Standing out from the Crowd with Sage Intacct

Percipient’s Sam Allen takes a look at how Sage Intacct is bringing greater planning, performance and profitability to venues and sporting organisations

Venues are typically complex in their operational structure. Many span multiple sites and encompass a range of disciplines, from music and sport, to corporate and recreational activities.

Selecting the right finance system to support this complex picture is paramount in optimising both performance and profitability. Yet many continue to get by using legacy or entry level systems which restrict insights and impede potential.

If you are at a crossroads with your existing system and contemplating options, here are some of the key areas where Sage Intacct can expedite value:

Multi-Entity Management

Venues often have a multi-site profile and it’s not uncommon for them to operate one or more stadiums, conference centre, gym and hospitality facilities.

The multi-entity capabilities within Sage Intacct mean that each operation’s performance within a venue can be viewed or mapped against another to compare, track patterns and anomalies as well as form part of consolidated accounts.

Sage Intacct can also support inter-company trading to manage internal investment and trade-offs, which are particularly important for those organisations where profit is not the sole goal.

Planning and budgeting variability

The variability which comes with an events-led organisation means that planning and budgeting can be tricky. Past performance isn’t necessarily an indicator of the future, and attempting to harness the variables involved in Excel is impossible. The dimensions in Sage Intacct mean that each event, team, match or season, can be accounted for individually, in granular detail, to track income and expenditure and create individual P&Ls.

In adding greater depth to this, Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) brings advanced budgeting and forecasting capabilities to refine and better predict revenue. This is particularly useful where venues need to analyse say, the number of tickets sold, food and beverage spend per individual attendee, or merchandise profit. And in areas where events calendars are short-term, planning only a few months ahead, reforecasts can be done on a rolling basis to adapt and optimise.

Reporting

Leveraging Sage Intacct’s Dimensions to performance in-depth analysis, P&L can be viewed for any area or entity across live dashboards. This can be high level, or drill down into detail around a specific area in just a few clicks.  

These dashboards include information such as revenue by event, attendee, tour, team, match or competition, and season. And crucially this intelligence is easy to access by non-finance users, empowering budget owners and departments heads to understand manage and plan accordingly.

The rapidly evolving entertainment landscape means that it’s paramount to understand levers for profitability in real-time, as opposed to retrospectively. And understanding how, say promotion or relegation will impact revenue and profitability is crucial in shaping the long term success of a sports club.

Robust, real-time and comprehensive reporting also supports regulatory demands, health & safety and specific rules such as financial fair pay in football.

Ease of Implementation

It’s not uncommon for organisations to delay moving to a new finance system because of perceived disruption and lengthy deployments. While this was fairly typical of traditional on-premise implementations, Sage Intacct is both easy to deploy and easy to use, with an average project taking just 10-12 weeks.   

Establishing a project team, setting pragmatic, realistic goals and timeframes which are sensitive to the financial year and events calendar, is key to achieving a smooth go-live.

Integrations

Through the use of Percipient Cloud Connect, our own proprietary API-centric middleware solution, venues and sports clubs can truly double down and maximise the intelligence and reporting available through Sage Intacct. Through seamless integration with third party systems, from ticketing, procurement and EPOS, to expense management and HR, organisations can get comprehensive, contextualised insights which converge to inform decision-making and meet strategic and operational goals.

Empowering teams, expediting transformation

The venues and sports sector is incredibly dynamic and sensitive to market shifts, so digital is pivotal to growth. The automation, intelligence and industry-focused capabilities that Sage Intacct brings to the table expedite this transition, empowering teams to drive greater proactivity and planning for enhanced future performance.