Goodbye legacy accounting systems – How cloud finance systems help wineries thrive
Manual financial and accounting tasks can be tedious as they require extreme attention to detail, accuracy, and constant monitoring.
Cloud finance solutions are an excellent way to solve this as they help businesses streamline their financial processes, and ultimately provide a real-time view of their operations.
“This is especially true for wineries because as the industry continues to grow and evolve, they must streamline their processes if they wish to thrive,” said AWCape MD Jeff Ryan.
“The best way to do this is with a robust cloud finance solution from AWCape that improves efficiencies and creates a better customer experience.”
Legacy accounting systems: The pitfalls
Many wine businesses today are using outdated legacy accounting and finance systems that can be time-consuming and prone to errors, largely due to their use of manual data entry processes.
These systems also make it particularly challenging for businesses to get a real-time view of their financial status because they do not have a centralised, automated system, and this leads to wasted opportunities and missed warning signs.
Additionally, these legacy financial systems are not intrinsically connected to other core systems (e.g. grape harvesting, wine production, inventory management, and point-of-sale systems), and as a result, can’t scale with the growth of the business in these areas.
The solution: Cloud finance systems
“Cloud finance systems provide wine businesses with comprehensive and integrated financial tools and resources,” adds Ryan
These cloud-based systems can provide many benefits to wine businesses, including:
1. Increased accuracy and efficiency
With cloud finance systems, data is entered once and automatically synchronised across the system, eliminating the need for manual data entry.
This can significantly reduce the risk of errors, saving time and improving accuracy. Research shows up to 75% improvements in productivity when using award-winning cloud finance solutions like Sage Intacct.
2. Reduced costs
Cloud finance systems are cost-effective compared to legacy systems, as there are no hardware or maintenance costs (including no consulting fees for updates or upgrades).
They are also scalable, allowing businesses to add or remove functionality as needed without incurring significant costs.
Additionally, they provide improved visibility through integration with other systems, leading to better planning and fewer financial losses due to incorrect management of demand and supply.
3. Real-time financial insights
Cloud finance systems provide a real-time view of a business’s financial status, allowing these organisations to make informed decisions based on up-to-date financial information.
4. Improved collaboration
Sage Intacct provides a centralised platform for accessing financial data and built-in instant messaging allowing for better collaboration between departments.
This can lead to more streamlined workflows, and reduces the need for manual processes while increasing efficiency.
5. Secure
Cloud finance systems are secure and offer better data protection than legacy systems.
They provide automated backups, multi-factor authentication and data encryption, ensuring sensitive financial data is protected.
Wine Waste Processor comes of age with Sage Intacct
Until recently, Brenn-O-Kem, a wine waste transformation company, used Sage 50 Pastel to manage its finances, but internal processes were manually intensive and time-consuming. “If I needed certain information, I would have to put in hours of work to find it, and to find the right combinations of data because it was spread across numerous Excel sheets,” says Brenn-O-Kem CFO, Andries Rossouw.
He adds that managing multiple entities and doing manual consolidations often led to duplication (of data and effort) and errors. “Before, we’d send emails back and forth, which was especially problematic when working remotely. Now, with information from all our entities automatically consolidated in the cloud, we just go straight into the system, and everything is done for us.”
Sage Intacct allows Brenn-O-Kem to drill down into specific workflows and to configure, optimise, and automate manual workflows. A better understanding of how the company’s Chart of Accounts works, and the ability to customise dashboards and workflows, have brought a whole new level of convenience to the business.
AWCape
With all of these benefits, cloud finance systems provide the flexibility and scalability wine businesses need to stay competitive and keep up with the changing landscape of the industry.
AWCape is a Platinum Sage Intacct implementation provider that has assisted many businesses with successful implementations of Sage Intacct and is willing to work through your unique requirements to ensure the most value from the solution. As with wine, quality takes time.
“Sage Intacct is one of our cornerstone solutions as our customers accelerate their move to the cloud, and partners like AWCape bring its full power to life,” said Gerhard Hartman, the Sage VP for Medium Business in the Africa and Middle East region.
“Our software solution is making it easier for business owners to capture financial transactions and helping organisations streamline processes, they are looking to their finance teams to collaborate more closely with the business as an advisor. Such technology will not replace accountants and other finance professionals. Instead, it will liberate them to do more for the business.”
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