Got Sage Financials and Needing Better Reporting and Budgeting? How Planning Software Solves this Need and Saves you Replacing your Finance System

The title of this article hopefully says it all. Sage Financials is a superb cloud-based accounting and financial management system… But… Although many finance professionals find it effective for managing their daily transactions and compliance needs, Sage does have limitations when it comes to flexible financial reporting and budgeting, especially as a business grows.

Creating custom reports and budget forecasts can be time consuming on Sage, and it often requires frustrating workarounds to configure the report parameters to the needs of the moment. At the same time, the lack of comprehensive advanced budgeting and analysis features in Sage Financials means that many users have to fall-back on spreadsheets to supplement their work with Sage.

This isn’t ideal, as spreadsheets are notoriously error-prone tool for reporting and forecasting. As a business’s financial needs scale, these gaps in functionality can widen, leaving companies and their finance teams to either struggle with inefficiencies the best they can, or consider a costly system replacement. What is the solution?

Should I Replace Sage With Another System?

Fortunately, unless there are other compelling reasons to do so as well as reporting and budgeting, then you shouldn’t need to. Replacing an entire financial system such as Sage is the equivalent of throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater – not a decision to be taken lightly. The onboarding process often takes months, disrupting operations and forcing employees to learn a brand-new system. And there is also no need to do it. Sage is a great system for what it’s designed to do. Using a planning software platform, such as Corporate Planner, in tandem with Sage, will enhance Sage Financials strengths and resolve its weaknesses at a fraction of the cost and complexity of replacement.

Corporate Planner – The Perfect Complement To Sage Financials

Implementing Corporate Planner is the perfect way to fill the gaps left in Sage Financials toolkit. Corporate Planner integrates perfectly with Sage, empowering your finance professionals with additional advanced budgeting and reporting tools to boost their productivity, agility, and efficiency.

Improved reporting capacity: Creating reports is a pleasure in Corporate Planner, making the whole process quick, flexible, and intuitive. The software’s drag-and-drop features and the ability to quickly customise reports to your needs, enable finance professionals to rapidly create insights tailored to specific stakeholder needs or business units. You can, for instance, generate departmental, regional, customer, product or project level reports in using data drawn directly from Sage or your ERP. Using Corporate Planner’s interactive dashboard, you can then translate this raw data into actionable insights, or share easy to understand visual summaries with your key stakeholders.

Effortless integration: Corporate Planner seamlessly integrates with Sage Financials, which in real terms means that it pulls your transactional data directly from the platform and automatically sync updates without the need for manual data entry. This saves countless hours on manual data extraction and makes sure that your financial planning processes are always based on the most up-to-date iteration of your data.

Sophisticated forecasting, budgeting, and planning: Corporate Planner steps up in the areas where Sage Financials often falls short, with a range of advanced budgeting features. These include the ability to make on-demand or monthly budget adjustments and re-forecasts to quickly adapt to economic turbulence, market opportunities, or other changes; customisable multi-scenario forecasting to mitigate risks and plan for various eventualities; and integrated planning tools to align budgets and forecasts across the different projects and departments of your organisation.

Find Out More

Book a free demo of Corporate Planner with Account-Ability today to discover how the platform works seamlessly with Sage to strengthen your reporting and budgeting processes