Prepare for Intacct
Sage Intacct Partner of the Year defines the seven core stages of project success when implementing Sage Intacct.
A successful deployment is integral in driving value and performance and instilling confidence in the business. But what makes a successful project, and what should the customer journey look like when the project goes live?
Why Sage Intacct?
Sage Intacct is a financial management platform built to scale as your business grows. It offers deep functionality, world-class intelligence, and reporting in just a few clicks. It accelerates decision-making and performance and brings modern financial management capabilities to organisations across various industry sectors.
With a modular framework to ensure today’s business needs are met, with flexibility and functionality to support tomorrow’s, it manages an almost infinite number of entities for consolidation and optimum reporting and reduces close time by up to 79%.
Why Work with a Partner?
Selecting new systems to support business goals or digital transformation projects can be daunting. It can feel impossible without the right skills, experience, and knowledge. Working with a partner who can bring these attributes to the table and guide the best route forward brings a wealth of value to project success and long-term business performance.
Even if you already have your next system in mind, or the business has already made that decision, working directly with a vendor isn’t always the right approach. A direct model often means an increased reliance on internal resources and, depending on the available accompanying services and support, can fall short of optimising the overall value of a deployment.
A partner model can address this resourcing gap, but selecting the right partner is vital. A common mistake when faced with partner selection is to opt for a consultancy that knows the software but lacks the industry and vertical sector experience necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the brief and scope. The best partner will know the software, have empathy through industry experience in finance and accounting roles, and have insight into the dynamics and nuances of the relevant vertical sectors.
The Percipient Way
Percipient’s ethos is built upon these core areas, and we apply this to every single customer interaction using the following methodology:
- Listening: We spend early sessions exploring our customers’ challenges, priorities, and nuances in depth to ensure we can act as a true extension of their team.
- Understanding: We apply what we learn to inform our perspective on where we can bring value, support goals, and exceed expectations.
- Experience: We use what we learned from similar projects to scope a methodology and align it with our customers’ parameters and prerequisites.
- Creativity: We design and scope the project based on these elements, recommending process improvements, addressing bottlenecks, and ensuring all available capabilities are leveraged for enhanced operational performance.
- Diligence: We rigorously set realistic and pragmatic project milestones and define regular check-in points to ensure time, budget, and deliverables stay on track.
- Commitment: We are not just there to manage the project; we are a long-term partner to support and enhance value as your business scales and pursues growth.
Percipient’s Implementation Roadmap & Methodology
We ensure a seamless transition to modern, intelligent and scalable accounting capabilities via our seven-stage methodology:
1. Scoping Phase
The scoping phase is arguably the most important part of a project. Rather than holding on to the way things have traditionally been done and relying on outdated processes, it’s important to take a completely fresh approach. While it may feel like a bit of a leap of faith, it’s important to trust in the process and embrace a new way of working designed to save time and improve things.
While we recognise that it can feel uncomfortable, letting go of how things have always been done can be incredibly liberating. Embracing a new way of thinking about financial management allows new avenues and opportunities to be explored.
2. Build Phase
This stage brings all the design ideas and planning from the scoping phase to fruition. Our highly experienced industry and technical consultants will build your solution, preparing any user acceptance testing (UAT) scripts to ensure it’s ready to be put through its paces.
3. Cleanse, Organise & Categorise Data
Any project should prioritise data cleansing as part of the export process. Not only is this crucial in maximising the quality of the data and, subsequently, the reports in Sage Intacct, but it also provides a window to scope out categories and evaluate suppliers to ensure you get the most out of the system. While it can be tempting to cut corners in the quest to complete the project faster, the importance of allowing sufficient time in this phase cannot be underestimated.
4. Testing
This phase is critical in instilling rigour. It ensures that all system elements work effectively from a functionality, data, user experience, and regulatory perspective. Once the team has confirmed that everything is operating correctly, migration can occur.
5. Deployment
A successful deployment is entrenched in experience, intuition, organisation, clear communications, and transparency. We believe that combining these principles is the best way to open up conversations, encourage questions, and ensure a smooth go-live.
