Success Story
Ontra
Ontra (formerly InCloudCounsel) is a fast-scaling legal-technology SaaS company. Running accounting in Excel was the kind of decision that quietly costs an engineering-led company hundreds of finance hours a month — until it doesn't. After moving to Sage Intacct, Ontra halved its month-end close, cut manual data entry by 90%+, and gained the open API integration profile a tech-forward CFO insists on.
Outcomes
−50%
Month-end close
Reduced from up to three weeks to roughly ten days.
4 h → 20 min
Manual data entry
Per month, on invoice uploads alone.
Invoice level
Reporting granularity
Payments now applied at invoice rather than batch level.
Tech-stack fit
Scalability
Open API matches the rest of the SaaS engineering stack.
Sage Intacct modules deployed
The problem
What the client faced
Ontra's accounting was running in Excel — a tool the team's VP of Finance acknowledges is great for many things, but not built for accounting and not capable of scaling with the business. Reconciliation was painful, manual invoice uploads ate four hours a month, and reporting required custom-coded workarounds. As the company grew, those workarounds compounded; the finance team was running faster just to stay in the same place.
The approach
How Sage Intacct consultants ran it
SaaS finance teams have a particular profile: tech-forward, integrations-heavy, scale-conscious. The implementation method for a SaaS company differs from an NGO or a professional services firm — the activation leans harder into the open API, into Salesforce or HubSpot integrations, into ASC 606 / IFRS 15 revenue recognition, and into the cash-to-invoice loop. SaaS engagements typically open with a Discover phase that maps every system touching the finance stack, then a Configure phase that builds the integrations as carefully as the books themselves.
The solution
What Sage Intacct delivered
Sage Intacct replaced Excel as Ontra's general ledger and brought structured AP, AR, and cash reconciliation into the cloud. Manual invoice uploads collapsed from four hours a month to twenty minutes. Payments could now be applied at invoice level rather than batch level, giving reporting the granularity the executive team had been asking for. The platform's open API was the determining factor for Ontra's CFO — the financial system had to be as agile and integration-friendly as the proprietary legal-technology platform it serves.
The 'we'll move off Excel later' problem
Almost every fast-scaling SaaS founder reaches a version of this story. The company starts in Excel because it's free, familiar, and the early-stage CFO knows it cold. The business scales. Excel stays. By the time anyone has the bandwidth to think about ERP selection, the company is doing eight-figure revenue, the finance team is drowning, the audit is painful, and the open question is no longer whether to leave Excel but how fast it can be done.
Ontra's story is exactly this arc, accelerated by being a tech-forward business with a tech-forward CFO who recognised early that the finance stack had become the operational bottleneck. The numbers — three-week month-end close compressed to ten days, four hours of monthly manual uploads reduced to twenty minutes — are typical of a well-run Excel-to-Intacct migration.
What 'tech-forward' actually means in finance software
SaaS CFOs use the phrase 'tech-forward' to mean specific things:
- An open, well-documented API — not a once-a-year file export.
- A cloud-native architecture, not a hosted version of an on-premise system.
- Real-time integrations with the systems the rest of the company runs (Salesforce, HubSpot, Stripe, the company's own product database).
- Frequent, automatic releases of new functionality.
- A configuration model that doesn't require a developer to add a dimension or a workflow.
Sage Intacct meets that bar. The implementation team's job, in a SaaS deployment, is to use that surface area properly: stand up the Web Services API integrations, configure ASC 606 / IFRS 15 revenue recognition, design the dimensional model for ARR / MRR / cohort reporting, and connect to the rest of the stack.
What this looks like for a South African SaaS company
For SA SaaS firms — especially those selling internationally — the Ontra story translates with a few amplifications: multi-currency invoicing (ZAR for local, USD for international), revenue recognition under IFRS 15, ASC 606 if you're reporting to US investors, integrations to Paystack and Stripe for card payments, and FICA-friendly customer onboarding flows. This stack maps cleanly onto SA SaaS firms across HR-tech, legal-tech, ed-tech, and fintech. Book a consult if you're nearing the point where Excel is no longer a tool, it's a tax.
"We wanted — and got — a financial-management vendor that was similarly tech-forward, with an open API and a cloud platform that's agile and scalable enough to grow with us."
Key takeaways
- Month-end close: −50% — Reduced from up to three weeks to roughly ten days.
- Manual data entry: 4 h → 20 min — Per month, on invoice uploads alone.
- Reporting granularity: Invoice level — Payments now applied at invoice rather than batch level.
- Scalability: Tech-stack fit — Open API matches the rest of the SaaS engineering stack.