Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations5 Proven Strategies

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 2

Is Finance Ready to Meet the Mandate for Growth?���������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 3

Strategy No� 1: Increase Productivity Through Automation �������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 4

Strategy No� 2: Accelerate Global Consolidations ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 5

Strategy No. 3: Gain Visibility into Project Profitability ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������6

Strategy No� 4: Streamline Processes and Integrate IT Systems ����������������������������������������������������������������������� 7

Strategy No� 5: Future Proof Your Financial Management Solution ����������������������������������������������������������������� 8

Profitable Growth Through Automation and Visibility �������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������9

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Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 3

In our services-centric economy, many project-based companies that provide technical and business services are fine-tuning their marketing strategies and business models to pursue growth� And the most recent benchmark report from SPI Research shows those efforts are paying off. The average net profits for the professional services organizations surveyed grew more than 10 percent for the fifth consecutive year.1

Of course, as those firms grow and expand, they place an added—and changing—burden on the finance organizations that support them. Transaction volumes begin to climb. Workflows grow more complex. Real-time reporting requirements increase. And the demands to do more while holding the line on staffing and overhead become almost impossible to meet when you’re trapped in a sea of spreadsheets, outdated information systems, and patchwork processes� Maybe the challenges look familiar to you:

• Lower productivity as finance gets bogged down with more manual data entry

• Time-consuming global consolidations

• A lack of visibility into project profitability

• Bid to bill process disconnection across sales, project teams, and finance

• Lack of confidence in being able to scale

Today, more services firms are turning to Sage Intacct for modern, cloud-based financial management solution to accelerate financial processes and streamline operations� The following pages of this white paper spotlight five services firms that have achieved success with Sage Intacct to transform their financial organizations through greater productivity, faster consolidations, increased visibility across projects, better IT integration, and an ability to focus on higher-level strategic issues such as acquisitions.

1http://spiresearch.com/spi-research/reports/2016psmb.html

Is Finance Ready to Meet the Mandate for Growth?

Services Firms Take It to the CloudSage Intacct delivers the power of sophisticated financial software with the ease of use and cost-effectiveness of a cloud solution� You get the best of all worlds:

• Best-in-class, project-centric financial management solution—Everything from a multidimensional GL to cash management, project accounting and project resource management, revenue recognition, subscription billing, reporting, and analytics

• World-class infrastructure— Automatic quarterly upgrades, disaster recovery, complete security, and more—all built in

• Flexible integration—Our open architecture lets you work with your favorites, including Salesforce

• Anytime/anywhere productivity—Built from the on a content note, we were always browser based, but not mobile friendly. In fact, up until around 2007, we only ran on Internet Explorer running on a PC. To say we were built from the ground up as a mobile friendly solution is a stretch. Many would argue that we still aren’t very mobile friendly, unless you just want to approve payments and see dashboards. that lets you work from any location on any device at any time

• A better ROI—Easy per-user subscriptions without the hardware costs and IT investments for a lower TCO

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 4

Strategy No. 1: Increase Productivity Through Automation

As firms successfully achieve their growth potential, too often the finance systems that helped them achieve their success fail to scale up to meet the new demands and requirements of the now larger firm. The result? Finance teams fall back on manual data entry and redundant re-keying into multiple systems a time-draining, error-prone process. A better way is to automate financial workflows to cut the time required and eliminate rekeying.

Meeting the Challenge at Tandem HR

Tandem HR provides human resources infrastructure, services, and expertise, enabling clients to focus more on strategic priorities to grow their businesses�

For this services firm, the challenges came from several directions: manual consolidations across 16 entities, complex project accounting processes, and lack of detailed financial visibility across projects� Tandem HR switched from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct’s best-in-class, cloud financial management solution, a move that’s paid dividends in several ways�

Results with Sage Intacct

• Saved 500 person-hours annually

• Streamlined accounting for 16 entities

• Reduced manual errors

With Sage Intacct, our finance team now has much more time to analyze data, as opposed to worrying about data entry and processing spreadsheets.

SAM KASHYDirector of Business Development, Tandem HR

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 5

Strategy No. 2: Accelerate Global Consolidations

For many services companies, business success is soon followed by steady geographic expansion into new markets� They evolve into multi-location or even global organizations to service customers around the world with skilled staff spread across the globe. This evolution creates new requirements for finance to support sophisticated global financial consolidation-a challenge that is difficult and time-consuming to perform in spreadsheets or outdated finance systems. As the firm grows, finance needs a project-centric financial management solution that simplifies and automates global financial consolidation�

Meeting the Challenge at ProKarma

ProKarma, a global IT solutions firm with more than 2,500 employees in 21 offices worldwide provides technical expertise to help customers drive productivity and efficiency and maximize their technology investments�

Results with Sage Intacct

• Saved 16-22 hours/month streamlining global consolidations

• 40% more transactions processed by AP team

• Eliminated revenue leakage

Previously, ProKarma spent 20-24 hours per month on global consolidations. With Sage Intacct, that same process takes two to four hours.

