How Sage Intacct Brings Competitive Advantage to Professional Services Companies

From architectural and accounting firms to digital marketing agencies and IT consultancies, more professional services companies are managing their financials in the cloud. You may have started with spreadsheets, but automating financial management and accounting tasks—especially if you run a project-based business—creates time and cost savings that transform business operations and customer experiences.

Here’s a look at how Sage Intacct’s cloud-based financial management and accounting software is helping professional services companies sharpen their competitive edge:

Finding a Competitive Sweet Spot

With able and willing competitors around every corner, business leaders can’t underestimate even the most subtle changes in their marketplace. Consider just a few of the competitive factors that are highly influential in professional services, such as value (not simply price), employee/consultant expertise, and even ability to meet deadlines and meet other service expectations. In order to avoid being perceived as a commodity, businesses need to find their “niche,” establish and promote a compelling value proposition, and stay up to date with internal and external trends that inform next steps.

By putting time and expense, project management, costing and billing, and accounting together into one powerful system, decision-makers have more visibility into business drivers that make a big impact on competitive position. With the right data and reporting capabilities at their fingertips, business owners and their executive teams have instant access to a clear, accurate, and timely view of their most important financial and operational metrics. These are the insights they need to make strategic decisions that impact not only business performance, but the company’s product and service offerings and customer-facing initiatives that influence brand differentiation and loyalty.

Explore The Rising Value of the Strategic CFO.

Delivering Strategic Agility

Professional services companies need agility to keep up with change—changes in technology, changes in consumer preferences, and changes in the way competitors run their business and serve their customers. Leveraging the right technology is a critical part of achieving competitive agility because it provides uses with a 360-degree of operations and empowers both business process optimization and data-driven decision-making.

A powerful financial management and accounting solution like Sage Intacct’s cloud-based software is designed to help users understand the relationships between various business activities, including those that help shape competitive differentiators. For instance, with the right insights, business owners can:

• Put more resources towards driving growth. Thanks for process automation and more streamlined workflows, a lean finance department (no additional headcount) means that during growth, more budget dollars can be spent on growing the business through marketing and sales initiatives, like advertising and content development.
• Offer the most profitable services. Built-in, dashboard-based reporting tools make it easy for users to access performance metrics so they can track profit margins, identify the most profitable projects, and expand service offerings for sustainable ongoing growth.
• Deliver an enhanced customer experience. Operational efficiency trickles down to the customer by way of value-added reporting, more timely and accurate billing, and more realistic and transparent projections, timelines, and costs. Plus, the software easily connects with Salesforce CRM to bring together powerful data that improves customer relationships.

All things considered, professional services companies find that upgrading from spreadsheets to cloud-based software is simply required for business growth. It’s designed to handle increased complexity that comes with more business, different types of business, and even new business locations and currencies. Find out How Sage Intacct’s Cloud-Based Financial Software Supports Growing Businesses with Automation. And don’t miss 3 Reasons You Should Use Intacct For Project Accounting.

If your professional services organization wants to sharpen your competitive edge with a best-in-class financial management and cloud accounting solution, contact us to learn more.