In today's fast-paced business environment, achieving real-time financial insights is no longer a luxury; it's a necessity for CFOs to drive strategic decisions and maintain a competitive edge. Yet, many finance leaders in South Africa are still grappling with outdated, legacy systems that stifle agility and innovation.
Rahana Vally, Director at Brilliant Link, which positions itself as a leading certified Sage Business Partner and premier provider of Sage Intacct solutions in the region, highlights the critical pain points: "We're seeing CFOs turning to external AI tools to bridge gaps in their legacy set-ups. They're hunting for outliers and insights, but bolting on these tools only compounds issues like delays, fragmented visibility and data silos. Legacy systems simply lack the speed, scalability for big data or mobile accessibility to deliver a single source of truth across the organisation."
Vally explains how complex, multi-system environments create bottlenecks: "Investigating a report value often means jumping back to your ERP, making tweaks, re-extracting data into third-party tools and validating totals, all of which delays action and erodes trust in the numbers. What CFOs truly need is one unified platform where you can drill down from the dashboard or report to transaction, make changes on the fly and instantly see the impact. This eliminates mistrust and empowers faster resolutions."
Enter Sage Intacct, the cloud-native financial management solution that's transforming CFOs from transactional overseers into proactive strategic advisors. As the go-to partner for Sage Intacct implementations, Brilliant Link helps businesses ditch spreadsheet-heavy workflows for automated, consolidated, robust multidimensional reporting and actionable insights. "With Sage Intacct, you can set smart parameters to flag outliers automatically," Vally notes. "It provides full transaction visibility from high-level reports down to source entries, freeing CFOs to align financial trends with business vision, refine processes and ensure agility in volatile markets."
A prime example is Brilliant Link's client, Q4 Fuel, a key player in South Africa's petroleum distribution network. Supplying essential fuel to sectors like mining, construction, agriculture, aviation and retail, Q4 Fuel faced mounting challenges as it scaled. Manual processes and spreadsheet-driven systems led to week-long financial reporting delays, operational inefficiencies and heightened compliance risks in an asset-intensive industry where real-time insights are critical for decision-making.
Partnering with Brilliant Link, Q4 Fuel implemented Sage Intacct to address these hurdles. The platform's automation, real-time visibility and multi-entity support proved game-changing. Traditional accounting systems couldn't handle Q4 Fuel's complex structure, but Sage Intacct introduced automated workflows, centralised dashboards and seamless integrations that streamlined operations across entities.
The results were transformative: invoice processing plummeted from a full day to just two hours, as noted by Darius Bester, Senior Accountant at Q4 Fuel: "Invoice processing was reduced from a full day to just two hours." Monthly processing times were cut by up to 20%, and month-end closes accelerated by up to 10 days. Bank reconciliations became near-instantaneous with live bank feeds, while automated customer data syncing eliminated manual entries, freeing staff for strategic tasks.
The implementation was swift and seamless, completed in just two months, thanks to Brilliant Link's tailored approach, including a sandbox for training and testing. After six months, Q4 Fuel expanded the roll-out to other business areas, demonstrating Sage Intacct's scalability. As Bester adds: "As Q4 Fuel scales, we needed a system that supports growth without requiring another migration. Sage Intacct provides the scalability we need to expand confidently."
Vally emphasises Brilliant Link's role as the leading Sage Intacct provider: "With legacy or disparate systems, finance teams can't achieve true visibility from source to report, limiting their ability to drive agility and efficiency. Brilliant Link's deep expertise in Sage Intacct implementations for high-growth, asset-intensive businesses like Q4 Fuel ensures smooth transitions and ongoing optimisation. We position CFOs to overcome challenges faster, foster innovation and lead their organisations towards sustainable success in South Africa's evolving landscape."
Is your financial system propelling your business forward or holding it back? Use Brilliant Link’s quick self-assessment to evaluate:
1. Reporting and insights
- I can easily generate real-time financial reports without relying on Excel workarounds.
- Does my system allow for multidimensional analysis (eg, by department, location, project) with easy slicing and dicing?
- Can we track KPIs and metrics aligned with our strategic goals?
2. Month-end close
- Can we complete the month-end close in under five days?
- Consolidations across entities or currencies are automated and accurate.
- We have confidence in the accuracy and audit-readiness of our financial data.
3. Scalability and growth
- Our system can easily add new entities, users or geographies without major reconfiguration.
- We can handle complex revenue models.
- We don’t have to wait for IT every time we need to make a change or get new insights.
4. Integration and automation
- Am I spending hours having to manually capture supplier invoices?
- Does my finance system integrate seamlessly with other key business solutions (eg, CRM, payroll and HR).
- Routine tasks like approvals, expense claims and inter-company eliminations are automated.
- We’re not spending time manually entering or reconciling data across systems.
5. Compliance and risk
- Is my existing solution able to detect anomalies proactively?
- Do we have robust controls in place to meet regulatory and audit requirements?
- Does our system maintain a clear audit trail and support role-based access control?
- Can we adapt quickly to changing compliance standards?
Scoring: 15+ checks: You’re in a strong position, but are you leveraging automation and AI-driven insights for maximum impact?
Eight to14 checks: It's time to explore a modern system like Sage Intacct with Brilliant Link's guidance.
Seven or fewer checks: Your legacy set-up is likely draining resources; contact Brilliant Link to unlock growth.
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