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 6

Strategy No. 3: Gain Visibility into Project Profitability

Growth in revenues and growth in profits don't always go hand-in-hand. SPI Research found a wide range in profitability. In its research, 55 percent of respondents saw profits rise 2.1 percent, but 20 percent saw profits rise 23.5 percent.2 How can you help your organization rise to the top 20 percent? It starts with visibility into project profitability.

Meeting the Challenge at Cameo Global

Cameo Global works with clients worldwide to manage or host, design, and implement technology that drives productivity and delivers enterprise communication anywhere� To support its ongoing growth, Cameo Global needed a flexible and full-featured financial management and accounting system that provides robust reporting and dashboard capabilities for greater visibility into labor costs and project profitability.

Results with Sage Intacct

• Achieved data-driven business decisions

• $100,000 saved in headcount costs

• 25% time saved/month

As our leaders have learned Sage Intacct’s powerful capabilities, they’ve started using more and more reports and are employing an increasingly data-driven approach for every business decision. Now everybody sees the same data, and we have much better information with which to collaborate and make decisions.

MIKE MUNSONGlobal Controller, Cameo Global

2http://spiresearch.com/spiglass/tag/2016-ps-maturity-benchmark/

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 7

Strategy No. 4: Streamline Processes and Integrate IT Systems

Growing companies hire more talented employees and apply more sophisticated technology for each function of their business. In many instances, however, the legacy finance system is unable to integrate with the new software, forcing the company to cobble together a disconnected set of processes. For example, the project delivery staff can’t remotely access the on-premises financial management solution, so they must enter their time and expenses in Excel. Then the finance team must rekey that data into the financial system to support billing. Instead, savvy services firms use an open financial-management solution to tie together operations and finance with streamlined, automated processes.

Meeting the Challenge at Tenzing

Tenzing is an e-commerce specialist that delivers scalable infrastructure, fast networks, and managed services to more than 400 companies around the world� Over time, Tenzing was left with a patchwork of disconnected applications and processes: QuickBooks for core accounting, a separate billing database, a custom purchasing program, and countless Excel spreadsheets to track prepaid and deferred revenues�

To support its growth, Tenzing needed the power of sophisticated, scalable financial management solution to minimize manual data entry, integrate with other systems, and handle complex revenue management needs.

Results with Sage Intacct

• Improved data quality with Sage Intacct’s prebuilt integrations

• Cut time/expense tracking by 50%

• Automated financial workflows

We love Sage Intacct’s ease-of-use, robust reporting capabilities, and its tight integration with Salesforce. It also offers flexible APIs to connect with other business systems and the ability to grow with us over time as we automate more and more processes.

Jodie WattsDirector of Finance, Tenzing

Overcoming Financial Growing Pains in Professional Services Organizations 8

Strategy No. 5: Future Proof Your Financial Management Solution

How do you ensure the system you implement can grow with your business? Whether you’re adding new services, increasing staff and contractors, or expanding to new regions, your business will continue to evolve and grow. How do you future-proof your financial management solution? The answer is a solution that is open and can integrate with the systems and tools that you need today and in the future�

Meeting the Challenge at System One

System One is one of the largest professional-staffing firms in the U.S., with more than 6,000 employees across 50+ offices that specialize in industries such as energy, engineering, IT, commercial, healthcare and scientific, legal, and more. Revenues have tripled over the past 9 years� As part of its growth strategy, System One turned to Sage Intacct for a scalable cloud financial management solution that would streamline processes and improve its reporting and analysis capabilities�

System One is continuing to grow through acquisitions and internal growth. We are happy to partner with Sage Intacct because we know that Sage Intacct will be able to grow with us.

TIM KELLY,Vice President of Finance, System One

Results with Sage Intacct

• $60,000/year saved in staffing costs

• 40+ hours/month saved

• 5 acquisitions since Sage Intacct

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Profitable Growth Through Automation and Visibility

With the right solution, the finance department within a services organization can support and enable profitable growth. It starts by streamlining and automating manual processes and enabling finance to quickly complete previously time-consuming work such as labor costing, project billing, and global consolidations. Soon, the value evolves into delivering real-time, project-level financial and operational monitoring and projections. In this manner, finance moves from handling transactions to becoming a strategic advisor�

Fast-growing and profitable services firms recognize the value of investing in a financial software platform that automates financial and operational workflows. The finance team is able to deliver real-time insights about billable hours, utilization rates, and project profitability. Project teams can assign the best resources on budget, identify potential project overruns, and minimize revenue leakage� To achieve these results, services companies need a best-in-class, project-centric cloud financial management solution—a proven solution that can easily be configured to your business processes, integrate with your current and future apps, and scale as your company grows�

Don’t get left behind. More than ever, the time to start your journey is now.