Family offices face significant challenges in achieving operational efficiency for back-office accounting and reporting. These challenges become more evident as your family office grows and the number of legal entities increases. Time-consuming manual processes, lack of quick and timely reporting, and over-reliance on spreadsheets are a fact of life when operating in QuickBooks or any inflexible system. If this sounds familiar, you are in the right place.
The good news is that making a switch to Sage Intacct, a cloud-based financial management and accounting system, can alleviate all these pain points and more.
With Sage Intacct you can say goodbye to the manual spreadsheet work, gain access to real-time reporting, improve the flexibility of reporting through the use of dimensions, increase productivity, grow and scale your business, and automate your procure to pay and payment processing.
Below we've listed some of the common challenges that Family Offices face. To learn more about these challenges, fill out the form to the right to download our guidebook.
The Challenge
A common pain point many quickly discover is that it is a cumbersome consolidation process when growth leads to the incorporation of additional entities. Within the context of a family office, these additional entities can take many forms: a trust, a fund, a business venture, etc.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
Sage Intacct houses all of your legal entities, making consolidated data readily available for your team. Consolidation is automatic via rollup if all entities have the same base currency (you can run any report across entities of the same base currency).
The Challenge
To put it bluntly, QuickBooks is not designed to solve the accounting challenges that arise from inter-entity transactions. There is no way to automate these inter-entity transactions so the finance team must constantly track their intercompany accounts and create manual entries in the affected entities. As you have probably experienced, when someone misses one of these transactions, the issue is usually not discovered until much later on when the details of the transaction have been forgotten.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
Sage Intacct has an automated solution for both of the challenges listed above. When you create entities in Sage Intacct, you have the option of defining intercompany relationships that control the automatic posting of intercompany transactions, making it much easier to centralize payables and receivables. Sage Intacct also facilitates multi-currency intercompany transactions and provides the ability to auto-eliminate intercompany balances when running a consolidation.
The Challenge
One of the most time-consuming and cumbersome tasks that many Family Offices go through with QuickBooks is the maintenance of their Chart of Accounts. Many hours have been wasted going hrough and manually adding any required accounts into each entity in QuickBooks. This means less time working on important financial projects and more time spent working on something your system should do for you.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
What a relief it would be if you only had to add a new account or segment once and let your ERP handle the rest. With an ERP like Sage Intacct this dream has become a reality. Sage Intacct gives you a shared dimensional chart of accounts across all your entities. This type of chart of accounts allows for easier maintenance, less errors, and a more detailed way of reporting.
The Challenge
QuickBooks does not enable you to set granular permissions for different types of users as the controls are activity-based. Since the audit trail is transactional only, it will not record login/logoff activity or changes to master records. In certain cases, the transactional audit trail can be circumvented or even completely cleared.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
Sage Intacct offers a comprehensive front-to-back office collaborative audit trail that removes any confusion over when a transaction changed or what it was changed from. The audit trail shows what a field value was before it was changed, what it was changed to, when it was changed, and who changed it.
Fixed asset management is not something that family offices usually have at the top of their priority list. However, having effective fixed asset management can provide many benefits for your family office.
The Challenge
One of the biggest challenges family offices face when managing fixed assets is the sheer volume of data that must be maintained in absence of a policy to handle it. This entails tracking asset acquisitions, improvements, disposals, impairments, and relocation of assets. The complexity grows when faced with multiple accounting and tax regulations.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
As a steward of your company’s assets, you need an asset management system that look beyond depreciation to provide dimensional visibility into asset valuation, condition, insurance status, and more. Sage Intacct fixed asset accounting software accelerates and simplifies accurate accounting throughout the fixed asset management lifecycle. You work with a single set of asset acquisition, depreciation, and disposal information that’s automatically shared with the general ledger, accounts payable, and purchasing modules.
Predictably, as your family office grows and the number of systems used for accounting and investment reporting increases, the proportion of manual work your staff must perform increases. This causes costs to spiral in the form of increasing headcount. The problem is that there is no leverage having people working in QuickBooks and Excel, you just continue to hire more people as the workload increases.
The Challenge
The laborious manual work that QuickBooks requires for consolidations and the close process demands additional resources. Finance resources are consumed with gathering, reconciling, aggregating, and cleansing data as spreadsheet bloat prevails.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
As a web based, live, and real-time system, Sage Intacct greatly accelerates critical financial processes like consolidations, collections, period closes, reporting, and payment processing. The efficiencies and productivity gained from Sage Intacct allow your business to scale without additional headcount.
