Centage

09/30/2026

Your FP&A team just got bigger. 🚀

Today we're launching FP&A as a Service at Centage, and we're so excited to finally share it.

Here's the idea: our FP&A software plus a US-based advisory team that runs your budget cycle, monthly forecast, and stakeholder reporting for you. One subscription. One team in your corner.

That means your team gets:
✅ A budget cycle managed start to finish, sign-offs and consolidation included
✅ A fresh forecast every month across every entity
✅ A workforce and payroll model that stays current with native integrations
✅ Board, lender, and department reports delivered on your schedule
✅ A named advisor with real FP&A experience who knows your business

You own the assumptions and approvals. We keep the model running.
Picture your next board meeting with a forecast that's already refreshed, reports that are already out the door, and a finance team with time to actually dig into the numbers. That's what we built this for.

Want to see what we'd take off your plate? Read the full press release. Link in the comments. 👇

09/23/2026

30 minutes into the demo, the Controller asked the question that ended it.

"The GL account structure in this demo. Is that our chart, or a sample one?"

Sample. And the live ERP pull she'd been watching, the one the rep called "live" four times in three minutes, was a CSV the sales engineer had generated the day before. The real connection happens during implementation. After signature.

She runs 15 entities on Dynamics GP with three fiscal year variants. Her close eats days 1 through 8 every month, most of it exporting trial balances and reconciling intercompany eliminations by hand. She was on that call because her CFO told her to get off the master workbook by year end.

This happens constantly, and it usually isn't dishonesty. Cloud native FP&A tools were built against cloud ledgers because that was the API surface they had. When a buyer on GP or Sage 100 or MIP shows up, the vendor demos what they built, and one word ends up covering four very different mechanisms: an agent running inside your network, a cloud API, a partner run adapter, and a file somebody uploads every month.

All four can be legitimate. A file based path priced and supported as a file based path is a fair deal. A file based path sold as automation is not.

So we wrote out the twelve questions that force the map into daylight. Ask them on the first demo, not during scoping, and get the answers in writing before signature. https://www.centage.com/blog/the-connector-that-holds

Most FP&A "integrations" are a demo trick. Here are the four honest connector tiers and 12 questions to ask any vendor about your GL before you sign.

09/21/2026

Day 4 of the close. Three finance leaders, three screens.

A CFO at a 14 site behavioral health group is scrolling through a Great Plains query he wrote eleven years ago. It still runs, still produces the same six division trial balance, and still lands in a workbook where one bad paste ends his day.

A Director of Finance at a regional food bank is watching Dynamics NAV pull actuals into her model on its own, exactly like last month. She moved on to the variance narrative an hour ago.

A Controller at a specialty adhesives manufacturer hasn't opened SYSPRO all week. His close has been running itself since a scheduled job kicked off Sunday at midnight.

Three ledgers, three cadences, three very different levels of confidence. All three systems work. All three were built by serious people to record transactions precisely. None of them was built to plan, and that was never the job.

The category has spent five years telling this audience their ledger is the problem. It isn't. A ledger records. It doesn't plan. The FP&A tools that plug into planning most easily are cloud tools that can't reach an on-prem ledger, so a nineteen workbook Excel layer grows instead, and it grows every quarter.

So we wrote the reference guide we wished existed. Ten ledgers, from Great Plains and Sage 100 to MIP, Deltek and Multiview.

What each one does genuinely well, who runs it, where it stops at planning, and which integration path applies. No migration panic, because most of these teams aren't migrating this quarter.

If your GL lives on a server in a closet, this one is for you.👇
https://www.centage.com/blog/on-premises-gl-field-guide?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic+social&utm_campaign=on+prem+gl&utm_content=blog

The respectful reference for the ten on-premises and legacy general ledgers finance teams still runs. What each does well. Who runs it. Where it stops.

09/16/2026

The Controller at a 180 person specialty chemicals distributor has sat through two Microsoft partner calls this month.

Great Plains has run the close at her company for 22 years. It still closes clean on business day six. Her IT director has never once flagged it as a problem system. Her audit partner has no issues with it. The partner on the call keeps saying "modern lifecycle."

She isn't panicking. She's doing math.

Here's what the published dates actually say. Microsoft has moved GP into a no new versions phase, with security updates continuing through a defined support window. Intuit has been winding down QuickBooks Desktop sales and version support on its own schedule. Neither vendor is switching anything off next quarter. Most mid-market teams have a multi year horizon to make the call on their own timing.

The urgency in the room isn't coming from the dates. It's coming from a channel whose revenue depends on migration events. Yours doesn't. Yours depends on a clean close and a board pack that ties.

What's worth pulling apart is that the announcement puts two decisions on the calendar, not one. Stay or go on the ledger is a five year business decision. What FP&A layer sits above whichever ledger you land on is a much shorter one, and it arrives either way. Business Central is a general ledger. So is Intacct. Neither of them plans.

Deferring the second decision because you might make the first is how teams lose five years to a workbook chain.

The dates, and what they change about your close: https://www.centage.com/blog/great-plains-quickbooks-desktop-end-of-life-fpa?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic+social&utm_campaign=on+prem+gl&utm_content=blog

Both Microsoft and Intuit have published lifecycle dates for Dynamics GP and QuickBooks Desktop. Here's what to know.

09/14/2026

Nobody puts the FP&A model on the migration Gantt chart.

