Transforming Logistics with Strategic Financial Systems: An Interview with Jeff Ryan

With fast growth and thin margins, logistics businesses often focus their investment on fleet, routes, and customer delivery, leaving finance to catch up later. But as operations scale, gaps in visibility, integration, and profitability tracking start to create serious friction.

Jeff Ryan has worked closely with logistics teams across South Africa to address that gap. His experience implementing Sage Intacct in complex, fast-moving environments has given him a clear view of what works and where most systems fall short.

In this interview, Jeff shares lessons from the field: the operational blind spots that surface first, how dimensional reporting changes the game, what makes multi-entity management so difficult, and where automation and tools like Copilot are finally starting to deliver practical value.

Addressing Inefficiencies in Logistics Operations

When you’re working with logistics companies, what operational or financial inefficiencies tend to surface first, and how do they shape the broader implementation strategy?

Jeff Ryan:
Well, we found in the logistics space, particularly in South Africa, that it is such a fast-growing industry. What has happened as a result of that is that a lot of the businesses are running on very basic systems or solutions. We’ve got some really big businesses that actually have run the entire business off Excel because of the growth aspect of their business, so they’re running both their finance and payroll systems off Excel spreadsheets.

Now, as customizable and configurable as Excel is, and accountants love Excel, I promise you, there are better systems out there that help you run your business better. What we’re also finding is that little logistics businesses invest in the operational systems, particularly around where their fleet is, how far away they are from the destination, or trying to improve the customer interaction, allowing them to have portals to see where their order is and when it’s going to arrive. Or just from a cost-effectiveness perspective, making sure that they’re managing routes.

What we’re not seeing, and this is where we think the opportunity for Sage Intacct is huge, is how that all comes together from a financial perspective. So how profitable are the routes that are coming through and being asked on the logistics? Are we optimizing those routes in terms of different areas? Should we not have a warehouse in that area to help from a logistics perspective because that’s where the high demand was?

What we’re not seeing is businesses using effective systems to look holistically at the business. There are pockets of investments and things that they think are important so they can continue with the growth strategy they’ve got. But they are definitely not keeping up to date with a lot of back-office systems like finance and payroll systems. Also, what they’re not doing is looking at it holistically to help their business go to the next stage. They’re getting to a stage where they’re actually breaking; they can’t keep up with the demand, and they can’t keep up with the invoices that need to go out. They can’t keep up with the cash collection or anything else in terms of their business because they don’t have the right systems in the background.

What we’re not seeing is businesses using effective systems to look holistically at the business.

ERP Implementation Challenges in Logistics

How does implementing ERP in logistics differ from other industries you’ve worked in, and where does that complexity tend to catch teams off guard?

Jeff Ryan:
Logistics is complicated. There are so many variables regarding the logistics industry, and depending on which industry you’re looking at, whether it’s B2B, B2C, or even just small couriers in terms of delivery for big organizations like Takealot or Amazon, there are so many complexities and nuances within the business. There are also returns or wastage in terms of what’s happening on the load. There could be accidents, detours. Just the complexity of actually managing a logistics business is really, really hard.

What we’re finding is that in those businesses, your fleet management solutions that are available, or your GPS tracking, become very sophisticated, and there’s a strong investment into that to help manage the complexity of a logistics business. But what we’re finding is because of that complexity, there aren’t very many financial systems that can actually cope with the variations that you have, especially when you’re talking about variable pricing, variable billing, changes within the route that might have happened, or changes within the actual order, or multiple orders that are happening on the same route. All those complexities are very difficult to put into a financial system that is not configurable to your needs.

What we find with Sage Intacct in this particular industry, with the dimensional reporting structures and statistical accounts, is that you can actually bring that data in and slice and dice that data in the way that you want, as well as record it in the way that you want to see, and then optimize how your logistics business is run. The other great thing about something like Sage Intacct, as opposed to other traditional ERPs, is that it’s built as a platform. Most ERPs or finance systems are looking to be standalone. They are the de facto system within the business. For logistics businesses, it’s actually the opposite; the operational business systems are more important than the financial, and yet the financial system still needs to be able to record what’s exactly happening on the operational side.

