In an environment where customer expectations continually climb, and prime costs like food, labor and occupancy keep tightening margins, franchise operators no longer have the time or tolerance for manual consolidations, delayed variance analysis, or rigid systems that slow decision-making.
They need a modern financial platform that is easy to use, extensible and purpose-built for multi-entity growth — because the most competitive franchises today share a common capability: turning real-time financial insights into faster, smarter action at the unit, market and enterprise levels.
Cherry Bekaert’s inaugural 2025 CFO Survey emphasizes that financial modernization is not optional — it’s urgent. But it doesn’t have to be disruptive or expensive. With Sage Intacct, a critical cloud-based financial management software, franchise leaders can accelerate transformation, unlocking speed and insight.
Sage Intacct, as the financial core, supports consistent execution across locations, rapid analysis of what is working, and confident scale without sacrificing control or transparency.
The Franchise Finance Crossroads: Rising Expectations, Rising Prime Costs
The landscape echoing through operators’ boardrooms is consistent with what we see across restaurant, hospitality, retail, health and wellness, education, and home services systems:
- Customers expect frictionless experiences, often driving investment in technology across the front and back of house.
- Prime costs continue to rise, intensifying emphasis on daily visibility into food spend, labor efficiency and vendor compliance.
- Growth is portfolio-based, meaning new units, new brands, acquisitions, and new service lines demand agile multi-entity financials and rapid consolidations.
- Leadership teams require meaningful, real-time data over static, after-the-fact reports.
- Finance organizations must streamline processes while strengthening compliance, controls and audit readiness.
The imperative for any franchise aiming to compete and expand effectively in today's dynamic market is to harness timely data, leverage continuous multi-entity financial consolidations, deploy bespoke reporting solutions, and adopt streamlined processes that underpin a best-in-class financial platform like Sage Intacct.
Why a Best-in-Class Financial Core Matters
Franchise systems operate in an ecosystem of specialized solutions: point-of-sale, workforce and payroll, inventory, delivery and e-commerce, banking, and more. Attempting to force every function into a generic all-in-one suite can create trade-offs in functionality, flexibility and performance. The result is often process workarounds, limited reporting, vendor lock-in and higher switching costs over time.
A better approach is to anchor your environment with a best-in-class, modern cloud financial platform that is intentionally designed to integrate, automate and scale. Do not risk vendor lock-in by settling for an all-in-one suite that may not be the best solution in every department. A modular, open, and extensible core allows you to evolve the surrounding ecosystem as your brand and market change without refactoring your entire financial backbone.
What Sage Intacct Delivers for Franchise Growth
Sage Intacct for franchises is designed for multi-entity, multi-location operators and franchisors who need to consolidate fast, measure consistently and manage performance at every level. The platform supports:
- Core Accounting: General ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, cash management, and fixed assets configured for dimensional accounting that simplifies location, region, and brand reporting without a bloated chart of accounts.
- Multi-entity Management: Rapid entity setup with shared charts, intercompany eliminations, currency support, and continuous consolidations that deliver enterprise visibility without manual data manipulation.
- Dynamic Allocations: Automate allocations for shared services, marketing funds, or management fees based on drivers such as sales, labor hours, square footage or transactions.
- Spend Management and Purchasing: Control commitments and budgets with role-based workflows, approvals, and vendor compliance integrated into daily processes.
- Sales and Indirect Tax: Streamline tax calculation and reporting with connectors and rules aligned to your jurisdictions.
- Projects and Contracts: For concepts with catering, events or service offerings, manage project financials, billing and recognition accurately.
- Budgeting and Planning: Native planning models enable companywide budgeting, rolling forecasts, and what-if scenarios so finance can partner with operations on future-oriented decisions, not just historical reporting.
- Reporting and Dashboards: Customizable, real-time dashboards for unit leaders, area directors, finance, and the executive team, each with the metrics that matter and the context to act.
By connecting your point-of-sales (POS), workforce management, inventory, banking and delivery/e-commerce data to Sage Intacct, you create a consistent financial data foundation. That foundation turns daily activity into reliable key performance indicators (KPIs), location-level profit-and-loss (P&L) statements, and enterprise analytics without manual exports, uploads, or reconciliations.
From Data to Decisions: Dashboards Operators Actually Use
Operators need to see the signal, not the noise. With Sage Intacct’s dimensional reporting and dashboards, you can deliver the exact combinations of metrics that drive decisions at each level:
- Unit-level Managers: Daily sales and traffic, labor as a percent of sales by daypart, food cost and waste indicators, comps and promos impact, voids and refunds, cash reconciliation, and on-time vendor deliveries.
- Area Directors and Regional Leaders: Prime cost trends by location, overtime analysis, inventory turns, discount leakage, variance explanations, and controllable expense benchmarking across peer groups.
- Finance and Executive: Consolidated P&Ls, cash positions and forecasts, margin trend analysis, operating leverage, capital spend against plan, and return on investment (ROI) on marketing or new concept pilots.
Dashboards are triggers for action. By embedding workflows, alerts, and drill-downs, leaders can move from “what happened” to “what needs to change today.” The result is a tighter feedback loop between finance and operations and fewer end-of-month surprises.
Faster Close, Stronger Controls
A fast and accurate close is not only about speed. It is about creating confidence in the numbers so leaders can move forward decisively. Sage Intacct supports a disciplined close with:
- Continuous consolidations that eliminate time-consuming spreadsheet reconciliations.
- AI-assisted outlier detection and rules that highlight unusual entries or variances.
- Role-based workflows and approvals that align with your governance model.
- A clear audit trail and documentation for assurance, compliance and lender requirements.
These capabilities help franchises avoid the trade-off between control and agility. You achieve both by embedding controls into standard processes and surfacing exceptions early.
