Driving value and supporting private equity backed and private businesses through our partnership with Sage Intacct

As part of our new series led by Chris Neill, private equity audit Partner in London, we have sat down with Lola Evans, a Director in PwC’s Risk practice to discuss the impact Sage Intacct is having on private equity backed businesses and private businesses.

Tell us about yourself and role at PwC

I’m Lola Evans, a finance transformation Director focusing on mid market and private equity backed organisations. I have been with PwC for nearly 15 years in various roles and I now lead our Sage Intacct Transformation & Managed Services business. I focus on helping our clients get the most value out of their finance functions - whether that be upgrading their systems, optimising their operating model, or developing the management information. They need to have a true pulse on the health of their business.

Tell us about our partnership with Sage

We have been working with Sage for a few years now, particularly around their Sage Intacct product. We are very proud to be Sage’s Implementation Partner of choice housing the largest Intacct Centre of Excellence globally. Leveraging this capability, we support clients with end to end finance transformation and/or finance managed services.

What is Sage Intacct?

Sage Intacct as a solution is one of the best kept secrets in technology. While established in the US for 20 years, it is newer to the UK market, so many organisations haven’t heard of it. They often think of Sage’s legacy products whereas Intacct is a recent acquisition to their portfolio.

It’s a powerful “born in the cloud” financial management and accounting system, designed for small to medium sized businesses that want to scale. It automates complex and tedious processes and offers multi-dimensional analysis. It has intuitive dashboards which provide fast insight to financial performance. Sage Intacct also integrates seamlessly with existing tools such as Salesforce. We really like it for medium size businesses because it's simple to implement and easy to use with a really smooth end user interface.

How can Sage Intacct benefit PE Houses and their portfolio companies?

We know that private equity houses are particularly concerned with value creation and the speed with which they can get a return on investment. Sage Intacct is a cost effective solution for growing portfolio companies, due to the ability to implement it within weeks or months rather than years. Due to the robust controls and range of functionality, it is a good fit for companies considering exit either through sale or IPO.

The key benefits of moving to Sage Intacct are:

1. Clear visibility of the performance of newly acquired organisations through a one source of truth 
2. Decreased operational costs and complexity with portfolio companies
3. Streamlined processes, reduction in manual processing, freeing up more time for value-added tasks
4. Robust control environment

Can you give us an example of when we have implemented Intacct in a portfolio company or on behalf of PE houses

One of our recent clients is a private equity house operating across a number of industries. They struggled with disparate and outdated finance systems across their portfolio and they realised that better systems and processes would provide a solid base from which to scale these businesses.

We’ve implemented Sage Intacct within three portfolio companies as a pilot and are currently partnering to develop a roll-out plan across all other relevant portfolio companies.

If I’m a CEO or CFO and I’m reading this what should I do now?

If your organisation has outgrown the current finance systems and processes, and you are in need of a rapid transformation approach, get in touch to see how we can work with you and if Sage Intacct might be a good fit for your requirements.