Traditionally, ERPs cannot handle the integration layers or the complexity or the amount of data and variables that need to be passed from the operational system. Intacct is built as a platform. The APIs are very strong, the data structures are configurable, and you’re able to pull that data through to give you visibility in real-time in dashboards, so the business can actually move forward from a financial and operational perspective.

For logistics businesses, the operational systems are more important than the financial, and yet the financial system still needs to be able to record what’s exactly happening on the operational side.

Adopting Dimensional Thinking in Finance

What changes when finance leaders start thinking dimensionally, not just structurally, about how they track and influence performance?

Jeff Ryan:
When we start talking to financial leaders about dimension reporting, which is a very different concept, a lot of the CFOs that we sell these systems to have come from a very traditional accounting background of cost centers. A lot of them have made their livings around taking Excel spreadsheets and taking the 16-digit account number, and only the accountant that’s been there for 20 years knows off the top of their head the last four digits, so they know which cost center, project, or area that this expense or other transaction needs to be appropriated to. Then they pivot all that data and make these fancy Excel dashboards.

What dimensional reporting does is it flips that all on its head. You’re effectively saying when the transactional journal is recorded, you tag that information. A lot of people compare that to Facebook. When there’s a picture that pops up, you can tag a location, the person in it, the date is obviously going to be there. There’s a whole lot of information around that picture that can be tagged and made available. The same principle has been applied to dimension reporting in Sage Intacct, so the information comes in, and you tag all this information around what are called dimensions. You can also supplement that with optional fields, tags, and statistics accounts, but the primary basis of Intacct is the dimensions.

As soon as that transaction actually hits the database, you already know which cost center, which project, which employee, which product line, all of that information is then tagged on the transaction, effectively creating a massive pivot table within the database in Sage Intacct. That then allows the finance users to pivot that data very quickly. So if they want to run income statements, trial balances, or reports for projects on a dimensional basis, it’s as quick as doing it on a dropdown. This is a massive improvement from all the other ERPs, where the data is generally dumped into Excel, massaged, or put into different configurations. It’s mapped to certain categories, and then only do you get the business intelligence. In Intacct, it’s real-time. It’s happening as you speak. As soon as the transaction updates the system, you’re getting real-time information.

Taking this into the industries we’re focusing on a lot at the moment, like logistics, you need to know what’s happening on your routes right now. You need to make real-time decisions so you can reroute your truck into the right area, so you can deal with the demand that suddenly increased because of some large customers coming in. In other industries, like the fast-moving goods industry, you want to make decisions quickly because you’ve seen your competitor changing the pricing structure of the discounting model, and it’s making a negative impact in your market. If you don’t change, you might lose market share. That’s where we see the differentiation with Intacct compared to all other systems before: that flexibility to make real-time decisions, and also with the dimensional structures to get it appropriate to a business to make those decisions.

That’s where we see the differentiation with Intacct compared to all other systems before: that flexibility to make real-time decisions, and also with the dimensional structures to get it appropriate to a business to make those decisions.

Integrating Operational Data with Financial Systems

What kinds of operational data tend to live outside the finance system, and what becomes possible when you bring that data in?

Jeff Ryan:
Having done Sage Intacct implementations for now hundreds of customers over the last five years, one of the things that really comes to the fore is how different businesses and different verticals are starting to really optimize the use of the dimensional reporting and the dashboards and the statistical concept that comes standard with Sage Intacct. One of the things that really differentiates some of the best businesses using Intacct and getting ahead of their competitors is how they bring the operational data into the statistical accounts.

For example, we’ve got a lot of retail chains. One of the dashboards they created was around the hospitality industry. They decided they wanted profitability per square meterage of each of their restaurants. Now, in a traditional ERP, that is not something that’s going to be available. You might be able to say profitability per restaurant, and you might be able to even say per region. However, to actually go down to the detail of how large that space is, bring that information in, and then do a comparative makes a massive difference in terms of understanding the profitability and how much they’re actually paying for rent and square meters they’re actually going up an expense account.

