Percipient has announced that Aberdeen Performing Arts, one of Scotland’s largest performing arts organisations, has successfully deployed Sage Intacct.
Aberdeen Performing Arts is a multi-award-winning, multi-site arts charity in the centre of Northeast Scotland. Its three iconic city-centre venues, His Majesty’s Theatre, the Music Hall, and the Lemon Tree, are all on a national and international touring circuit for the performing arts and a vital part of Aberdeen and Scotland’s cultural landscape.
With three very different venues and a growing customer base, Aberdeen Performing Arts had outgrown its previous Sage 50 financial management system. As well as the system being overwhelmed and relying heavily on manual workarounds to process, its propensity for errors left the organisation open to risk.
Large transaction volumes, seven festivals per annum, a mix of charity-based and trading entities, and many moving pieces when booking acts and events converged to put pressure on a limited finance team.
Aberdeen Performing Arts needed a modern, dynamic, cloud-based platform to deliver intelligent insights, analysis, and reporting. This would allow the team to move away from Excel and embrace a more intuitive working method. The system needed to deliver greater visibility of costs and income at a venue-specific level and in consolidated accounts so that the team could understand each entity’s cash position and report appropriately.
Percipient’s in-depth knowledge and experience of hospitality and the not-for-profit (NFP) sector meant they 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, just a highly friendly, open, transparent, knowledgeable, and well-prepared team from day one.
New Levels of Performance
Having selected and deployed Sage Intacct, Aberdeen Performing Arts’ financial management has transitioned from a manual one-dimensional set of processes to a dynamic, seamless operation. The team can now look at their accounts by department, venue, event, or month, with the option to adjust and move things as mandated by the board or regulatory bodies for complete transparency and visibility.
“We were seeing benefits only a few weeks in through time being freed up to refine operations. Data capture is much easier, and accounts payable hugely faster,” explains Matt Godfrey, Director of Finance and Commercial at Aberdeen Performing Arts.
“We can now get data on various areas and flex to report accordingly. The system is so intuitive that we can do this in a few clicks. Month-end is easy, and we have substantial drill ability to understand the detail behind the headline figures better.”
Sage Intacct for Non-Profits
“Percipient’s in-depth knowledge and experience of hospitality and the not-for-profit (NFP) sector meant they 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, just a highly friendly, open, transparent, knowledgeable, and well-prepared team from day one. They had clearly taken time to learn about us and understood our business immediately, so we didn’t need to explain 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.”
Looking ahead, Aberdeen Performing Arts’ goal is to dynamically launch month-end reports without needing to e-mail them. They also plan to roll Sage Intacct out to budget holders as soon as the team feels 100% au fait and proficient in all aspects of the system.
Read Aberdeen Performing Arts’ full success story. For more information about how we can help your NFP business succeed with Sage Intacct, get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.
