I work for a start up business with no existing accounting/finance system that owns small music venues and promotes music events/etc. The crucial reporting for our business is the ability to individually track revenues and expenses for the thousands of events a year that will run through our venues (i.e. I need to be able to run profit and loss statements for thousands of small "projects"). I have been looking into cloud based systems such as Xero and Quickbooks, but it appears that although I would be able to track some events using "dimensions" or "tags" or "tracking" there is a cap of either 100 or 300 "projects". Our business is still a startup and can't afford a full blown ERP, so is anyone aware of a workaround or any reasonably priced cloud based finance system that may be able to report the information my business needs? Thanks in advance!
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Hi, Sage Intacct maybe a candidate to look at: https://www.sage.com/en-gb/sage-business-cloud/intacct/
Don't go worrying about integrations... Sage Intacct has it's own marketplace and sits in the top right-hand corner of the Gartner quadrant.
It was built for the purpose of multi-dimension reporting in the cloud
If you need any further assistance just drop me a line
Maybe look at Xero’s separate Projects module? It is not limited in the number of options in same way Tracking Categories are.
Presumably not more than 300 concurrent projects?
Could you use the 'project' tags in rotation?
And, presumably, need to keep a register somewhere of which project was on which tag
Impressive.
"I work for a start up business with no existing accounting/finance system" and yet "we could have up to 1,000 concurrent projects (i.e. concerts) at any one time given the number of venues my business operates."
I presume concurrent refers to the period during which costs & revenues occur for each concert but that overlap the similar period for other concerts? Nevertheless that's a lot of concerts p.a.
What are you using for ticketing? I suspect that the ability to integrate information from that into your accounting system will be a key criterion
Also: owning several venues and thousands of events (plus bars etc) doesn't sound that small to me (probably millions in revenue), so be prepared to invest in a decent system (the owners have invested in the venues so they aren't that hard up...).
One bad VAT inspection could wreck you so make sure your systems are watertight
MS Business Central/Dynamics Finance is SaaS so not too expensive up front (though needs planning/configuration), very flexible for account/project structure, plays nicely with other MS systems, some 3rd party add-ins
https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-gb/business-central/overview/
Getting to sound like quite a big business - so maybe a vanilla system like Xero isn't really for you..
Given that you're running 1000s of events per year it sounds as if you are well out of the traps as a start up ...
In terms of longer standing Sage products:
* Sage 50 has a projects module that will support 1000s of projects (depending on how many cost and revenue categories you have).
* Sage 200 Standard has transaction analysis codes that would allow you to tag transactions with a project code, and comfortably support 1000s of projects
* Sage 200 Professional may well be more than you want to pay, but it has a couple of project accounting / job costing options and alternatively could use costs centres and/or departments for your projects reporting
I suspect there are additional factors that will determine the suitability or otherwise of any product, such as:
* how you quickly get to active projects during data entry (possibly just well designed project codes?)
* the reporting process (1000s of projects is a lot to work with)
* whether project p&l reporting is only at project level or you also need aggregate views (eg per venue, if you run multiple events at each venue)
* managing the setup and lifecycle of projects
Sage 200c has limited integrations, although it does have a legacy (non-official) marketplace of developers who support connections to various apps. You're much better spending your money on Intacct if a cloud based, connected system is of interest. It's only been under the Sage umbrella for a couple of years and it's significant market presence was the USA, so you may struggle to find decent UK based integrations.
Also, don't bother with the Dynamics 365 recommendation. It does integrate with other MS products buts that the only good thing about it.
Given your need for tracking at volume I'd take a look at iplicit, xledger and AccountsIQ. These are good cloud based products with decent integrations and open APIs so you can connect pretty much anything. However, if your accounting needs are relatively straight forward I think you could make this work with Xero and connected apps.
I use Sage 200, in a different sector.
My version is 'on premise' although there may be other versions.
I like it as an accounting system - more than Sage 50 for example.
But - not really sure about volume, we are higher value lower volume here.
In a previous life, we used Netsuite. From memory it was possible to use one of the fields to store project numbers, and then report on them. Probably way too expensive though...
There are plenty of systems out there to look at - but I would always start with those which are winning awards with AccountingWeb! There are many newcomers in the last few years which are all cloud-based and designed to integrate with anything so it's worth doing some research. It sounds as though investment now in the right system will pay back later, or you could end up in a right old mess, so making sure you have the right software in place might be worth investing a little more than you had originally imagined.
Some names to look at - iplicit, Xledger, AccountsIQ, Dynamics Business Central, Sage Intaact
Good luck!
If you wanted to have a look at AccountsIQ, we'd gladly show you the solution. Or there is a pre-recorded demo here: https://vimeo.com/481289359/aba2413f31 You can track unlimited projects in AIQ and we have many businesses with large transaction volumes. If you wanted to integrate other systems such as cvent for managing events, we've got an integration that's up and running. I hope this helps, just let me know if you would like further info!
Hi,
Take a look at the award winning iplicit, it has the ablity to have P&L's by project. A true cloud solution running on the Azure platform.
Happy to discuss further, [email protected]