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Senior living operators, like Assisted Living Facilities (ALFs) and Skilled Nursing Facilities (SNFs), evaluating financial management systems face a crucial decision: Continue with traditional accounting software or upgrade to a purpose-built financial management platform like Sage Intacct.
Understanding the differences helps you make an informed choice on your senior living ERP software.
Traditional accounting software like QuickBooks or basic Sage products were designed for small, single-entity businesses with straightforward accounting needs. Sage Intacct was purpose-built for growing multi-entity organizations requiring sophisticated financial management, extensive automation, and deep reporting capabilities.
This fundamental design difference impacts everything else.
Traditional software struggles with multiple entities. You might maintain separate company files for each property, manually consolidate results, and struggle with inter-entity transactions. Sage Intacct handles unlimited entities within a single system, automatic consolidation with elimination entries, easy inter-entity transaction management, and unified reporting across all entities.
For multi-property senior living organizations, this difference is transformational.
Traditional software typically offers basic department or class tracking. Sage Intacct provides unlimited dimensions for tracking financial data by property, department, service line, funding source, resident type, and any other dimension relevant to your business.
This granular tracking enables powerful analysis like profitability by property and service line, resident lifecycle revenue tracking, and cost allocation across multiple dimensions.
Entry-level accounting software requires significant manual effort for invoice entry, approval routing, payment processing, and journal entries. Sage Intacct automates these processes through intelligent workflows, electronic approvals, automated allocations and recurring entries, and integration with vendor systems.
This automation can reduce accounting department workload by 40-60%.
Traditional software generates static reports that become outdated immediately. Sage Intacct provides real-time dashboards showing current financial position, interactive reports users can customize on-the-fly, scheduled automatic report distribution, and self-service reporting for non-accounting users.
Executives can answer their own questions without waiting for accounting to run reports.
Basic accounting software offers limited integration options, often requiring manual data transfer or expensive custom development. Sage Intacct's open API and marketplace of pre-built integrations connect seamlessly with hundreds of business systems including leading senior living EMR and resident management platforms, payroll providers, banks and payment processors, and business intelligence tools.
While traditional software provides basic audit logs, Sage Intacct delivers comprehensive tracking of every transaction and change, role-based access controls at granular levels, configurable approval workflows, and separation of duties enforcement. Sage Intacct is not only HIPAA-compliant but also has a Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) Peer Reviewed designation. Further, Sage will sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA).
These capabilities are increasingly essential for compliance and risk management.
Traditional accounting software hits hard limits as organizations grow. Adding properties becomes increasingly cumbersome, reporting becomes more time-consuming, and system performance degrades. Sage Intacct scales seamlessly from 3 to 300 properties without performance degradation or process changes. Sage Intacct is a great choice for your senior living ERP software.
Traditional software appears less expensive initially, but total cost of ownership tells a different story. Consider the cost of user licenses, IT infrastructure and maintenance, staff time for manual processes, cost of limited integration, and risk of errors and control failures.
When organizations perform honest TCO analysis, Sage Intacct often proves comparable or less expensive than limping along with inadequate systems.
Implementing Sage Intacct requires more upfront effort than installing QuickBooks, but this investment pays dividends through proper system configuration, comprehensive training, thoughtful process redesign, and integration setup.
Working with an experienced implementation partner like Blytheco dramatically increases success rates and accelerates time-to-value. Read the 5 Reasons Why Sage Intacct Is the Right Choice for Senior Living.
Consider upgrading to Sage Intacct if you operate 3+ properties, spend excessive time on manual consolidation, lack real-time financial visibility, struggle with reporting limitations, or plan to grow through acquisition or development.
Not sure if Sage Intacct is right for your organization?
Complete Blytheco’s ERP Checklist to understand if it’s time for you to migrate to a new ERP, then reach out to solutions@blytheco.com to begin the conversation with our experts.
Sage Intacct Solutions Engineer
Todd has over two decades of experience in marketing, sales, presales, and professional services and held roles as Director of IT and CFO. Throughout his career, he successfully established and developed nine practices from the ground up. This experience equipped him with a proven track record of implementing and managing various accounting and ancillary software solutions, including Sage Intacct. He leverages his vast business and software background to lead companies to successful and efficient solutions.