Budgeting, Forecasting and Planning for Growth
Growth is a planning exercise as much as an operational one. With Sage Intacct’s planning functionality, finance teams can model scenarios in hours, not weeks:
- Unit Economics: Understand the ramp profile of new locations, break-even points, and sensitivity to labor or COGS changes.
- Portfolio Decisions: Evaluate acquisitions, brand additions, remodel programs, and new service lines with cash flow and profitability impacts.
- Labor Planning: Align schedules with forecasted demand and staffing constraints while monitoring compliance with local regulations.
- Capital Planning: Prioritize projects by expected returns and capacity to execute.
By combining planning with actuals in the same platform, operators maintain continuity between forecast, budget, and performance, driving accountability and enabling a faster response to changing conditions.
Integration: Where Modern Platforms Deliver Real Value
The most consistent driver of time savings and accuracy we see in franchise finance transformations is integration. Sage Intacct’s open APIs, SDKs and prebuilt connectors reduce manual effort across:
- POS: Daily sales summaries, tenders, comps/promos, gift card activity, and sales tax posted automatically with location and daypart detail.
- Workforce and Payroll: Labor hours, wages, benefits, and payroll journal entries by location and department, with overtime alerts and compliance checks.
- Inventory and Suppliers: Purchase orders, receiving, price changes, and inventory counts integrated to support food cost control and vendor management.
- Banking and Payments: Bank feeds, merchant settlements, and automated reconciliations for faster close and better cash visibility.
- E-commerce and Delivery: Revenue channels and third-party fees mapped correctly to ensure margin clarity by source.
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Field Service: For service-oriented franchise systems, quote-to-cash integration aligns pipeline, billing and collections.
Integration does not have to be disruptive. A phased approach brings value fast, starting with the data that creates the most rework today and progressing to deeper automation based on ROI.
Time-to-Value Without Compromise
Franchise leaders often ask how long a transformation like this takes. We advocate a staged deployment that creates value in days while building toward the full target state:
- Phase 1: Core financials live with initial entities, dimensional design and essential reporting.
- Phase 2: Add multi-entity automation, continuous consolidation and core dashboards.
- Phase 3: Integrate POS and payroll for daily operational insight.
- Phase 4: Extend to inventory, banking, purchasing and spend management.
- Phase 5: Activate budgeting and rolling forecasts; refine analytics and benchmarking.
This approach balances speed and rigor. It helps ensure teams learn the system in practical steps while reducing risk and preventing change fatigue.
Results You Can Expect
While each organization’s outcomes depend on scale, complexity and adoption, franchises typically realize measurable improvements in the first 90 to 180 days:
- Close cycle reduced from weeks to days through continuous consolidation and automation.
- Prime cost visibility improved to daily or near real-time, with standardized variance analysis.
- Manual journal entries, reclassifications and spreadsheet reconciliations reduced significantly.
- Location-level P&Ls published faster with consistent definitions and drill-down capability.
- Budget-to-actual governance tightened with automated spend controls and approvals.
- Executive and board reporting streamlined, with less time preparing and more time deciding.
Beyond efficiency, the more important result is the quality of insight, decisions and performance. Quality is one of our core values, and it shows in the way leaders use the platform: fewer surprises, clearer accountability and greater confidence in pursuing growth.
Checklist: Is Your Franchise Finance Function Ready To Compete?
Use this diagnostic to identify where Sage Intacct and Cherry Bekaert can help you advance:
- Can you produce consolidated financials at any time, without manual spreadsheets?
- Do unit leaders receive daily, actionable dashboards tied to controllable metrics?
- Are allocations, intercompany, and eliminations automated and traceable?
- Do you have real-time insight into prime costs and margin by channel and location?
- Are POS, payroll, inventory and banking integrated to reduce manual entry?
- Can finance and operations collaborate on rolling forecasts and scenario plans?
- Are approvals, spend controls and audit trails embedded in daily workflows?
- Can you onboard a new entity or brand in days, not months?
- Does your platform strategy avoid vendor lock-in and allow best-in-class choices?
If the answer to any of these is “not yet,” it is an opportunity to build capability that directly improves competitiveness.
Sage Intacct helps franchises grow by delivering the financial clarity, control and agility required to perform in a competitive market. It turns data into decisions, processes into performance, and growth plans into measurable outcomes.
Combined with Cherry Bekaert’s advisory, implementation and managed services, your organization gains a partner committed to accountability, innovation, leadership and quality at every step. Do not let legacy tools or vendor lock-in limit your ability to compete. Build on a best-in-class, modern cloud platform designed for multi-entity growth.
How Cherry Bekaert Helps You Get There
Engage with a firm that brings insight and action together to create a better future for your franchise. Cherry Bekaert brings commitment to every franchise engagement by combining financial knowledge with practical, industry-grounded implementation. Our role is to guide, enable and support so your teams can operate with confidence long after go-live.
Our services include:
- Readiness and Roadmap: Assess current processes, systems and data; design a target operating model; establish a phased program aligned to your growth plan.
- Implementation and Integration: Configure Sage Intacct to your dimensional model; set up entities, allocations and workflows; integrate priority systems with a focus on reliability and performance.
- Data and Reporting: Cleanse and migrate historical data; design executive, finance and operations dashboards; establish benchmarking and variance analysis processes.
- Controls and Compliance: Embed approvals, segregation of duties and audit-ready documentation; align with tax, assurance and lender requirements.
- Planning and Analytics: Deploy budgeting, forecasting and scenario planning; train teams to run monthly reforecasts and operational reviews.
- Managed Services and Enablement: Provide ongoing support, enhancements and training; or augment your team during peak periods of growth or acquisition.
Engage with a firm that brings insight and action together to create a better future for your franchise. Request a Sage Intacct for franchise finance assessment today.