The GL conversion is bounded work. Chart remap, cutover date, opening balances, parallel run, sign off. You can plan it and watch it close out.

Then 90 days in, someone asks what happens to the three years of driver based forecasts, the position level workforce plan with wage bands and multi state payroll tax, and the twelve board views your CFO now opens in every leadership meeting.

All of it built on account codes that are about to change.

The usual answer is that finance will rebuild after go live. Six months, give or take.

Meanwhile the CFO still expects a rolling forecast the day the new ledger turns on, because the alternative is explaining to the board why the numbers went dark.

There is another version. A community services nonprofit with a $28M budget and 22 restricted funds moved off QuickBooks Desktop. They didn't rebuild. They stood up the new connector, re-mapped about 900 GL accounts into their model's 240 line chart over eleven business days, pulled three years of actuals through, ran one parallel close, and cut over.

The workforce budget stayed. The fund allocation math stayed. The board reports stayed. Total FP&A side effort was about three weeks of one person inside a two month migration.

The difference isn't a clever tool. It's where the model lives. Five things survive. One thing gets redone.

Read more: https://www.centage.com/blog/what-if-changing-your-gl-didn-t-reset-your-fp-a-to-zero?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=organic+social&utm_campaign=on+prem+gl&utm_content=blog

If your FP&A layer lives in an FP&A system rather than in a workbook chain glued to your GL, a migration is a re-point, not a rebuild.

09/02/2026

Not every consolidation problem is actually a consolidation problem.

That distinction matters more than it sounds.

In multi-entity , finance may be dealing with three very different things at once:
- Intercompany eliminations.
- Shared-cost allocations.
- Compliance-driven separate books.

One requires transactions to disappear. Another requires costs to be distributed. The third may need to remain separate entirely.

Yet many finance teams are asking one spreadsheet to somehow understand all three.

It doesn’t.

So finance becomes the logic layer — maintaining formulas, checking mappings, tracing broken references and making sure one rule change didn’t quietly break something downstream.

That’s when complexity becomes fragility.

For healthcare FP&A leaders managing multiple entities, the better question may be: Are we actually dealing with one consolidation process — or three different financial processes we’ve forced into one?

We unpack the distinction in our latest blog.
🔗 https://www.centage.com/blog/multi-entity-consolidation-three-problems

Healthcare finance conflates three mechanically-different multi-entity flavors into one workbook. Here is what each one needs.

08/31/2026

What if a two-week close isn’t just “how healthcare finance works”?

Month after month, the same cycle repeats:
- Payroll accruals.
- Intercompany reconciliations.
- Variance research.
- Forecast updates.

Then suddenly it’s day 10, the board wants answers, and the finance team is already thinking about next month.

is complex. But complexity and inefficiency aren’t the same thing.
When the mechanics of close consume two weeks every month, the real cost isn’t just time.

It’s everything finance isn’t doing during those two weeks: analyzing contracts, modeling new sites, challenging assumptions and helping leadership make better decisions.

Maybe the question isn’t, “How do we close faster?”
Maybe it’s, “Why does our close still require this much manual work?”

We explored that question in our latest blog.
🔗 https://www.centage.com/blog/two-week-close-is-a-choice

Why healthcare close cycles run ten to fourteen days, and the four process choices a labor-heavy operator can change to close in five without a bigger team.

08/27/2026

A healthcare labor budget can be perfectly calculated and still be millions of dollars wrong.

The problem often isn’t the wage rate. It’s the mix.

Your budget may assume permanent RNs. Reality may be 40% permanent, 40% travel and 20% agency. Add different wage bands, benefits, payroll taxes and locations, and a seemingly small staffing assumption can create a massive gap.

And finance often doesn’t see the full impact until the variance hits.

That’s the bigger lesson for FP&A teams: workforce planning can’t stop at headcount.

The question isn’t just, “How many nurses do we need?”

It’s, “What will the workforce we actually use cost us?”

We break down the math and the hidden $10M wage-mix gap in our latest blog.

🔗 Read the full article: https://www.centage.com/blog/healthcare-workforce-planning-the-10m-wage-mix-gap-in-your-rn-budget

Your RN budget assumes 100% permanent. Your ledger says otherwise. How to model wage mix, fringe, and payroll tax at position level across 2-8 sites.

08/24/2026

A nursing budget can be perfectly built and still be wrong.

Not because the math was off.

Because the people changed.

- A few more senior RNs than expected.
- A shift in the mix between permanent, float, and agency staff.
- One location hiring differently than another.

None of those changes seem dramatic on their own.

But across multiple locations, over an entire year?

That gap can become hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.
And often, finance doesn't see the full impact until payroll starts telling a very different story than the budget.

That's the problem we wanted to make easier to spot.

That's why we created the "Multi-Location Nurse Wage-Mix Worksheet" to help healthcare finance teams compare what they planned against what their staffing mix could actually cost.

One workbook. Five tabs. About 15 minutes.
Check the comments for the free worksheet.👇

08/13/2026

Somewhere along the way, a lot of us learned the wrong lesson. That being right is what earns you a seat at the table.

Mark Heinkel, CFO at Athos Commerce, learned something different. Someone once told him:
"You don't have to always be right, but you need to be convicted."

It changed how he shows up in every room. With his team. With buyers doing diligence on a nine figure deal. With himself.

If you've ever held back an idea because you weren't 100% sure, this one is for you.

🎙️ Watch the full episode. Link in the comments.