More digital, but keep my padlocks

Recently I was lucky enough to host a webinar with one of AWCape's latest Sage Intacct customers Marc Meiring (Colmed) and his entrepreneurial journey to be owner of 6 companies. Part of the discussion was about his decision to implement Sage Intacct, especially as it had only released in South Africa in August 2020. One of the key drivers for him was real time access to his data across the 6 businesses to manage his cash flow effectively.

"Financial Statements are great but... I need to manage cash flow now."

Marc Meiring - Colmed

At a fundamental level, isn't this why most companies go digital? Real time access to data, allows for real-time decision making. This could be the difference between your business being a market leader vs. a market follower.

We asked the audience during the webinar, what the number 1 priority area was for them:

1. Digital transformation

2. Cyber, Data threats

3. New Business models / Growth Strategies

4. New work culture (e.g. WFH, gig economy)

5. Better Insights

Number 1 (Digital Transformation) and 5 (Better Insights) came out top with 2 (Cyber, Data threats) coming in next. This again supports the premise above that businesses are trying to stay of their competitors by digitally transforming their business to get better insights (while being cognizance of the risks). For me, this is why Sage Intacct has been so successful, it is a truly native cloud solution focused on delivering key insights to the business and finance user.

"Sage Intacct received the highest score for the 5th year in a row. "

Gartner Critical Capabilities Report

We were also lucky enough to be joined on our panel by Erika More, Sales Director at Sage who expanded on the benefits of not only Sage Intacct, but cloud products in general. This included:

Erika's main point was that not only do customers gain massive cost savings and productivity improvements straight away from cloud based products, the speed to market for additional features is much faster. This was demonstrated by the 4 releases per year that Sage Intacct does and that the latest release included an AI feature to pick up GL outliers based on historic transaction behavior. These additional leading edge technology features keep the product and businesses ahead of the competition.

However, with anything new, there is always anxiousness or even fear. Specifically around the protection of data and reliance on a third party. When we opened the floor to questions at the end of the session, many of the questions related to data security and compliance with data policies e.g. GDPR, POPIA. I touched on this in a previous article, but the reality is that no small business (and not most big businesses) can provide the economies of scale that technology and hosting companies like Sage, Microsoft, Amazon etc. can in terms of data security, compliance and uptime. As a result, it is actually riskier to host data locally than in the cloud.

"Riskier to host data locally than in the cloud."

Although the intent to digitally transform may be there in most companies, the resources and money might not be available to go true cloud immediately. There may be many legacy systems that had big investments and integrations across the organization. Some of these are the primary systems in the business and too costly and impactful to completely swap out. So what then? Well COVID and WFH (work from home) has shown us the solution - hybrid cloud solutions. This is where existing legacy systems are hosted in the cloud to allow remote access (and gain other benefits of cloud e.g. infrastructure and security savings).

AWCape has done many of these hosting solutions recently and they have been very successful options for these business. There has been such a demand for these services that we are actually hosting another webinar on this topic this month.

A final note: Digital transformation has been accelerated in the last year because of COVID, but not all cloud solutions deliver results and customer satisfaction like Sage Intacct does. Be wary of products with a flashy front end and very little back end support, security and compliance. Also use trusted partners, with years of experience to help you on your journey, one step at a time...there is still opportunity to leap frog the competition.

Webinar recording: