create your own performance cards, graphs, and bar charts. To date, QuickBooks Online does not yet have this flexibility.

According to Finances Online, Sage Intacct is one of the top 10 alternatives to QuickBooks, with a reported score of 9.8 and 99% customer satisfaction. Sage Intacct offers definite advantages over QuickBooks Online, FinancialForce Accounting, and NetSuite.

Sage Intacct is a best-of-breed, cloud-based, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for SMBs and large enterprises, rather than a one-size-fits-all software suite such as NetSuite. Unlike QuickBooks Online, Sage Intacct is also 100% GAAP-compliant.

Sage Intacct’s dashboards and reports are fully customizable and perfect for multi-currency management, inter-entity consolidations, and access control management. Sage Intacct links seamlessly to Salesforce via an effortless point-and-click CRM integration process seamlessly links to Salesforce, even for companies without prior familiarity with the latter. Essentially, Sage Intacct facilitates seamless scalability and is an extremely popular step up from QuickBooks Online.

The Benefits Of Sage Intacct

In 2017, six award-winning companies leveraged Sage Intacct to decrease close times by 60%, achieved an astonishing combined 410% ROI, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars in reduced staffing needs. These companies were (in no particular order) Meals on Wheels America, Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland, Legacy Healthcare Services, DFO, Publisher Circulation Fulfillment, and Workiva.

With Sage Intacct, DFO found that it could consolidate 80+ entities in minutes rather than days/weeks. The cloud-based solution also decreased DFO’s invoice processing costs by more than $250 per invoice. Meanwhile, Meals on Wheels America shortened their end-of-month close times by 33% and reaped increasing revenues with only a 25% increase in staffing.

Workiva (with its powerful enterprise management and reporting/compliance SaaS platform) reportedly gained $500k in value by utilizing Sage Intacct’s robust quote-to-cash process. The verdict is clear: with Sage Intacct, your business will reap the rewards of flawless scalability and agility.

For further help in evaluating how Sage Intacct can benefit your business, contact us. Whether you’re interested in how automation increases staff productivity or how Sage Intacct’s faster cash cycles can boost your business operations, we’re here to answer your questions. At Massey Consulting, we’re focused on solutions that work for you.