Customer: Cargas
Location: Lancaster, PA
Solution: Sage Intacct Accounting Software
Cargas is an employee-owned business software and consulting company specializing in software solutions for Sales & Marketing, Accounting & Operations, and Fuel Delivery & Service, with a custom development team for everything in between. Our unique culture of employee ownership, shared values, and a commitment to excellence attracts and retains top talent and fosters high-quality customer service.
We are uniquely positioned as both a Sage Intacct partner and customer, with technical insight into the software’s capabilities and real-world experience using it every day as our accounting solution. We are incredibly proud of what we have achieved with Sage Intacct and are happy to share why we chose to implement it for our business.
Gearing Up for Growth
In 2015, Cargas was undergoing a significant transformation. Our Energy business unit was experiencing a record-breaking year and we were ramping up hiring to keep up with the growth while simultaneously building out crucial departments like HR and IT to support an expanded team. We were also planning the future launch of a new business unit centered around our latest product offering, Sage Intacct.
With new employees, products, and business units coming into play, we knew we needed to make a change to our accounting solution. Our legacy system had served us well, but it was designed for the Cargas of 15 years ago. We wanted to revise our chart of accounts and make changes to the way we were analyzing business performance—things that would be difficult to manage in the legacy solution.
“We wanted to have the ability to analyze our business in new ways,” explained Mike Yeager, former CFO and current VP of the Sage Intacct business unit. “To look at profitability by product line, business unit, and more.”
Our ideal accounting solution would offer better business insight through real-time data and robust reporting capabilities. It was important that the new system be a true multi-tenant cloud product. As a company, we were committed to moving as many of our software solutions to the cloud as possible to eliminate the cost of maintaining and upgrading on-premise servers. The move to the cloud would also allow us to adopt a best-in-class strategy, selecting the best applications for our business and integrating them to build our total solution.
When it came to choosing an accounting system, the decision was an easy one. Cagas had been a Sage Intacct partner since 2012. We knew the product’s capabilities inside and out and had seen firsthand the impact it had on our customers’ businesses. We truly believed in Sage Intacct and were planning to launch a new business unit centered around it in 2017.
“We chose to sell Sage Intacct because we can honestly say it is the best accounting product we have seen. It made total sense that we would choose to implement it for ourselves.”
Mike Yeager, VP of the Sage Intacct business unit
Better Insight = Better Business
With the decision made, we embarked on a two-month implementation project utilizing our own team of expert consultants, and we haven’t looked back since.
Our favorite benefits include the simple user interface, the quarterly upgrades, and the flexibility of the cloud platform.
The user interface has streamlined the onboarding process, which has been crucial in allowing us to grow our accounting team quickly and efficiently. The quarterly upgrades happen automatically, without any disruption or downtime for our business. And they come packed with new features and enhancements, so we never have to worry about the software keeping up with modern technology standards or changes in accounting practices.
The cloud platform allows easy remote access anytime, anywhere. Director of Finance Alex Mobarak described a time when a staff member logged in to process a complicated customer invoice while she was across the country at a Sage Intacct conference. The entire process only took a few minutes.
“You can’t do that easily if you have an on-premise accounting system where you need to log in to a VPN and performance can be slow,” said Mobarak.
“Setting up dimensions and tagging things at the transaction level allows for visibility that the majority of accounting systems I’ve used don’t have,” said Mobarak. “When it comes to reporting, you normally have to buy a separate reporting tool, but with Sage Intacct, everything is right there in the system.”
In addition, Mobarak likes the audit trail functionality, which allows him to dive into the details of a transaction from a high-level financial report, and the performance speed that keeps Sage Intacct moving quickly when generating reports or jumping from screen to screen.
For Yeager, the ability to utilize Sage Intacct’s dimensions to build dashboards and generate automatic reports with real-time data is a game changer:
With Sage Intacct’s capabilities, we were able to make sense of our growing business, establish real-time analytics for today’s decision-making and future planning, and set ourselves up for continued growth with a flexible, scalable system.
“Sage Intacct won’t hold us back or keep us from making changes that will help our business,” Yeager said. “It has the ability to adapt and change with our company so we can grow and adapt our business model when we need to.”