In a highly competitive market, it is imperative to use customizable reporting to precisely highlight the impact your decisions, investments, and spend has had on returns and risks. KPIs used that ensure efficiency and best response to clients include how long it takes to produce reports/reconcile data, the accuracy of said reports, and the time required to make an investment decision.
The Challenge
QuickBooks often falls short of a family office’s quick, accurate, and granular (oftentimes ad-hoc) reporting requirements. Reporting in QuickBooks lacks the speed necessary to be a true differentiator in terms of cost and profitability as it relies on the manual creation of spreadsheets. The inflexible reporting inherent in QuickBooks leads your team to resort to exporting data to Excel and parse through inconsistent tags in memo fields to try to make sense of the data. Not only does this take time, but it also carries serious risks.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
Sage Intacct was uniquely designed to give you endless reporting flexibility thanks in part to its shared dimensional Chart of Accounts that enable you to slice-and-dice your information to meet your needs (across funds, locations, or asset classes). You no longer need to spend countless hours on monthly reporting. Unlike QuickBooks, Sage Intacct enables you to track both financial and operational data in real-time, allowing you to make quick adjustments to your business depending on the situation and shorten the reporting cycle.
The Challenge
From a security standpoint, QuickBooks might be holding you back in following two ways, adding risk to your accounting process and lost time due to mitigation and workarounds:
- User Permissions – In QuickBooks, permissions are activity-based and are “all or nothing”. This makes delegating accounting work much more difficult than it should be as you are not able to restrict certain tasks at the user level without giving up control.
- Infrastructure – Hardware failures and natural disasters can disrupt your business and affect the integrity of your data.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
With security features built in to the Sage Intacct application, you can prevent outside attacks and ensure that the right people get the right level of access to your Sage Intacct environment. Sage Intacct has the ability to restrict a user’s permissions via granular, role-based security policies across all of Sage Intacct’s modules. Sage Intacct also allows to restrict a user’s viewing/transacting ability to specific entities or departments, which allows you to protect confidential data from anyone who does not need this level of access.
Whether it be an expense management, HR, or a Procure-to-Pay system there are many valuable solutions that allow teams to streamline several of their day to day processes.
The Challenge
If you use systems like QuickBooks desktop, getting this data into your accounting system may be a meticulous process. Have your ever wished that QuickBooks could speak to your other systems? Imagine a world where your team didn’t have to spend hours converting data from one system to another. This is a very common issue for Family Offices who struggle to get their financial information from other back-office solutions into QuickBooks.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
Sage Intacct has a wide range of Marketplace partnerships that allows your solutions to communicate to one another. Through direct Application Programming Interface (API) integrations Sage Intacct brings real time information from your outside systems into your ERP. This means you don’t have to import any of the data or deal with formatting data day after day in order to maintain accurate information.
The Challenge
The procure-to-pay process as it exists in QuickBooks has several limitations that significantly hinder its efficiency and internal controls. Purchasing workflows are not customizable in QuickBooks so you can forget about molding the process to fit your family office’s needs. Even worse, purchase orders are not “connected” with other modules/functionality so you will find yourself performing redundant data entry. For a growing business that might process hundreds if not thousands POs, this can be an extremely time-consuming inefficiency.
How Sage Intacct Can Help
You can use the Sage Intacct Purchasing module to create structured, predefined transaction and approval workflows that increase purchasing speed, accuracy, and efficiency. Combining Sage Intacct’s Purchasing module with the system’s suite of dashboard and reporting tools, you have the ability to monitor budget vs. actuals, analyze costs, and gain visibility into your entire procure-to-pay cycle.
Get a Sneak Peak of Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct hosts a 30-minute, zero commitment interactive demo every day at noon EST / 9 a.m. PST.
During this demo, you’ll learn how Sage Intacct can help you improve your company’s performance across departments. It all stems from a powerful financial management and accounting solution that gives you deeper insights and greater financial visibility into your company’s operations, processes and data.
Click the button below to sign up for the upcoming daily demo on Sage Intacct’s site.
Then, when the time comes, grab a fresh cup of coffee for this “coffee break” and dive into the world of Sage Intacct. Don’t be afraid to ask questions!
