Five workforce expectations Sage 300 CRE can no longer support

Today’s professional construction workforce brings expectations about accessibility, usability, transparency and professional growth shaped by their experiences in their daily life, education and at previous jobs. Unfortunately, construction companies operating on legacy accounting contractor software like Sage 300 CRE often struggle to meet those expectations. 

Let’s look at five expectations shaping today’s construction workforce and examine how Sage Intacct Construction addresses them in ways Sage 300 CRE does not.

1. Seamless remote access without workarounds

Like in any other industry, professional construction employees expect flexibility. Some want to work from home occasionally. Others live in different states. Nearly everyone expects the ability to log in easily and securely from anywhere.

Sage 300 CRE can’t deliver that experience on its own. To enable remote access, teams typically rely on VPN connections or hosted environments like myCREcloud. But VPNs are, at best, a temporary fix. Their latency and security concerns make them frustrating and risky to use long-term. And while hosted environments reduce on-site hardware demands, they still depend on remote desktop sessions and require coordinated software and operating system upgrades.

Today’s workforce expects to log in through a browser as easily as they access online banking or cloud productivity tools. Sage Intacct Construction delivers that experience. Users access the system through a secure browser connection without VPNs or remote desktop layers. The platform handles updates automatically, which eliminates the need for internal teams to manage version control or schedule downtime.

2. Real-time project visibility for project managers

Construction project managers need and expect a level of visibility into their job performance that most Sage 300 environments can’t provide.

Sage 300 CRE’s licensing structure makes it cost prohibitive for most companies to provide access to PMs. Even when companies purchase additional licenses, its lack of remote usability limits what PMs can even do with it. As a result, PMs depend on accounting to generate job cost reports, often once per week. By the time accounting delivers those reports, the data is already out of date. This workflow slows decisions and creates tension between the PMs and the accounting team.