Akuna Customer Success Story: Family office simplifies multi-industry business management

Morris Group implements Sage Intacct with Akuna Solutions

Morris Group implements Sage Intacct to make consolidation and reporting easier across multiple entities, countries, and currencies.

Morris Group is a successful Australian family office that operates a range of disparate businesses across numerous industries including tourism, hospitality, technology, property and aviation.

The family office structure sits across multiple sectors and each sector includes several distinct businesses that generate revenue and costs, often across multiple countries, currencies and tax regimes, creating complexity in consolidation and reporting for the finance and accounting team.

“A major win with Sage Intacct for us is the consistency and greater efficiency for reporting across entities.”

Kirstie Jenkin
Business Systems Manager, Morris Group

Key outcomes:

• Consolidation of 13+ entities into Sage Intacct financial management platform
• Shared chart of accounts for fast access to information and reports
• Automation of finance and accounting functions to reduce manual integrations across systems
• Seamless reporting across multiple entities, currencies and tax regimes
• Improved usability, dashboards and dimensions for real-time visibility
• Out-of-the-box functionality and API for easy integrations with operating software used for specific businesses across the group (such as aviation and hospitality)

Modernising finance and moving to the cloud

Morris Group has evolved into a relatively large family office that operates a number of distinct businesses across various sectors and countries. Over time, the finance team found consolidation and reporting more difficult and time consuming as the organisation grew organically and by acquisition.

The legacy accounting and finance system had served the business well, but it was not capable of easily integrating information from different business entities, had no clear upgrade path and was not cloud-ready. The time had come to modernise the organisation and prepare it for future growth.

Business intelligence breakthrough

Morris Group undertook an evaluation of various options to replace their legacy accounting and finance system. As part of the finance system solution, Morris Group engaged ZAP, a leading data warehouse automation and analytics company, to deliver a robust, data warehouse platform. ZAP Data Hub consolidates data from multiple systems, including Sage Intacct and through its robust, innovative features, enables reconciliation and enrichment across data sets.

Sage Intacct was able to integrate specialised operating systems used by various Morris Group businesses such as those in the aviation and hospitality sectors, ensuring seamless consolidation and reporting, and a single source of information and insights for the finance and management teams.

Partnering for success

Kirstie Jenkin led the project to select, adopt and integrate the Sage Intacct platform, bringing prior experience working as an implementation consultant to Morris Group before joining the organisation as Business Systems Manager.

Experienced Sage Partner and Sage Intacct specialist Akuna Solutions was engaged for the project, working closely with Morris Group from the discovery process through to implementation and on-going support over the extended roll-out period as different operating entities and their subsidiaries adopted Sage Intacct.

Careful planning for a successful system implementation

The project team made up of Morris Group and Akuna Solutions personnel spent a lot of time preparing and planning before commencing the integration phase. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and related travel restrictions in the early stages of the project meant the team had to adapt to remote work and meetings.

Akuna leveraged its deep financial software experience to deal with some complex system requirements during the process of establishing more than 13 entities, shared chart of accounts and multiple locations on the Sage Intacct platform.

Set up to scale

Since implementing Sage Intacct, one of the key benefits has been the reduced cost of IT infrastructure from moving to the cloud, which also allows the finance and administration team to scale without increased headcount or IT costs. This is extremely important as Morris Group continues to experience fast organic growth, as well as absorbing acquisitions, regularly adding new entities and locations.

Sage Intacct has automated various finance and accounting functions, reducing manual effort and the potential for human error in consolidating information across disparate systems. Intacct provides information and insights in real-time, offering a single source of truth across the various operating groups and entities.

Faster reporting and efficient access to information

A consistent view across business units, entities and locations, along with access to real-time information, has resulted in faster and more timely reporting across Morris Group. This was a major objective of the transformation project and is starting to have a positive impact on the time and resources needed for month-end reporting.

“A major win with Sage Intacct for us is the consistency and
greater efficiency for reporting across entities.”

Kirstie Jenkin
Business Systems Manager, Morris Group

Bringing it all together

Sage Intacct has enabled the provision of consistent financial information across Morris Group. The presentation of information in various stakeholder dashboards makes it easy to achieve real-time visibility into business performance, along with actionable insights.

Intacct dimensions help capture the business context of transactions, operational measures and budgets for finance team members and other stakeholders to quickly access or create reports that analyse performance by business drivers, without managing a complex chart of accounts.

“Moving to Sage Intacct has been a positive experience, from the evaluation, adoption and implementation process with the help of Akuna Solutions, to the faster consolidations and ready access to accurate, consistent and consolidated financial information.”

Kirstie Jenkin
Business Systems Manager, Morris Group

A valuable partnership

As a Sage Intacct specialist with robust experience across a number of industries, and specifically family office implementations, the team at Akuna Solutions understood the unique requirements of the finance and accounting function in a family office such as Morris Group.

While Sage Intacct offered immediate, out-of-the-box functionality, the API facilitated integrations for specialised operating software used across group companies as diverse as aviation, hospitality and technology. In addition, Akuna assisted with writing integrations to import information from
siloed operating systems specific to certain business units.

With the work to implement Sage Intacct for Morris Group largely completed, Akuna Solutions provides support as needed as part of their commitment to align technology solutions to evolving business outcomes.

“Every family office is different, but they also have common aspects such as consolidations, diverse reporting needs and treasury. Having worked extensively in this sector, we are proficient at leading multi-faceted projects with complex accounting and integrations, including consolidating disparate entities and operating systems to provide real-time visibility across the organisation.”

Mike Lorge
Director of Akuna Solutions

Future-proof your business

As an accredited and awarded Sage Intacct reseller, we view our clients’ success as our own and are dedicated to helping them find their way forward. Offering ongoing support, training, and resources ensures that our clients maximise the benefits of Sage Intacct and stay abreast of the ever-evolving business landscape.

Having implemented Sage Intacct for many businesses in ANZ across diverse industries, our experience spans areas such as Software and SaaS, Family Offices, Non-profit Organisations, Financial Services, NDIS and Human Services and many other industries.

Email us at Akuna Solutions for a free consultation and explore with a Sage Intacct implementation specialist how to leverage modern technology available today to future-proof your business operations.

Photo by Manny Moreno on Unsplash

Success Story written by Sage (Akuna Solution’s Business Partner)