6. Tailored Training
Training tends to be a blanket word for imparting information on how a system works.
Our approach at Percipient is different. We listen and engage with all the team from the outset, picking up on cues, learning styles, and personalities so that we can ensure training is tailored appropriately. Some people have more finance knowledge than others. Some learn better through visual walkthroughs and screen sharing, while others prefer to go away, play with the system, and come back with questions.
Aligning training accordingly is hugely important in ensuring each team member is confident they can hit the ground running with Sage Intacct. We do not promote a one-size-fits-all model because we aim to ensure that everyone succeeds.
7. Support
Our approach is highly flexible, and we take care of every aspect of your support requirements. From technical enquiries to managing third-party applications, we’ll tailor the right package to your needs and adapt and adjust it as your needs evolve.
Our support is world-class, and it includes a dedicated customer success manager, an online helpdesk, how-to videos, yearly reviews, and community engagement.
Download Our Guide to Sage Intacct Support
What Our Customers Say
Aberdeen Performing Arts
“Percipient’s in-depth knowledge and experience of both hospitality and the not-for-profit (NFP) sector meant that they really understood our organisation’s dynamics, challenges and financial management requirements. The value they added from the outset was truly impressive. There was no hard sell; there was just a friendly, open, transparent, knowledgeable, and well-prepared team from day one. They had clearly taken time to learn about us and understood our business straight away, so we didn’t need to spend time explaining what we did at the start. Because of that joint understanding, we could scope the project incredibly robustly, instilling diligence and reducing any room for the project to be derailed at any point.
“A very focused, robust methodology meant that we ensured the right amount of time was spent on the right areas and complexities. The Percipient team challenged some of our processes, which, because of their strong grounding in finance, was hugely valuable as they encouraged us to look beyond what we thought we needed to get to precisely what we needed. It was a genuine pleasure working with them, and we got so much more than a software deployment – it was true consultancy of the highest level.
“Percipient undoubtedly delivered more than we expected, and in tandem with Sage Intacct, this project has been an enormous success. The wider team couldn’t believe how smooth it was, and the fact that it took a matter of weeks to go live was a bonus.”
Matt Godfrey, Director of Finance and Commercial
TLH Leisure Resort
“Percipient really did pull out the stops to meet our remit for a four-week deployment. We knew that it could be rolled out in a timely way owing to its cloud-native architecture, but we were conscious that this timeframe was untypical and a tall order. The Percipient team, however, worked around the clock, taking a pragmatic approach and were dedicated to our goal.”
Ian Piercy, CFO
Holkham Estate
“I have a lot of experience in managing comparable deployments, and in my previous role, I managed a large finance team of 70+ people. I honestly feel that the relatively short deployment timeframe was a testament to the fact that Percipient spent so much time learning and understanding our diverse business upfront. They were brilliant.
“If further evidence was needed, one of our non-executive directors was genuinely taken aback when we reported a three-month deployment. I believe this timeframe was because the team put in so much time and commitment at the outset.”
Luke Tyce, Finance Director
Read Our Success Stories
Supporting Your Digital Journey
Percipient is a multi-award-winning Sage Intacct partner and the current Sage Intacct Partner of the Year for its outstanding performance in FY24. It currently holds the top EMEA Intacct VAR NCA ARR Revenue award, which essentially translates to us selling the most license value to new customers on behalf of Sage.
Achieving this level of success requires bold vision, dedication to excellence, and market leadership. Your hard work and strategic execution have set you apart as a valued partner.
The Perfect Blend of Experience, Empathy & Energy
These accolades are a result of our dedicated implementation methodology, amazing people, and the extensive and deep-rooted industry experience of our consultants, who bring empathy and energy to the projects we manage.
In a world where digital is intrinsic to success, and change is the only constant, choosing the right partner is paramount to success. As well as representing a flexible extension of your team and securing access to expertise and resources at the point at which you need them, we bring essential business value to help drive performance and achieve business goals throughout your digital transformation journey and into the future.
If you’d like to discuss the benefits of working with Percipient, the Sage Intacct Partner of the Year, contact us or call the team today on 01606 871332.
