Why Sage Intacct is the Backbone of the Modern CFO’s Tech Strategy
By Dan Clibbens, Percipient
A Pivotal Time for Finance
According to research from PwC, CFOs are at a crossroads. Subdued economic sentiment, skills shortages, constrained visibility and policy uncertainty, are converging with changing business expectations to demand transformation. A Gartner report echoes this picture, highlighting that CFOs are now expected to co-own or fully own multiple business priorities in line with a shift in how financial leadership is being leveraged for overall business performance.
Against this backdrop, agility, resilience, intelligence are no longer value adds, but mainstays. The modern CFO must not only be ready to respond to questions and enquiries from the business, and provide relevant reports to executive teams as needed, but lead a new kind of culture.
New Rules
This culture will see businesses rely on finance professionals, and CFOs in particular, to transition into a new role which strategically advises and shapes the direction of corporate goals. In this era, CFOs will no longer be the guardians of the spreadsheet, but tasked with fostering collaboration with the board and wider business to bring measurable strategic value.
Building the Right Tech Stack
In responding to this transformation, visibility of operations and performance is key. But a view of say, the previous month, or a year-on-year comparison simply isn’t enough.
Having systems which provide a live view into procurement, sales, costs and operations can provoke analysis into anomalies, and ensure any overspend is stemmed, is therefore intrinsic to effective planning. Certain industries, such as hospitality, are grappling with such thin margins post-pandemic and post-budget, that things can change hour by hour. In this kind of business environment, live visibility can mean the difference between a healthy margin and a loss-leading business activity.
Sage Intacct: The Fabric of Transformation
Sage Intacct addresses these requirements, allowing CFOs to fulfil these new strategic remits through access to live business insights via dashboards.
With its ability to assign codes to an infinite number of items and fields for in-depth analysis, dynamic intelligence, and easy-to-view reports at pre-defined levels of detail, Sage Intacct unlocks new possibilities. Fully integrated with budgeting and planning, CRM, sales, procurement and HR applications for 360-degree visibility means every piece of data is captured and applied to steering the business forward.
This dashboard-centric intelligence effectively acts as a console to react and shift left or right, depending on what is emerging or standing in the way of plans.
Its ability to bring scale, agility and intelligence in an easy-to-use interface is central to new expectations and responsibilities, as the level of automation, reporting and expedited productivity owing to AI not only frees up CFOs’ time to focus on high level strategy, but instils resilience and mitigates risk, In the face of global political uncertainty, supply chain complexity and fluctuations in both costs and demand, such a capability is paramount to planning ahead.
Chris Gallagher-York is Financial Director at Simon Rogan-led Umbel restaurant group. As a high-end restaurant business with ambitious growth plans, he knows only too well how important live granular data is in steering the business forward, as he explains:
With 15 different sites and a £10 million turnover, and ambitions to expand further, the granularity Sage Intacct gives us ensures we’re on top of every aspect of every operation and entity at every moment. Entry-level systems such as Xero or Quickbooks simply don’t offer this capability and control over the numbers.
“Ultimately, we can pull out and review three and a half years of data in just five minutes, something which previously would have been impossible. It’s so easy to get information in and out of it, it really has become part of the DNA and driving force of our business.”
An intelligence-led mindset
Ultimately the top performing CFOs in 2026 and beyond will be those who deliver on strategic priorities, and to do that means having the right tech stack built upon a core platform such as Sage Intacct.
CFOs who embrace this type of digital culture, empower their teams and adopt and the right processes will undoubtedly be the leaders of tomorrow. Through championing the digital transformation necessary for a new era, those CFOs will be in the best position to mitigate talent shortages and drive performance in the face of uncertainty.
Lead The Change
See how Sage Intacct can help you build agility, resilience, and intelligence into your finance function. Book a free consultation with one of our experts or call us on 01606 871332.