The other thing is, they then correlated it to the headcount that was actually being deployed into those restaurants. So obviously, if it’s a bigger square meter, you need more headcount, or if it’s a very busy location, you might need more headcount, which then comes with an increased cost. They then try to optimize the scheduling and the people that were available, or invest in training and having different people move around. This visibility is not possible with most ERPs or financial systems.

Taking that into the logistics space, where people want to now use the operational data related to which is highly complex, the amount of routes, how many trucks are there, whether those trucks have been on a maintenance schedule, if they’re due for maintenance, do you want to measure your driver fatigue? Where in the regions are they? Are they outside the country? Are they inside the country? Can we do another delivery on the way back? Those complexities, which are within the operational system but might make a massive difference from a financial performance perspective, are the data that’s getting brought into the financial systems in systems like Sage Intacct.

For example, taking the number of kilometers traveled as a diameter that can be brought into Sage Intacct, that then gives the wear and tear of those vehicles. You can bring it into the system and relate it to the fixed asset model around when the depreciation is, what is the value of the vehicle that you’re using at the moment, how many more trips can it do from the trip perspective, how many trips has this done, what is the most profitable trip, what regions are, what customer or supplier are the ones that we should be targeting? Because effectively, those are the ones that are the most profitable. This is the sort of information you can bring back into the operational system combined with the financial system information and get a much better view of where you should be going as a business and what you should be investing in.

What really differentiates some of the best businesses using Intacct and getting ahead of their competitors is how they bring the operational data into the statistical accounts.

Data-Driven Decisions in Logistics

How have you seen statistical accounts shift the conversation between finance and operations in a logistics setting?

Jeff Ryan:
It’s an interesting one because when you have data, it becomes factual, and most business owners are the kind of people who have been successful, especially in fast-growth industries, on gut feel. So it becomes a very interesting conversation when there’s factual information that contradicts the gut feel of the business owners. We’ve seen this play out in a lot of ways.

However, the ones that have succeeded in a logistics environment are the ones that are willing to look at the data with an open mind and then make business decisions based on that, and not just go on the assumption that what they’ve always done is effective or has always worked in the past. A real-life example would be, there’s a particular large customer that has always been around for 20 years, and this is exactly the best customer you’ve ever had. But when you drill down into the financial detail and the statistical information, those routes were much longer, the margin they were making off that larger customer was smaller because they had more negotiation power and because of the increased costs, and also maybe there were more tolls on the road. Suddenly, that actual big customer was actually less profitable than 10 or 20 smaller customers on smaller routes.

If the business owner and stakeholders are willing to look at that information and see it from a perspective of what is best for the business, that’s when the decisions make better sense for the business. It can be quite an interesting conversation because the operational guys will always say, “Oh, we love this route. It’s easy, we know it.” And then the finance guys are saying, “But actually, you’re costing us quite a lot of money, and we need to look at more routes.” The operation guy might say, “Well, we don’t want to make more routes. We drive fatigue. It’s busier, it’s more hectic.” So you get some really interesting conversations going back and forth.

But again, the critical thing is, what is best for the business and what is going to drive the most success? If you don’t have the data to drive those conversations, it becomes a gut feel and it becomes emotional rather than real.

The critical thing is, what is best for the business and what is going to drive the most success?

Challenges in Multi-Entity Financial Management

As logistics businesses grow and diversify, what makes multi-entity financial management especially challenging, and how do you keep workflows aligned?

Jeff Ryan:
There’s a massive dependency on them because the South African infrastructure is very poor from a rail perspective, and therefore, as a result, there’s quite a high reliance on vehicle transport. The growth of that business becomes quite interesting in that space. Initially, the business owner might have had one truck and started making good profit, or the second, etc. The expansion of that business then becomes very much around owning the supply chain in a lot of cases. So they might need a warehouse, and therefore they purchase a warehouse, but then they become a property owner, and they might want to be a property management company. Suddenly, this business has expanded from a very small, one-man band into a multinational, multi-entity business.

Now, a lot of systems that you buy as a startup are not scalable. They work very much in a one-entity environment, and they work very well. But as soon as you start looking at complexities, where you have intercompany loans or transfers between entities, or you have different functions within each of the businesses, one might still remain in logistics, the other one is a property management. Maybe they do something else in terms of production, and then they put a manufacturing arm. Most financial systems don’t allow for that sort of scale.

