Alley Theatre’s Financial Makeover, Great Plains to Sage Intacct

Understanding the situation

Alley Theatre, a renowned performing arts institution, found itself in need of a significant upgrade to its financial management system. The existing system, Great Plains, lacked the detail and flexibility required to analyze all revenue streams and provide a complete financial picture. Alley Theatre’s controller, Tasha Criss, approached Sage Intacct, which strongly recommended she engage the CLA digital team for strategy and technical implementation. Having had a positive experience with CLA’s audit and tax services at a previous firm, Tasha trusted CLA’s capabilities and chose CLA digital for Sage Intacct implementation.

Exploring the challenge

Great Plains is a static system that couldn’t track data with the granularity Alley Theatre needed. It showed basic information like ticket revenue and direct costs, covering only a part of the revenue stream. It lacked a more comprehensive analysis including revenue from fees, concessions, and other indirect income sources.

In moving to Sage Intacct, CLA’s digital team guided Alley Theatre toward a financial management structure capable of offering a complete picture of its shows’ economic impact. CLA offered comprehensive guidance, including chart of accounts design and strategies to leverage Sage Intacct’s dimensionality to its full potential.

Achieving results

Thanks to the new financial visibility designed within the Sage Intacct implementation, Alley Theatre saw tangible financial gains. For example, the theater reinstated a cancelled show after seeing its overall economic value — a number that was obscured by the limited data available in its old system but made clear in the comprehensive analytics of the new system.

Alley Theatre, with assistance from CLA’s digital team, also leveraged Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) to create more detailed budgets and plan its workforce. Using SIP allowed the theater to refine the budget for each role in the organization, giving greater control and precision to the budget process. The advanced features of SIP, such as workforce planning tools, made financial management even stronger and more comprehensive.

CLA’s digital team successfully guided Alley Theatre as it transitioned from Great Plains to Sage Intacct, helping overcome initial challenges and achieve a modern, versatile, and comprehensive financial management system able to support detailed economic impact analysis and informed decision-making for the theater’s productions.