Modern professional services firms face mounting pressure to deliver more with less, often relying on outdated technology that hinders performance and profitability:
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Professional services firms need features beyond what spreadsheets and legacy accounting software can handle. With past solutions, you’re limited by manual processes and a lack of relevant access to the data and insights your firm needs for growth. Breaking free of these constraints, professional services firm industry leaders trust Sage Intacct to support their businesses. Here’s why:
Leverage multi-dimensional accounting: Report and analyze data on a more granular level with complex categories and tagging. Tag data for different countries, entities, departments, vendors, customers, departments, employees, regions and other classifications and groupings.
Access real-time information: Make more effective decisions with current information. Review your business data consolidated across systems, entities, departments and functions.
Improve timesheet data accuracy: With agentic AI, Sage can prepopulate timesheets and improve data accuracy. Automated functionality alleviates the timesheet burden for employees by using project schedules and team calendars to simplify time tracking.
Track KPIs with customizable dashboards: Create purpose-made dashboards and reports to track the KPIs you need at-a-glance: project on-time delivery, project or employee margins, employee billable utilization and other data.
Reduce administrative burden: Save time and free your team from routine tasks. Through automated bank feeds, outlier detection, intelligent time tracking and continuous close features, you can reduce your firm’s administrative burden.
Support growth and long-term value: Scale more effectively and plan for profitable growth or a future exit. A modernized tech stack anticipates your firm’s future needs and builds value for partners and owners.
5 Ways Professional Services Firms Use SageProfessional services firms tracking employee hours, project insights and contractors produce so much data it’s hard to manage and use effectively. Multiply this by your offices across the region, country or world and you have a recipe for overwhelm and underutilized data. How long will it take to close this quarter? What’s your per-employee profit?
You’re halfway through next month by the time you know last month’s numbers. One error in a spreadsheet formula renders reams of data inaccurate. To make it all work, you could combine manual effort with a collection of software. Or you could use a single platform like Sage Intacct that aggregates your data and provides powerful reporting and analysis functionality.
With Sage Intacct, you can:
Since there’s no way to error-proof legacy software and spreadsheets, this reality doesn’t go away with more team hours or hiring an extra reviewer. Meanwhile, reporting complexity only grows as your firm adds clients or recons with more economic uncertainty.
Configuring Sage Intacct to your business, with Armanino’s proprietary processes, provides a customized solution in one platform.
Your firm’s challenges show that it’s time for strategic changes. Here’s how a simplified tech ecosystem with Sage Intacct for Professional Services can help:
CHALLENGE #1: Outdated, no-longer-relevant data.Professional firms need to respond quickly to competitive pressures. Forced to be ‘historians,’ accounting documents the past but can’t make a meaningful prediction in time. Closing takes days or weeks.
SOLUTION: Real-time data you can use in modeling and making hiring, sales and growth decisions. Complete closing continuously with access to live information.
CHALLENGE #2: Patched-together systems.Duplicated, obsolete or inefficient homegrown software that requires manual action to reconcile bank statements and transfer data. Your systems don’t work together, so your team is constantly re-entering the same data.
SOLUTION: One integrated system connecting your business applications.
CHALLENGE #3: Overburdened team.Your controller works 70 hours a week and still doesn’t have all the right information to run the business. Accountants rely on the IT staff for generating reports and closing. Leadership in your firm wants to hire more staff to alleviate overwhelmed employee schedules and meet project deadlines.
SOLUTION: Technology that never stops working in the background to provide visibility and streamline processes. Stronger productivity and faster access to relevant data.
CHALLENGE #4: Outgrowing spreadsheets and manual accounting.Spreadsheets can introduce manual and formula errors into your data. Your firm’s complexity no longer justifies reliance on reconciling bank statements or filling out templates by hand. As you change processes or add clients, you spend scarce resources adapting your strategy.
SOLUTION: Cloud solution with an intuitive, spreadsheet-like interface that imports your data automatically.
CHALLENGE #5: Limited flexibility to scale and grow.Your systems can’t keep up with your firm’s growth and you’re missing important metrics and KPIs. Missing features encouraged your firm to implement multiple or duplicate systems for each department.
SOLUTION: Project Intelligence dashboard to see current, at-a-glance metrics customized to your projects.
For your existing Sage Intacct setupIf you’re already using Intacct, get a Health Check to ensure your implementation is taking full advantage of Intacct’s automation, reporting and integration capabilities.
Professional services firms tracking employee and contractor hours, client relationships and project details can be stuck making tradeoffs between accuracy and efficiency. In maximizing whatever value is left in older, patched-together tools that are holding you back, your team may be missing important insights.
Simplifying your tech ecosystem involves centralizing your critical functions and financials into an integrated platform. An enterprise application like Sage Intacct can move your team away from a collection of manual workarounds and tools. Instead of having to unify disparate, siloed information sources by hand, Intacct allows you to build a foundation for all of your tools and integrations with a single source of truth.
Sage Intacct for Professional Services Firms helps you use your data more efficiently, bringing together prebuilt metrics and dashboards, Sage Intelligent Time hour tracking, agentic AI and other features that provide insights.
Leveraging AI in professional firmsFacing pressure to hire? Another fast, effective way to grow your team is through automation. Often, cumulative manual tasks across multiple areas of your technology stack are a culprit behind staffing shortages. AI is increasingly capable of augmenting the work your team already does so your team can get more done.
At the center of your tech stack, Intacct holds your entire system together:
Once you have Sage as a single source of truth connecting your tech stack, you have a flexible architecture that lets you adjust reporting and workflows as your requirements change. Encourage your team to take a continuous improvement approach and look strategically at how your firm develops and adapts operational processes. If your leadership aligns around shared priorities, you can more consistently make data-supported decisions.
Sage Intacct provides you with the tools to get more from your data and identify the right changes at the right time, helping your organization grow in the right direction.
The right tech stack empowers your professional services firm’s goals instead of hindering them. Use these best practices to get started:
Revamping your tech stack requires a partner that understands professional services firms. See how Sage Intacct helps deliver operational excellence and learn more about how our Sage experts assist firms with ERP implementation.
Unlock the benefits of total visibility and streamlined workflows. Contact our Sage Intacct experts today to learn how to start driving innovation for your organization.
