Sage Intacct for growing businesses

Whether you are ready for Sage Intacct Construction depends on your accounting staff and the complexity of the business.  We've actually seen many growing businesses who only need a simpler implementation of Sage 100 Contractor or Sage 300 CRE that can last them for a decade.

We implement Sage Intacct Construction, and we host Sage 100 Contractor and Sage 300 CRE. Audra Speth, Troy Guevara, and Mohammed Ali explain how to tell when a growing contractor is ready, and what to do until then.

Readiness depends on staffing, not revenue

We look for four signals that often appear together:

• Your team is tired of maintaining servers, licenses, and software updates.
• You operate three or more entities.
• Intercompany transactions and consolidated reporting are already familiar parts of the business.
• Your accounting team must combine several reports to give the owner a clear view of the company.

Three entities is the threshold that matters. With two entities, your team can usually reconcile intercompany transactions by hand at month-end. With three, the process becomes three closes, three sets of intercompany entries, and a manually assembled reporting package for the owner. At that point, a shared multi-entity structure and one consolidated dashboard start paying for themselves.

Those signals alone do not settle the question. Staffing does.

A contractor can process a large volume of work in Sage 100 Contractor and still lack the team needed to run Sage Intacct Construction.

What to use until you are ready

Start by looking at what your accounting system needs to handle today.

How many jobs are running at the same time? How long do they last? How much labor does the company self-perform? Have change orders and work-in-progress reporting outgrown your spreadsheets?

QuickBooks is a capable bookkeeping system for a startup. It can categorize checks and invoices, but assigning a check to an expense account is not the same as job costing. Construction accounting must organize job costs and work in progress so that they support project-level reporting as well as the financial statements.

The need for construction-specific accounting software usually becomes clear when a contractor prepares its first WIP report, begins tracking retainage, or has to manage change orders.

For many contractors, these needs begin to appear around $1 million in annual revenue.

That figure is a rough guideline, not a rule for every trade. The complexity of the work is a better test than revenue alone.

Smaller contractors also often rely on a bookkeeper rather than a trained construction accountant. Sage 100 Contractor gives these companies a place to learn the fundamentals of construction accounting as they build the business. Some smaller contractors may continue using it successfully and never need Sage Intacct Construction.

Sage 100 Contractor and Sage 300 CRE can also support substantial companies. A contractor with $20 million in revenue can still get the work done in either system. The better planning question is whether the company intends to grow beyond that point. You should also consider whether you want to replace your software while growing from $25 million to $35 million or put the next system and team in place before that growth occurs.

A Sage 100 Contractor customer does not need to move to Sage 300 CRE simply to follow a product sequence. If Sage Intacct Construction is the right long-term destination, the timing should depend on how the company wants to access its software, the complexity of its entities, and the readiness of its accounting team.

The construction product is Sage Intacct Construction, not standard Sage Intacct. Your implementation partner needs experience with that product, not only with general Sage Intacct.

Cloud access without changing ERP systems

Wanting web access does not necessarily mean your company is ready for Sage Intacct Construction.

If a contractor wants to stop maintaining a local server but is not ready for a new ERP, we can host its existing Sage 100 Contractor or Sage 300 CRE environment. The software stays the same, but the team accesses it over the web instead of maintaining it on local infrastructure.

Even this change can require an adjustment for people who have spent their careers working with on-premises software. We typically give the team about six months to become comfortable in a hosted environment before discussing a move to Sage Intacct Construction.

Once the team is comfortable, we can show what a full cloud ERP offers and bring in an ERP advisor for a high-level demonstration.

Sometimes a company that believes it needs Sage Intacct Construction mostly wants off the server, and hosting what it already runs gets it there. Telling those two apart is what prevents a hard implementation later.

What changes with Sage Intacct Construction

A contractor can have accurate numbers and still receive them too late to act on them.

This delay has the greatest impact at the project level. If you cannot see job costs until a project closes, the numbers only explain what happened. The project team has already spent the money.

A contractor should be able to rebudget jobs every week and answer practical questions while the work is still in progress:

• How much of the project budget remains?
• What is the projected project profit?
• Are labor costs moving away from the estimate?
• Do current conditions require a change order?

Sage Intacct Construction gives you budget status and project profitability daily, while the job is in progress and there is still something you can do about it.

Labor is often the most difficult cost to control.

Reporting also changes. Instead of repeatedly assembling reports for owners, banks, and bonding companies, the accounting team can build reports within the system and work from current data.

The same principle applies to multi-entity growth. Sage Intacct Construction allows you to add each new company as an entity within your existing structure. Consolidation then happens in the system instead of through manual entries and spreadsheets.

A staged implementation

A Sage Intacct Construction implementation changes how the team works, so people need time to build confidence in the new system.

We begin with the functions people need to do their jobs. We intentionally hold back features or products that could distract the team before it understands the fundamentals. Once users are comfortable with the basics, we add the next useful layer.

We use the same approach after implementation. We begin with basic questions: How is reporting going? How is month-end going? Does the team feel comfortable?

If the foundation is strong, the next step might be to bring outside reporting into Sage Intacct Construction. Later, the company may be ready to consider equipment management, AP automation, or AI and Copilot tools. If the team is still uncomfortable, we return to the fundamentals. A renewal date should not determine whether the team is ready for the next phase.

For multi-entity companies, the implementation can proceed one entity at a time.

Discovery Land began with more than 400 entities across products that included Sage 50, Sage 100, and Sage 300 CRE. Over nearly seven years, we have moved those entities deliberately. Each entity receives its own business process review and implementation support before it joins the top-level structure. The company is now approaching the final few entities in its long-term plan.

Each year, we plan the next phase together. We identify which entities are ready and organize the work accordingly. If priorities change and one company needs to move sooner, we adjust the sequence rather than forcing every entity to move at once.

Guardian Restoration provides another example. After acquiring companies that used Sage 300 CRE, QuickBooks, ComputerEase, and other systems, Guardian began consolidating its entities into one environment for consolidated financial reporting. The implementation is moving one entity at a time. Teams can continue operating in their existing systems while we move one company, train its users, build their confidence, and then proceed to the next group.

Treating each entity as a separate implementation takes longer than applying the same template everywhere. However, it respects the way each business operates and creates a system the entire organization is more likely to maintain successfully.

Choosing the right time to move

Moving to Sage Intacct Construction too early creates problems. Waiting until the business has outgrown its current system creates problems of its own.

One customer moved to Sage Intacct Construction too quickly under a previous sales process. When an economic downturn reduced its business volume, the right response was to listen to the customer, move the company back to Sage 300 CRE, and leave the option open for another move when the business was ready.

The timing should reflect the needs and capacity of the business.

Readiness should also account for where the company is going, not just what it needs today.

Plan for the company you have a reasonable chance of becoming.