Sage Unveils Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning for Small to Midsize Businesses

Sage (FTSE: SGE) today announced the launch of Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning, stemming from its acquisition of Budgeta earlier this year.

This powerful, yet easy to use, cloud-based financial budgeting and planning solution – deployable in a few days – provides a collaborative environment that streamlines and improves the planning process. Sage Intacct customers can now eliminate the need to rely on spreadsheet and emails for planning, giving them back time to focus on their businesses.

Budgeta, a Sage Intacct partner, had previously integrated its solution with Sage Intacct, and its team brings extensive market expertise. Acquiring a proven solution and extending the tight integration accelerates Sage Intacct’s ability to level the playing field for small and midsize businesses that have outgrown spreadsheets for planning but don’t have the time and money to implement and manage an enterprise-scale solution.

“Dedicated budgeting and planning software can provide greater business value to executives and managers than spreadsheets. An application like Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning can streamline the process and free up valuable time to focus on the business. In addition to financial control, growing companies need a planning process that enables them to retain their agility by rapidly responding to markets and competitors,” commented Robert Kugel, senior vice president and research director, Ventana Research – a leading business technology research and advisory services firm.

Democratization of Budgeting and Planning for Smaller Businesses

For any company, speed, ease of use, accuracy, alignment, and collaboration during financial planning and forecasting is critical to continued growth. Approximately 90% of businesses with between 50-200 employees use tools such as Microsoft Excel for planning purposes, and many companies eventually find themselves in what’s become known as “Spreadsheet Hell” – synonymous with spreadsheet formula errors, hard-to-use templates, inaccurate or delayed analysis, and endless versions of massive spreadsheets that crash computers.

That’s where Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning comes in – meeting at the intersection of powerful and easy-to-use functionality for growing businesses. It enables organizations to collaborate on the latest version of the plan or budget in a single secure application. This eliminates inefficiencies and security risks, as multiple versions of spreadsheets are no longer shared via email in the review and approval process.

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning features bidirectional data synchronization with Sage Intacct and uses the same structures, including the chart of accounts and all dimensions, to seamlessly manage actuals, budgets, and plans. This delivers the flexibility and control needed to better manage the complete budgeting and planning process using one integrated solution and increases the quality of budget reporting and analysis available in Sage Intacct.

“Company executives and managers need performance measures and insights. Spreadsheets can’t deliver this well enough,” added Kugel. “Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning is cloud-based and designed for use by finance departments without any IT department resources. Especially for small and midsize companies moving away from spreadsheets for planning, a cloud-based solution can be much easier and less expensive to deploy and maintain than legacy software solutions.”

“It’s clear that better planning leads to more effective and profitable organizations, yet companies with between 50-200 employees have been hard-pressed to find solutions that support continued growth. We believe Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning changes the game in some very fundamental ways,” said Dan Miller, vice president of product, Sage Intacct. “We see a significant market opportunity, starting with our current customers, to deliver a more effective, team-based budgeting and planning solution that identifies growth opportunities and the means to achieve them.”

Benefits of Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning improves organizational alignment, reduces wasted resources, and improves security. It is built specifically for budgeting and planning in small to midsize businesses and enables companies to:

Improve Organizational Alignment, Eliminate Risk: Collaboration tools ensure transparency and accountability within finance teams, but also for other key stakeholders. All users work from one set of numbers to ensure the business avoids cross-functional confusion caused by multiple “final” versions and eliminates the need to share sensitive information via email.
Automate the Plan Process: Reduce the time spent on plan management by up to 50%, as well as streamline monthly and quarterly reporting processes. With an estimated 300-percent annual payback from time saved in administering plans, the solution easily pays for itself.
Increase Security: Comprehensive security features provide control over use of data, as well as which users can view, edit, or modify information.
Easy to Deploy and Use: Unlike many solutions that take weeks or months to deploy, Sage Intacct customers can be up and running in just days. The solution is easy to use and includes spreadsheet-style formulas, a drag and drop user interface, and a library of best practices and sample reports ready to go “out of the box”.

For more information on the features and functionality, including a video overview of Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning, please visit https://www.sageintacct.com/budgeting-and-planning. This new solution will also be showcased at Sage Intacct Advantage 2018. For details on attending this customer and partner conference, Oct. 22-26 in Nashville, please visit https://www.sageintacct.com/advantage.

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning is currently in limited release and is expected to be generally available in Q4 2018.