Most of the move from Sage 300 CRE to Sage Intacct Construction is more familiar than people expect. The general ledger structure carries over with few changes. Two things consistently stand out for our clients: job-cost payroll and the miscellaneous worksheets your project managers use. Both of these "gotchas" can be easily designed for with the proper planning up front.
We move construction firms between these two systems for a living. Troy and Tina explain our approach and the tips/tricks we use to help facilitate a smooth migration.
The general ledger structure will look familiar
Sage 300 CRE organizes the general ledger in a way that translates well to Sage Intacct Construction.
In Sage 300 CRE, the prefix identifies the company. The base account remains the account, while subaccounts generally become dimensions such as departments or locations in Sage Intacct Construction.
Dimensions are often the main concept users need to understand. Most of the accounting logic carries over, but Sage Intacct Construction uses different terminology and a more flexible structure. Even familiar construction terms can change. For example, what Sage 300 CRE calls a category becomes a cost type in Sage Intacct Construction.
Our extraction tool prepares Sage 300 CRE data for import into Sage Intacct Construction, so your team does not have to rebuild the chart of accounts by hand.
The distance between the two systems is shorter than it looks. The chart of accounts will look familiar when you open it. The bigger adjustment is learning how to work with it in the new system.
Job-cost payroll works differently
The first surprise is payroll.
Sage 300 hands-down has one of the best payroll solutions out there for job costing, because it's independent — it has a payroll that posts to the general ledger for GL reporting, and a separate payroll that posts to your job cost and gives you transactional costing. When clients come over to Sage Intacct, that dedicated job-cost payroll they're used to seeing isn't there in the same form, and that's a big surprise. It's worth setting that expectation early for any Sage 300 CRE shop that leans on job-cost payroll.
Tina Rehberg · Senior Sage Intacct ConsultantSage Intacct Construction does not include its own payroll module. Instead, it connects to a specialized payroll platform.
We bundle Hammr as our preferred payroll provider. It supports certified payroll, prevailing wages by county and trade, multi-union projects, timesheet-level labor synchronization, and California compliance.
Before implementation begins, document exactly what your current payroll system does and design the replacement process. If your team leans on Sage 300 CRE's job-cost payroll, that is a design conversation, not something to find out the week after go-live.
Miscellaneous worksheets require a new workflow
The second surprise is how users enter transactions that affect job cost and the general ledger.
Miscellaneous worksheets in Sage 300 is — I would call it maybe not necessarily a free-for-all, but they can utilise it to do a lot of things that happen in the general ledger. Project managers can go in and say 'I'm putting in a job cost for this transaction' and type it into miscellaneous worksheets. It's a general ledger. When you come to Sage Intacct, if you don't have a business licence you're not able to impact the general ledger, so you have to go through a different workflow.
Tina Rehberg · Senior Sage Intacct ConsultantIn Sage 300 CRE, miscellaneous worksheets give project managers a direct and flexible way to enter job-cost transactions. Sage Intacct Construction controls that access differently.
Users with the appropriate business license can affect the general ledger directly. Other users must submit transactions through a defined workflow. The accounting outcome is the same. The route and the controls around it are not.
This is why an implementation discussion needs to go beyond a feature list. In the demo you will ask where the miscellaneous worksheets are. The question that decides the design is who needs to enter this information, who approves it, and how it reaches the general ledger.
Do not recreate every old process
The hardest part of moving from Sage 300 CRE to Sage Intacct Construction is not learning two new workflows. It is accepting that the new system should not reproduce every process from the old one.
The smoothest implementations begin with two expectations: your team will need time to test and adjust, and some processes will need to change so Sage Intacct Construction can support the way your business operates.
The move also gives you an opportunity to eliminate workarounds that existed only because Sage 300 CRE required them. Keeping all of them makes the first few weeks feel familiar and costs you most of the reason you changed systems.
What gets easier after the move
Once the new workflows are in place, Sage Intacct Construction provides capabilities that many construction companies now expect from their accounting systems: cloud access, API connections, multi-entity accounting, dimensional reporting, and integrations with the platforms their project managers already use.
Consolidation no longer has to be a separate month-end task. Entities roll up in one place instead of being combined manually. Reporting becomes easier for the same reason.
They don't have good reporting, they don't have real-time reporting. They need reporting for their bonding company, for their bank. They spend all this time building these reports. In Intacct I do it once, it's done.
Troy Guevara · Construction TechnologistThis matters because construction decisions cannot wait until a job is complete. While work is underway, your team can review budgets and project profitability daily. When the numbers change, you can update the budget weekly. It is the difference between reading the final job-cost report and still being able to do something about it.
Interstate Mechanical & Core made this move after outgrowing Sage 300 CRE. The company needed a cloud-based system its project managers could use alongside Procore, so we implemented Sage Intacct Construction.
Cloud still raises fair questions about access, data protection, and where the data actually sits. Put them on the evaluation list and make your partner answer them there.
Companies are moving because their expectations for cloud access, integrations, reporting, consolidation, and job-cost visibility have changed, even if Sage 300 CRE still handles their core accounting.
Plan for job-cost payroll and miscellaneous worksheets to work differently, and be prepared to update the processes around them. Sage Intacct Construction is a different product from Sage Intacct, so choose an implementation partner with specific Sage Intacct Construction experience, preferably one that works primarily with construction companies.
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