Forrester research quantifies the total impact of Sage Intacct

If you’re using QuickBooks, Oracle NetSuite, Xero, Microsoft Dynamics or a host of other bookkeeping and accounting tools, you know you can do better. Your company needs better visibility into its financial information to make real-time, data-driven decisions on business strategy. And you can’t rely on a mix of cumbersome solutions and error-prone spreadsheets to get the answers your top executives demand.

If you’re a savvy CFO at a growth-oriented company, you’ve likely heard of or researched Sage Intacct. Thousands of pragmatic CFOs are among our many customers. But you might still be questioning whether replacing your core financial platform is the right move for your company.

Let’s level-set by examining the results you can expect to achieve using Sage Intacct, as detailed in the Forrester Research report The Total Economic Impact™ of Sage Intacct. In its executive summary, Forrester describes Sage Intacct as follows:

“Sage Intacct is a cloud-native accounting solution that delivers in-depth finance capabilities to organizations, empowering executives to report with accuracy and confidence, offering complete visibility at both macro and micro levels, and enabling them to address problems quickly and efficiently in real time. Sage Intacct’s ease of integration with other third-party solutions helps companies capture unclaimed revenue, increase productivity, and deliver a high return on investment.”

Forrester interviewed four customers who upgraded their financial tech stack using Sage Intacct. For the purposes of their study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization, a technology services company, headquartered in North America with global operations. The composite generates $30 million in annual revenue, has 100 employees, and grows 20% annually via acquisitions during the three-year TEI analysis period.

The four interviewed organizations said that, prior to Sage Intacct, their accounting and financial systems were disjointed, complex and problematic. The financial processes resided across multiple platforms, such as enterprise legacy systems, bookkeeping software, spreadsheets and other applications.

Due to lack of system consolidation and automation, the organizations used laborious manual processes to bridge data gaps, often requiring additional labor to perform maintenance tasks, such as copying the data in third-party software and legacy solutions or tracking contracts and invoices in individual spreadsheets.

After the investment in Sage Intacct, the interviewees acquired visibility into their organizations’ financial performance and had confidence in their numbers due to the platform’s real-time data. They gained financial insights and the ability to slice and dice the data, drill down on numbers, and isolate any issues with a particular number, which they could not do in their previous environments.

Sage Intacct Impact Key Findings

Forrester quantified the benefits of using Sage Intacct in five major areas:

• Incremental margin gained due to more accurate customer invoicing. The financial environment of the composite organization is complex and fragmented, resulting in missed billing invoices, lost business opportunities and unclaimed revenue. With Sage Intacct’s financial capabilities and ease of integration with third-party CRM software, the organization captures incremental revenue gains and delegates customer contract management to sales teams more efficiently. Forrester quantified this benefit at $737,100 over three years with a risk-adjusted present three-year value of $604,001. I believe this benefit will help you improve customer satisfaction, and you can more about its effect in this blog post.
• Avoided/delayed cost of hires due to improved system automation and data accuracy. Sage Intacct’s automated platform enables data accuracy and integration with third-party systems, eliminating the need to hire and sustain additional labor. Furthermore, Sage Intacct offers the flexibility to add revenue recognition and other modules, allowing the organization to delay hiring and doing due diligence required for acquisitions and other business transactions. Also, with Sage Intacct, the organization eliminates some more expensive software solutions for substantial savings. Forrester quantified this benefit at $598,500 over three years with a risk-adjusted present three-year value of $496,127. I believe this benefit will help you increase revenue and margins, and you can more about its effect in this blog post.
• Incremental improvement in sales team effectiveness. Sage Intacct’s out-of-the-box solution synchronizes with CRM software. This provides the sales team complete visibility into customer accounts and contract status as well as enabling team members to renew contracts in real time, oversee billing and provide more accurate add-on pricing. The solution creates automation and cohesion between sales and accounting departments, eliminating laborious and duplicate data entry and helping them focus on customer relationships and churn reduction. Forrester quantified this benefit at $730,080 over three years with a risk-adjusted present three-year value of $605,200. This benefit will help you improve organizational, and you can more about its effect in this blog post.
• Increased productivity of the accounting team and improved reporting compliance. The process to determine revenue per generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) requirements is tedious, complex and time-consuming in the composite organization’s legacy environment. This permits too much room for error and makes it difficult to perform the due diligence required by investors in a business transaction. Sage Intacct’s integrated and automated multiple-entity reporting, based on GAAP’s revenue recognition requirements, significantly improves the accounting team’s productivity and better prepares team members for business transactions, such as acquisitions and divestitures. Forrester quantified this benefit at $165,984 over three years with a risk-adjusted present three-year value of $137,593. This benefit will help you decrease costs, and you can more about its effect in this blog post.
• Improved finance team efficiency and cost savings in audit reporting. In the prior environment, the composite organization requires internal resources to complete audit tasks, causing delays in submitting the data to external auditors. Furthermore, the consolidated data reveals significant gaps, leading to extensive, drawn-out and costly audits. With Sage Intacct, the composite organization provides external auditors with read-only access to systems. This saves time for the accounting and audit teams. This also saves on audit costs without disrupting the accounting team’s daily operations. Forrester quantified this benefit at $302,400 over three years with a risk-adjusted present three-year value of $249,658. I believe this benefit will help you improve your working capital and asset management, and you can learn more about its effect in this blog post.

In addition, Forrester found unquantified benefits; that is, benefits that provide value for the composite company but aren’t quantified in their study. These include:

• Improved visibility and real-time reporting that helps analyze data and isolate issues with numbers, locations or products quickly
• Access to customer accounts that does not require access to Sage Intacct due to real-time data integration with third-party CRM
• The multiple-entity function that effectively captures acquisitions and reports on company performance
• Accounts payable and automated clearing house (ACH) transfers managed easily and securely
• Increased visibility into nationwide operations at the local level providing a unique perspective

To determine the return on investment, Forrester factored in annual license costs, initial and ongoing implementation costs and training costs

Combined, the three-year net present value benefits to the composite company equals $1.7 million, with a return on investment of 441%.

As a frame of reference, the four company CFOs interviewed represent:

• A marketing technology company with annual revenue of $80 million and a growth rate of 100% per year through acquisitions
• An insurance company with annual revenue of $20 million and a 25% organic growth rate
• A cloud- and software-services company with annual revenue of $10 million and a growth rate of 80% per year through mergers and acquisitions
• An ERP consultancy with annual revenue of $17 million and a 20% organic growth rate

Of these, three used Oracle NetSuite and the fourth QuickBooks, and the majority used Salesforce.

The complete report contains a detailed benefits analysis, and for each quantifiable benefits explains the evidence and data, modeling and assumptions, and risks. The report also details costs and compares these with those of the prior solutions.

If you’re still questioning whether replacing your core financial platform with Sage Intacct is the right move for your company, I invite you to download the complete report or follow any of the links above for more insights.

And before I close and at the risk of being repetitive, let’s look at Forester’s executive summary one more time, but this time I’ve added some emphasis:

“Sage Intacct is a cloud-native accounting solution that delivers in-depth finance capabilities to organizations, empowering executives to report with accuracy and confidence, offering complete visibility at both macro and micro levels, and enabling them to address problems quickly and efficiently in real time. Sage Intacct’s ease of integration with other third-party solutions helps companies capture unclaimed revenue, increase productivity, and deliver a high return on investment.”

Wouldn’t you like to highlight those areas as well?