A successful finance system implementation begins well before configuration or data migration. It starts with understanding how finance works today, where the delays and risks sit, and what the business needs the new solution to improve.
That may sound obvious. Yet it is easy for a project to become centred on features, demonstrations and a target go-live date before the team has agreed what success should actually look like.
In this Finance Leaders Unplugged conversation, Jon Clarke and Gavin Roe discuss the questions finance leaders should ask before replacing a finance system. Jon is a former Finance Director who has led ERP, POS and WMS rollouts across several continents. Gavin is a former Financial Controller who first implemented Sage Intacct as an in-house user and now helps Inixion customers implement the solution.
Their message is simple: do not begin with the technology. Begin with the problem.
Watch the full discussion here:Â https://youtu.be/Nsynimw-Pfo
A new finance system is not the objective
Replacing a finance system is a significant business decision. It affects everyday processes, reporting, controls, integrations and the people who rely on financial information.
The objective should therefore be more meaningful than “replace the old system” or “move to the cloud”. Those statements describe an activity, not a business result.
A finance leader might instead want to:
- Reduce the month-end close from ten working days to five
- Produce management reports in hours rather than days
- Remove manual consolidation across multiple entities
- Reduce invoice processing and approval time
- Give budget holders timely access to relevant information
- Improve audit trails and confidence in the numbers
- Support acquisitions, new entities or changing reporting requirements
- Free the finance team to spend more time analysing performance
These outcomes give the finance system implementation a purpose. They also provide a way to judge whether the project has delivered value after go-live.
Map the processes before evaluating solutions
Jon’s first recommendation in the video is to map the existing finance processes. This does not need to become a theoretical exercise involving every minor task. It needs to show how work really happens, including the steps people have added outside the finance system.
Follow the work from beginning to end
Choose the processes that create the greatest effort, risk or delay and follow each one from its starting point to completion. These may include:
- Purchase-to-pay and invoice approvals
- Order-to-cash and credit control
- Bank reconciliation
- Intercompany accounting and consolidation
- Month-end close
- Management and board reporting
- Budgeting and forecasting
- Project, department or service-line reporting
Record the systems, spreadsheets, emails, approvals and hand-offs involved. A process may look straightforward in a procedure document while depending in practice on exported files, manual adjustments and one person’s knowledge.
Separate symptoms from underlying problems
“Reporting takes too long” is a useful starting point, but the team needs to understand why. Is data spread across several systems? Does the chart of accounts no longer reflect the business? Are reports rebuilt in Excel every month? Is information late because approvals have not been completed?
The same applies to a slow month-end. The finance system may be part of the problem, but delays can also come from unclear ownership, disconnected processes or information arriving late from outside finance.
Good process mapping prevents the business from buying a new solution and recreating the same problems inside it.
Turn pain points into clear requirements
Once the current processes are understood, translate the pain points into requirements. This is a crucial part of a finance system implementation plan because it gives potential solutions and implementation partners something meaningful to respond to.
Avoid writing a long wish list in which every requirement has equal importance. Separate the needs that are essential from those that are desirable.
Ask what the business needs now and next
Requirements should cover the organisation the finance team supports today and the one it expects to support in the next three to five years.
Consider:
- The number of legal entities, locations and currencies
- Planned acquisitions or expansion
- Reporting by entity, department, project, customer or service line
- Consolidated and intercompany reporting
- Approval controls and delegated authority
- Transaction volumes and expected growth
- Integration with CRM, payroll, expenses, banking and operational systems
- Data access for finance and non-finance users
- Audit, security and compliance needs
- The reports and dashboards required by different decision-makers
A requirement should describe the business need rather than dictate a familiar workaround. For example, “produce consolidated reporting across six entities without manual spreadsheet consolidation” is more useful than “export six trial balances to Excel”.
Define success before the project starts
Every organisation will define a successful finance system implementation differently. What matters is agreeing the measures early enough for them to influence the project.
Set a starting point
Measure the current position before changing it. If reporting currently takes five days, invoice approval averages eight days or month-end closes on working day twelve, record it. Without a baseline, it is difficult to demonstrate improvement.
Use specific, measurable outcomes
Useful measures could include:
- Month-end completed by working day five
- Management accounts available within one day of close
- A defined percentage of invoices processed without manual data entry
- A reduction in spreadsheet-based reporting
- Faster approval times
- Fewer manual journals or reconciliation adjustments
- Consolidated reporting available without offline manipulation
- Increased adoption of dashboards by budget holders
Targets must be realistic and relevant to the business. The purpose is not to manufacture an impressive number. It is to create a shared definition of success.
Look beyond go-live
Going live is a project milestone. It is not, by itself, proof that the finance system implementation has succeeded.
The more useful review takes place after users have completed real transactions, a month-end and their regular reporting cycle. At that point, the business can compare the agreed measures with the baseline and identify where further optimisation or training is needed.
Give the right people ownership
A finance system project cannot be left solely to the implementation partner, IT or one senior finance leader. The business owns the processes and decisions, even when external specialists guide the implementation.
The project needs:
- An executive sponsor who can make decisions and remove blockers
- A finance project lead with sufficient authority and protected time
- Process owners who understand how work is completed
- Input from the people who perform the day-to-day tasks
- IT involvement for security, access, integrations and data
- Representation from operational teams that supply or use finance information
People closest to the process often know where the exceptions and workarounds sit. Involving them early improves the design and helps build trust in the new solution.
Ownership also means being realistic about internal capacity. A finance system implementation creates work alongside business-as-usual responsibilities. If key users have no time for workshops, data preparation, testing and training, delays and rushed decisions become far more likely.
