12 days of Christmas with crosscountry consulting

As a premier Sage Intacct partner, we wind down our year and celebrate how, for 20 years, they have brought us tidings and joy (and excellent finance and accounting tools). We gladly bring you … the 12 Days of Sage Intacct. Here is Day 2 – 6!

On the second day of Christmas, Sage Intacct gave to me: a solution to handle all of my Procure-to-Pay needs.

Sage Intacct offers a full “Procure-to-Pay” solution right out of the box. The purchasing application enables companies to create and maintain complex procurement processes, transactions, and approval workflows with ease. Whether you need basic vendor invoice approvals or complex workflows with requisitions, purchase orders, and vendor invoices (or more), Sage Intacct has you covered. If you also need dynamic approval workflows for each of those transaction types based on what is being purchased, then you are all set.

Once all of your transactions have been fully approved and the product or service is delivered, Sage Intacct then provides robust payment selection and approvals. Their “Pay Bills” functionality allows you to select bills for payment based on any number of attributes, including custom fields. Once you have selected the bills you would like to pay, you can choose to route them through an approval process or have them released right away – either manually or through various payment automation tools.

One of our not-for-profit clients who process more than 1,300 invoices per month has utilized Sage Intacct to dramatically increase control over their spending and ensure that money from donors is used efficiently. Switching to Sage Intacct and using the purchasing application allowed the client to implement a formal purchase order process across the organization, thus ensuring that nearly all spend receives approval before an invoice is even generated by the vendor. Creating this process also guaranteed that controls are in place to detect things such as duplicate bills or over-billing, which may need to be rejected or routed through additional approval.

The client also added two key wins when it came to payment processing. First, they added additional approval steps to the release of payments in order to ensure all cash leaving the organization was fully approved. Second, they used one of Sage Intacct’s marketplace partners to automatically connect to and release payments from their bank, ultimately saving time, money, and reducing the risk of manual error.

And, they did all of this while processing invoices in more than 25 currencies across more than 50 countries!

Sage Intacct’s Procure-to-Pay applications do far more than we can explain here (such as automated reporting, custom templates, etc.).

On the third day of Christmas, Sage Intacct gave to me: quarterly releases, the gift that keeps on giving throughout the year.

Each quarter, Sage Intacct provides customers with new features and enhanced product functionality, which means you don’t need to wait a whole year for improvements to your ERP system. Their seamless release process performs the upgrade behind the scenes, requiring no action from users. The morning after, users can simply sign into their Sage Intacct environment and immediately begin taking advantage of all of the new and enhanced functionality.

Prior to each release, Sage Intacct will provide detailed notes that include particulars on which areas of the product are being impacted and how. Their team also puts together a short video covering the release highlights, which makes it easy to preview all of the new functionality.

Recently, a client of ours needed to include Accounts Payable bill approvals in their workflow, but was not yet ready to commit to implementing Sage Intacct’s native purchasing module, or using a third-party tool that would allow them to do so. In the first release this year, Sage Intacct produced functionality to allow users to approve bills before they are posted based on a pre-defined workflow set up by the customer. This is just one example of how Sage Intacct is always working hard to improve and enhance their product.

On the fourth day of Christmas, Sage Intacct gave to me: insights into finance and accounting data that allow me to run my business.

Sage Intacct has an excellent data model built on modern cloud architecture. As transactions are entered, they are automatically posted (if approved) in the general ledger. These exceptional reporting capabilities allow managers to view data in real time, helping them to make informed business decisions.

As a practice leader at CrossCountry, I rely on Sage Intacct to provide me insights into my business. I have access to summary-level dashboards that allow me to view financial results across timespans (monthly, quarterly, year-to-date, inception-to-date) and multiple key financial metrics (revenue, cost of revenue, expenses, and project margins). I can also drill down from summary dashboard reports to see the line item details to determine which projects are running on plan and which ones might need my attention.

Because I am also asked to manage my indirect costs, I have another dashboard that shows my actual expenses-to-date compared to my budget for marketing, sales, organizational development and conferences. This shows me if I am trending on or over budget, and has the functionality to help me see the individual transaction that may be driving me over. This real-time data presented in intuitive graphs and key performance indicators allow me to, at a glance, understand what is happening in my business.

Prior to Sage Intacct, I had to rely on Excel spreadsheets that did not contain enough data or the detailed transactions I needed to run my business.

On the fifth day of Christmas, Sage Intacct gave to me: fixed asset tracking and transacting from within Sage Intacct … no signing into a third-party tool required.

Sage Intacct Fixed Assets gives customers the ability to manage and track their resources in the same system where they manage their core accounting functions. Highlights of the product include automated depreciation through recurring journal entries and asset creation directly from purchasing, accounts payable, and cash management transactions. On top of this, customers are able to manage their asset data from right within Sage Intacct. Inside of each record, customers can track important details such as insurance information, warranties, maintenance logs, and even directly drill into the transaction from which the fixed asset record was created.

As a stocking stuffer, the tool also comes with an out-of-the-box Roll Forward Analysis report that allows customers to reconcile net book values at period end, including beginning balances. This report also provides a centralized view of accumulated depreciations, as well as any additions and disposals across your company for that timeframe.

One of our financial services clients was managing their entire fixed asset sub ledger offline in Excel. This meant that each month, they were spending countless hours creating manual journal entries to account for any asset acquisitions, disposals, and depreciation for the period. After implementing Sage Intacct Fixed Assets, the client is now able to create fixed assets directly from their Accounts Payable bills, and view all of their financial and non-financial data in a central location on demand. Posting depreciation is a breeze now that the entries have been automatically created by Intacct, and with a few clicks, can be posted to the general ledger each month!

On the sixth day of Christmas, Sage Intacct gave to me: open APIs to automate and integrate my back office.

Sage Intacct offers a completely open, documented, and easy-to-use Application Program Interface (API), which enables customers to automate processes and integrate tools with ease. Their API allows you to create, update, delete, or process transactions within the system, saving countless hours of manual updates. If you also wanted to create a custom integration between Sage Intacct and another tool (such as accounts payable automation, loan servicing system, etc.) you can accomplish this through their interface.

All in all, you can do just about anything with APIs.

Furthermore, Sage Intacct offers a number of tools to assist users in creating their own API calls. In addition to the full documentation on their developer site, they also provide you a Postman collection to make it even easier to create code and interact with your environment.

One of CrossCountry’s SaaS clients recently utilized Sage Intacct’s open APIs to develop completely custom web-to-web integration with their AP automation tool. Using APIs, the tools automatically communicate with one another on vendors, bills, payments and much more. This ensures no time is wasted with manual, error prone double entry, leaving the finance team more time for value-add work.

Sage Intacct’s reporting tools offer far more than we can explain here. To learn more about Sage Intacct and sign up for their 30-minute Coffee Break Demo.

 

To learn more about CrossCountry’s Sage Intacct capabilities, please click here.