Sage has announced the launch of Sage Intacct into three new countries within Africa, Namibia, Botswana and Mauritius. The expansion, led by Sage South Africa, will offer finance leaders an award-winning solution to help run businesses using a modern digital tool. It also opens up the potential to leverage the Intacct Ecosystem of solutions. However, few of those are likely to have a physical presence in the country. Sage only launched Intacct in South Africa in 2020.
Sage will enable partners in the three countries to resell the solution to clients, expanding its availability in more SADC countries (South African Development Countries). Gerhard Hartman, Vice President, Medium Business for Sage Africa & Middle East: “Sage Intacct is a cloud-native financial management solution that helps forward-looking CFOs and finance professionals automate processes and gain insight by dynamically exploring their data in real-time. By enabling the business to work anytime, anyplace, and anywhere, Sage Intacct frees finance teams time to focus on the business and strategic, data-driven decision-making. This solution sets a new standard for finance leaders on their journey to drive digital transformation, all in the cloud.”
Why chose Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct is one of the leading cloud financial management solutions. Designed for and built by finance professionals, it offers multi-dimensional accounting, and offers features that help automate many of the pain points for finance teams, including bank reconciliation, accounts payable and planning and budgeting.
It offers finance leaders the ability to have a real-time view of their business rather than a data repository used for historical reporting. It has a comprehensive library of integrations using its open APIs and has deep integration with Salesforce. There is also a rich ecosystem of applications partners, with many applications available on a Marketplace.
Intacct is predominantly targeted at services companies Sage Intacct targets non-profits, professional services, healthcare, hospitality, wholesale distribution, financial services and SaaS vendors. Sage also recently launched Sage Intacct Manufacturing within France and, subsequently, the UK. This is, however, a different code base and does not seem to be part of this announcement (it isn’t launched in South Africa yet).
Sage Intacct is also cloud-based, and customers in South Africa were originally connected to an Irish data centre. It isn’t clear if the company has set up a data centre in South Africa yet to host customers. Sage generally leverages AWS data centres which deliver world-class security backups and disaster recovery and offers a lower total cost of ownership against other providers
Why now, why Sage Intacct
Recent Sage research found that the role of the CFO is evolved from a role of reporting on historical results to one that is strategically important for the business. Finance leaders need to analyse data that is received in real-time and to accurately forecast future revenues and scenario plan options.
Digital tools like the Sage Intacct Planning and Budgeting tools can help CFOs in their new storytelling role. This is just one of the add-on modules that Sage Intacct sells that allow organisations to build a solution piece by piece without overcommitting in terms of outlay.
CFOs need to digitise their operations to increase efficiency and enable growth within increasing administration costs. The research showed that 75% of CFOs say their responsibility for digital transformation has increased in the last year alone. This is an opportunity for ambitious and well-established firms to digitise their operations with local experts supporting a globally recognised solution.
Hartman added, “Today’s CFOs and finance professionals must blend attributes that allow them to engage in cross-functional decision making, operate with purpose, and future-proof their organisations. These executives play a multifaceted role in guiding their organisations toward productivity, equity, and innovation. A cloud-based system like Sage Intacct supports their expanded role, putting the right digital tools at finance leaders’ fingertips to drive greater agility and improved current and forward-looking visibility for enhanced decision making.
“Our expansion into Mauritius, Namibia, and Botswana demonstrates our commitment to the regions, by creating customers for life and adding value to their businesses, together with our Business Partners and through the use of our Sage software solutions.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
In some ways, this news is surprising. It indicates that Sage South Africa is ambitious in its growth plans and believes Sage Intacct has a strong future in SADC and possibly beyond. Sage can now offer a modern solution that can compete with the likes of NetSuite in the region.
However, Sage Intacct is still only available in English, and although this is a common business language across the region, it is not the only one. In Namibia, while English is the official language, only 3% of the population speak it; Oshiwambo is the most common and Afrikaans the most widely understood. Within Mauritius, while English is the parliamentary language, it is French that is used in education and the media, with French Creole spoken by 90% of the population. In Botswana, Setswana is the most common language spoken, though English and Tswana are the official languages.
There is not only the multilingual aspect that might hinder Sage Intacct. Also, the announcement shared no details about localisation within the three announced countries. For example, does Intacct support the ITW8 Tax certificate report? Sage South Africa is familiar with the required localisations, having faced the challenge for their other solutions such as Sage X3.
Unlike other announcements, Sage did not announce any partners they will work within the region. It will be interesting to see which partners join this initiative and how quickly the customers emerge. These are also not core countries for Sage. It is surprising that it has not accelerated its language support and launched in its other core territories, such as France.