Treat data as its own workstream
Data migration is often underestimated because it sounds like a technical transfer. In reality, the organisation must decide what to move, how to clean it and who will verify it.
Before migration, review:
- Suppliers and customers that are duplicated, inactive or incomplete
- The chart of accounts and reporting structures
- Entity, department, project and other coding
- Opening balances and outstanding transactions
- Historic data requirements
- Tax, payment and banking information
- Data ownership and approval
Moving poor-quality data into a new solution does not improve it. It simply makes the old problems available in a newer system.
Agree reconciliation and sign-off responsibilities in advance. Finance should be able to demonstrate that migrated balances and key records are complete and accurate before go-live.
Decide how integrations will work
Most finance teams do not work in a single system. A new financial management solution may need to exchange information with CRM, expenses, payroll, banking, payment, procurement or operational platforms.
For each integration, establish:
- Which system owns the original data
- What information needs to move
- The direction and frequency of the transfer
- How errors will be identified and resolved
- Who owns the integration after go-live
- What happens if one system is unavailable
An integration should solve a defined problem. Connecting systems without clear ownership can automate confusion and make errors harder to trace.
Plan testing around real finance work
Testing should reflect the transactions, exceptions and reporting cycles the team will actually handle. A test is more valuable when it confirms an end-to-end process than when it proves that an isolated screen or field works.
Include everyday activity and less common scenarios, such as corrections, credit notes, rejected approvals, intercompany transactions, foreign currency activity and period-end adjustments where relevant.
The team should also test:
- User permissions and segregation of duties
- Reports, dashboards and drill-down
- Integrations and error handling
- Data migration and reconciliation
- Approval routes and limits
- Month-end tasks
- The cutover plan
Record expected results as well as the steps. Issues should be prioritised, resolved and retested rather than accepted informally because the go-live date is approaching.
Training should be based on roles and processes
Generic product training is rarely enough. Users need to understand how the new solution supports their role, which process they are responsible for and what has changed.
Training may need to differ for accounts payable, management accountants, entity controllers, budget holders and senior leaders. A user approving an invoice needs a different level of knowledge from somebody designing management reports.
Training should be close enough to go-live for people to remember it, supported by process guidance and reinforced after users have worked in the system. Internal champions can help answer questions and encourage adoption, but they need time and support to do the role properly.
How Sage Intacct can support the outcomes
For the right organisation, Sage Intacct can address many of the challenges that prompt a finance system replacement. The exact design depends on the business requirements and agreed scope.
Faster, more flexible reporting
Sage Intacct uses dimensions to add business context to transactions. Finance can report by areas such as entity, department, location, project, customer or service line without expanding the chart of accounts for every reporting combination.
Reports and role-based dashboards can give users controlled access to current information, while drill-down helps them move from a figure to the supporting transaction. This can reduce the time spent exporting, combining and checking spreadsheets.
Multi-entity financial management
For organisations operating across multiple entities, Sage Intacct can support multi-entity accounting and consolidated reporting. The right configuration can reduce manual consolidation and improve group visibility, including intercompany processes and reporting across different parts of the organisation.
Accounts payable automation
Depending on the modules and services selected, Sage Intacct can help reduce manual invoice handling through digital capture, structured approval workflows and more consistent processing. This can improve control and reduce delays caused by invoices moving through email or spreadsheets.
Bank feeds and reconciliation
Bank connectivity and matching tools can bring transaction information into the finance process and support more efficient reconciliation. The benefit depends on the banking arrangements, configuration and controls agreed during implementation.
A cloud-based foundation for connected processes
Sage Intacct is a cloud financial management solution with integration options for other business applications. A carefully designed integration can reduce repeated data entry and help finance work from more consistent information.
These capabilities are not benefits in isolation. They become valuable when they are configured around defined processes and measurable goals. Inixion’s Sage Intacct implementation approach begins with the organisation’s requirements and the outcomes it wants to achieve.
Common mistakes to avoid during a finance system implementation
Several problems repeatedly weaken implementation projects:
- Selecting a solution before understanding the requirements
- Recreating every existing process without challenging it
- Allowing scope to grow without assessing the effect on time and cost
- Underestimating data preparation
- Leaving integrations until late in the project
- Treating testing as a final check rather than a structured workstream
- Expecting key users to contribute without freeing up their time
- Providing training without explaining the new process
- Measuring success only by whether the system went live
None of these means the project is destined to fail. Identifying them early gives the team time to correct the plan.
A practical finance system implementation checklist
Before selecting or implementing a new solution, finance leaders should be able to answer the following questions:
- Why are we changing the finance system?
- Which processes cause the most delay, risk or manual work?
- What must the new solution support now and in the future?
- Which outcomes will show that the project succeeded?
- What is our current baseline for those measures?
- Who owns the project and each process?
- Which users and departments need to be involved?
- What data needs to be cleaned, migrated and reconciled?
- Which systems need to integrate, and who owns the data?
- How will real processes and exceptions be tested?
- What training does each user group need?
- When and how will benefits be reviewed after go-live?
If the answers are unclear, the business may not be ready to select a solution. Spending time on these questions is not delaying the project. It is part of implementing it properly.
Successful implementation starts with a clear definition of better
A new finance system should make a measurable difference to how the organisation works. It might shorten month-end, remove manual consolidation, improve invoice processing or give leaders faster access to trusted information.
The right result will be different for every business. That is why a finance system implementation should begin with process mapping, honest pain points and specific targets rather than a generic list of features.
The technology matters, but it cannot define success for you. Finance leaders need to decide what better looks like, involve the people who understand the work and use those outcomes to guide every stage of the project.
If you are considering replacing your finance system, request a call back or get in touch with Inixion to continue the conversation.
