Sage Intacct
Academy Trust eliminates manual processes with Sage Intacct
A Customer Success Story
Project background
The client
Founded in 2012, the Community Academies Trust (CAT) is a thriving multi-academy trust with 17 schools and plans for further expansion. CAT’s core mission is to provide excellent community education while preserving the unique identity of each school.
Supporting students from reception through to KS5, the trust adopts strategies for school improvement that build on and enhance local reputations, as well as raise standards to respond to the needs and aspirations of the communities they serve.
Greater financial control
The challenge
With their plans for continued growth, the consolidation of financial information had become a key priority for CAT. Previously, each school operated on individual databases and the process of exporting reports and manually combining them had become long and prone to errors.
The organisation was also heavily dependent on paper-based systems which complicated document management and the tracking of purchasing processes. This lack of central visibility created inefficiencies and made it difficult to maintain accurate, real-time financial oversight.
As the organisation grew and added more schools, there would be an increasing need to automate processes to make them less time-consuming and reduce the likelihood of errors. The organisation faced further delays and discrepancies associated with separate databases, and a limited ability to make informed decisions and improve operational efficiency.
An innovative approach
Our solution
To address these challenges, CAT worked with an external consultant to run a tender process for a new financial management system which led to the appointment of Solutions for Accounting as their Sage partner.
When asked ‘Why did you choose to work with Solutions,’ Trust Accountant, Jennifer Harvey said:
We implemented IMP for budgeting at the same time, so understanding Sage Intacct was only one part of the tender criteria. We needed a Sage partner who could work effectively alongside other technology providers as well, and we felt that Solutions bought into that collaborative approach adding Yooz for ‘Accounts Payable’ automation.
Jennifer Harvey, Trust Accountant at CAT
A key project objective for CAT was to improve the visibility of their consolidated data. By implementing Sage Intacct, staff would no longer need to switch between multiple spreadsheets to access information, giving them greater transparency across the whole organisation and streamlining their reporting processes.
CAT also needed to reduce their reliance on paper-based systems and improve the management of purchasing processes. Sage Intacct would support this by allowing documents to be stored and accessed electronically, making it easier to organise, search for and retrieve important files. It would also provide real-time tracking and automated workflows, which would ensure accurate order management.
As a growing organisation, CAT needed a solution that would scale with their Trust. With Sage Intacct’s native-cloud infrastructure, they could easily and quickly add new schools at any time without disrupting existing data and operations. This would mean that additional entities could be onboarded efficiently, allowing CAT to keep track of finances as they grow.
CAT required a custom solution for cash receipting from the schools that integrated seamlessly with Sage Intacct. The schools required a way to post cash receipts and payments into the system, such as for school trips, without needing individual user licenses for Sage Intacct, which they did not want to grant. To solve this, Solutions created a web-based system where staff can log in and enter receipts, which are then pushed into Intacct via an API. This ensures they can only post receipts to their school site, providing a controlled and efficient way to manage cash receipting processes.
Streamlined and efficient
The outcome
Since adopting Sage Intacct, CAT has been able to harness the power of a robust solution to support its financial management needs. The implementation of Sage Intacct has automated many of the organisations’ processes and empowered team members to focus on high-impact individual tasks, unburdened by excessive manual processing.
The elimination of paper-based methods has saved considerable time as documents can be emailed or scanned directly into Sage Intacct, which then processes them through an authorisation workflow. This has removed the inefficiencies of handling physical documents and reduced the risk of lost or inaccessible paperwork. CAT can now click into the system to see documents and any purchase orders attached. This has been particularly beneficial during audits, as auditors can directly access the system and review documents without needing to ask the team for individual invoices.
When asked how Sage Intacct has impacted their operations, Jennifer Harvey said:
There is no paper. Documents can either be emailed or scanned directly through to Yooz and once processed through the authorisation workflow, they’re just there in Sage Intacct. We can also create our own reports if we want to, which is a really good feature allowing us to customise reports based on our own requirements. We also really like that Sage Intacct holds images of the invoices and that we can add attachments to journals as well.
Jennifer Harvey, Trust Accountant at CAT
By integrating Sage Intacct with other business software, CAT has found that the nightly flow of transactions between systems has replaced the cumbersome manual uploads, saving time and significantly reducing the risk of errors. The team now conducts a single BACS run instead of multiple ones for each school, freeing up resources to focus on credit control functions and other strategic initiatives. Month-end processes are also more efficient as consolidation is required only once instead of multiple times.
CAT is confident that Sage Intacct, with its scalable, cloud-based infrastructure and integration capabilities, will continue to support their growth and evolving needs. The partnership with Solutions for Accounting has proven invaluable, providing expert guidance and a proactive approach to building integrations with other software partners.
If you are interested in finding out more about Sage Intacct or integrating it with your existing systems, please get in touch.