Intacct, on the opposite side, is very much built around multi-entity environments. Not only is it built on the fact that you can have multiple entities, but it also aggregates the data across the businesses out of the box, which is a massive improvement from most ERPs, where you generally have to buy an instance of each of the ERPs for those entities, and then they have very convoluted routes of actually bringing the data together or creating ways to move the transfers across the different entities. Intacct does that out of the box. They then supplement that with a consolidation model, which is a phenomenal ability for the accounting clients to actually now get a full view from audited financial statements around which accounts, which entities do not include or deal with minority interest in different shareholders, and have all that advanced accounting functionality as well, so that we have audits of financial statements.

But from an operational perspective, out-of-the-box aggregation of data makes a massive difference, especially in the fast-paced growth industry like logistics. If you have multiple entities and multiple shareholders and you want to report that very quickly in your management pack, it can be done very quickly. If a board decision suddenly requires a new area or new region to be attacked, the information is in real-time through the dimension reporting and statistical accounts to make those decisions. It’s got very quick and easy financial report designers and drag-and-drop dashboard designers, as well as some of the even more advanced reporting tools that come out of the box that can make that information real and able to be changed and configured at runtime. I think that’s what differentiates Intacct from all the other systems in terms of growth industries like logistics. But in general, any sort of business that has multi-entity or growth aspirations, the system can scale with your business.

Out-of-the-box aggregation of data makes a massive difference, especially in the fast-paced growth industry like logistics.

The Impact of Open APIs on Finance and Logistics Integration

How do integration decisions, especially around open APIs, impact the relationship between finance systems and the tools logistics teams already rely on?

Jeff Ryan:
This gets me the most excited: integration. It’s really where the value add from a type of perspective comes in. We realize the Sage products that we sell are phenomenal, and they do amazing things. They are not going to do everything in every single shape and form that the business requires. This is where the other best-in-class systems come in, and logistics is a great place where integration is really important. You have fleet management, your GPS tracking, the integration with your order systems. That is all separately done outside of the financial system.

However, a system like Sage Intacct with an open API will make it much easier for those systems to bring data into the system in an automated fashion, so that there is no manual capture or manual import or export of data between the systems. This makes the business much more seamless. It gives access to real-time data and that visibility that makes it easier to make decisions around where the business would want to go.

What it also means is you’re not dependent on any provider. For example, if you happen to invest in a fleet management system, and your business can only afford the lower-tier software provider that happens to be available at the time, but suddenly you grow into a more complex environment, and you need to upgrade that fleet management system, because of the open API on a system like Sage Intacct, you can plug and play those fleet management software and still not lose your business continuity as you transition into it. It literally just becomes another source of data that has been pushed into the financial system.

I think that’s where it’s exciting that you’re actually optimizing the business process. It might seem like a trivial event, that you’re exporting and importing, but we’ve seen businesses where they have 12 people whose job is capturing data into the system. Those 12 people are potentially very skilled individuals, potentially in the finance team, and they’re not being used for their purpose. So it has a secondary effect: you might lose those people because they’re not enjoying the job. It’s very manual, depressing. They’re not using their skill sets. It’s also prone to error, so the error is going to permeate through the system, and it’s highly inefficient. It’s not as quick as an automated system. So, having an open API has massive benefits for the business, besides the cost benefits, just the ability to actually have a seamless view overall, holistically, makes a massive difference.

A system like Sage Intacct with an open API will make it much easier for those systems to bring data into the system in an automated fashion.

The Value of Automation in Logistics

Where do you typically see automation starting to reveal real value in logistics, and what signals that a team is ready for it?

Jeff Ryan:
Automation is an interesting term, and particularly our department is around integration and automation. It’s a very key point that when we do integration and automation, or look at this potential scenario within any businesses, whether it’s logistics, the wine industry, or some of the other industries we’ve gone into, like financial services, it’s all around understanding the business process and questioning the why before we even start looking at automation.

