Aberdeen Performing Arts Put Digital Centre Stage
with Sage Intacct and Percipient

A new cloud deployment helps one of Scotland’s largest performing arts organisations enhance data analytics, speed up reporting, and empower budget holders.

Aberdeen Performing Arts is the charitable organisation that manages His Majesty’s Theatre, the Music Hall, and the Lemon Tree, three of the North East of Scotland’s most important cultural venues. As the organisation sought to improve financial processes and reporting capabilities, it partnered with Percipient to implement Sage Intacct.

The solution provided real-time financial insight, automated key reporting tasks and created a single source of truth, enabling more efficient financial management and better-informed decision-making across the organisation.

About Aberdeen Performing Arts

Aberdeen Performing Arts is a multi-award-winning, multi-site, arts charity right at the centre of the North-east of Scotland. Its three iconic city centre venues, His Majesty’s Theatre, the Music Hall, and the Lemon Tree, are on a national and international touring circuit and are a vital part of Aberdeen and Scotland’s cultural landscape.

A Modern Approach

With three very different venues and a growing customer base, Aberdeen Performing Arts had outgrown its previous Sage 50 financial management system. As the system became overwhelmed and relied heavily on manual workarounds, 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 all converged to put pressure on a limited finance team. Aberdeen Performing Arts needed a modern, dynamic cloud-based platform that could deliver intelligent insights, analysis, and reporting, letting the team move away from Excel and adopt a more intuitive way of working.

The system needed to provide greater visibility into costs and income at both venue-specific and consolidated account levels, so the team could understand each entity’s cash position and report appropriately. As Matt Godfrey, Director of Finance and Commercial at Aberdeen Performing Arts, explains, three key drivers underpinned its business case for digital transformation.

First, the board set a requirement for more data analysis and integrated insights. Secondly, to meet regulatory requirements for detailed, cohesive financial information, the organisation needed a system to deliver this in an organised, efficient way. And finally, the board wanted to give budget holders the autonomy to manage their cost bases, levers and cashflow, empowering them to manage their own P&L.

New Levels of Performance

With Sage Intacct selected and deployed, Aberdeen Performing Arts’ financial management has shifted from a manual, one-dimensional process to a dynamic, seamless operation. The team can now view accounts by department, venue, event, or month, and adjust and move items as mandated by the board or regulatory bodies, ensuring full transparency and visibility.

“We were seeing benefits only a few weeks in, through time being freed up to refine operations. Data capture is so much easier, and accounts payable is much faster,” Matt adds. “We can now get data on all kinds of 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 drillability to get a deeper understanding of the detail behind the headline figures.”

A Focused Methodology

“Percipient’s in-depth knowledge and experience of both hospitality and the not-for-profit (NFP) sector meant that they understood the dynamics, challenges, and financial management requirements of our organisation. 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 straight away, so we didn’t need to spend time at the start explaining what we did. Because of that joint understanding, we could scope the project robustly, instilling diligence and reducing the risk of derailment 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, and because of their strong grounding in finance, they encouraged us to look beyond what we thought we needed to get to what we actually needed. It was a genuine pleasure working with them, and we got so much more than a software deployment; it was true consultancy at 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.”

A Vibrant Future

Looking ahead, Aberdeen Performing Arts aims to launch month-end reports dynamically, without emailing 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.

“A testament to the collaborative approach which underpinned this project was that in the reflecting phase, there was very little the team would have changed, something that in my many years and six or seven enterprise software deployment projects, is a first,” Matt concludes.

“It could be said that it was boring, which in any other scenario could be construed as a negative, but for a software deployment, it is undoubtedly a massive win. We’re excited to build on this to pursue our next chapter and look forward to working with Percipient to embrace whatever comes next.”

Multi-Award-Winning Sage Intacct Partner

To learn more about our work with Aberdeen Performing Arts, or the benefits of Sage Intacct for your organisation, get in touch or call us on 01606 871332.