In most businesses, you would have a CRM system, and you’re probably likely to have a finance system. It’s one of the more common use cases that we find within businesses. In terms of the CRM, though, it can be fundamentally different. In the logistics industry, you would have a lot to do with actually managing the delivery of the goods and keeping the customer visible of where that actually is from that perspective, as well as capturing the original order. So the CRM perspective can be very complex in certain environments, or sometimes very simple. However, from an integration perspective, that data needs to be passed through.

Now, the systems that are manual, and they say, “I want to now be automated,” might be an Excel spreadsheet, and now they want that automated, but if we don’t challenge the business process, you’re just going to automate a bad process. So you need to challenge the process in the first place. Look at the CRM. That’s the sales capture process. What do they actually do?

As an anecdotal example of logistics, what we heard through one of the conferences is that the current process was there was one document that was written up on a piece of paper in pencil. It was then handed to the driver, and the driver, around the other side, then wrote it in pen to hand it over to the customer. When it then returned to the office at a later stage, it was highlighted. The last example was that it was actually put through with a stamp that was sitting in the front office before it was loaded manually into the system.

Now, looking at that process from the outside, we’re going to say, “Oh my goodness, why?” But you can understand from a business that started out with very little, a piece of paper is very cost-effective, so it’s a solution. However, from a business perspective, it’s definitely not scalable and it’s definitely not automated. So we always have to look at the business process before we even think of integration or automation, and then taking one step further, once that’s all done, then you look at artificial intelligence over and above that.

If we don’t challenge the business process, you’re just going to automate a bad process.

Agility with Intelligent Tools

With tools like Intelligent GL and Copilot now available, what kinds of possibilities are opening up for finance teams trying to stay agile in a high-pressure, low-margin industry?

Jeff Ryan:
This is a bit of a pain point. Professional services firms like ourselves and Copilot’s AI have very much decreased reliance on experts. It doesn’t mean that we don’t still have a place, but a lot of the information is available at different items. The prevalence of ChatGPT is showing that the information is much more readily available. It doesn’t always mean that it’s accurate or does it the right way, but there’s more information available. It’s the same sort of shift that happened when Google came out, but suddenly the search engine across insulates data became big. This is another shift that changes, or a paradigm shift in our environment.

The same is now equated to the functions that Sage Intacct is releasing with the GL outline, and especially with Copilot. The GL outlier and the Intelligent GL are very much around optimizing your GL to be more efficient. So the dimension reporting, therefore, makes your simplified chart of accounts much easier to manage, as well as having the GL outline where it actually has tolerance levels for things or transactions that are happening in your system, and being proactive about preventing those from happening. An alert would come to the accounts or financial management if something different from the normal process is happening. An example would be the rent expense is 10,000 a month, and suddenly it goes up to 100,000 because someone put in an extra zero when they were typing it in. An alert would be generated because that’s well outside the tolerance level, and you could deal with it before it actually gets processed.

On the AI side and Copilot, there’s a lot of talk about it, and people are fearful of jobs. What we’re finding is that the ethical approach that Sage is taking to this is great, and they don’t use anything from an AI perspective without making sure it’s as close to 100% accurate and in the right way for what’s benefiting the customers. The rollout of Copilot shows us the initial launch is very much focused on helping within the help function within the system. The second part of the release is very much around prompting users and helping them with the monthly close to make that more efficient. They are specifically rolling this out in terms of the way that they want to do it. They’ve done the same in terms of the AP automation, the OCR, and the learning about how to process supplier invoices. Each iteration makes it better and better for the users in the system, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all tool that you can use for everything, which a lot of people, I think, are using at the moment. These are specific use cases that are driving value across the business.

It can be a little bit scary. It can be something quite new. It’s obviously a risk to a lot of different businesses, but those who embrace it and understand where the value can be added by providing advice on how to use these tools is where the opportunity is. But I think it’s really exciting for customers to have this functionality built into the system. Like Sage Intacct, it’s only going to make them better. It makes it much easier to drive your business forward, ask the right questions, and improve your efficiencies and processes within the more manual tasks that you have in your business.

It makes it much easier to drive your business forward, ask the right questions, and improve your efficiencies and processes within the more manual tasks.