2020 release 3 highlight: Sage Intacct continues to strengthen its foundation for continuous accounting and planning

The premise of continuous accounting is that if you can capture data in real-time, automate reconciliations, and eliminate manual adjustments, you’re able to say goodbye to the tedious close process. But with organizations in North America on average spending 9 business days monthly, 10 quarterly, and 24 at year-end closing the books¹, the concept of continuous accounting may seem like a pie in the sky dream.

With every release, Sage Intacct continues to deliver features that bring our vision of continuous accounting closer to reality. In Release 3, we’re delivering automation and streamlining processes around credit card transactions and reconciliations, cross-entity allocations, and budgeting and planning.

Let’s take a closer look at how Sage Intacct continues to strengthen its foundation for continuous accounting.

Streamlining Cash Management

With 2020 Release 1, Sage Intacct delivered support for bank feeds, enabling our customers to seamlessly connect to over 10,000 banks and “soft close” daily. We’re excited to announce that in Release 3 we’ve made enhancements to how we handle credit card transactions. By generating and matching credit card transactions within Sage Intacct, you can save hours and increase accuracy when reconciling and recording transactions. When creating missing transactions, you can create the matching credit card transaction or journal entry directly from the transaction and auto-populate important details. With a unified experience for reconciling credit card and bank accounts, and the ability to filter by account type, you can gain daily insight into where your cash stands and save time when closing the books.

Automating Allocations Across Entities

If you’re like most organizations, you allocate indirect costs or revenue to gain a more accurate picture of your organization’s performance. Last year, we took a major step towards the continuous close by delivering Dynamic Allocations, which enables you to completely automate your complex allocations. That means no more manually gathering source data, maintaining complex spreadsheets, or making post-period adjustments. With the ability to create recurring allocations, your allocations are done consistently every time. With the ability to document and dig into the details of how your allocations are set up, auditors can easily find the details needed to understand your allocation entries.

In Release 3 we’re taking another big step forward. We’ve enhanced Dynamic Allocations to support the allocation of costs, revenue, assets, and liability amounts across entities, including entities with different base currencies. Save a significant amount of time managing your cross-entity allocations by fully automating them inside Sage Intacct. Eliminate manual processing, reduce errors, and increase transparency by centralizing the creation, management, and audit trail for cross-entity allocations. Easily control which allocations can cross entities with the click of a button​. Because Sage Intacct maintains currency exchange rates, your transactions will be automatically converted into the base currency for each entity. Not only does this automate a complex, time-consuming process, it builds upon our industry-leading multi-entity functionality.

Accelerating Budgeting and Planning

As you go further down the path towards continuous accounting, you free yourself up to focus on more strategic initiatives and decision making. Given the current climate of uncertainty we’re all operating in, the ability to be nimble in the face of change has come to the forefront. With the budget wizard providing that bi-directional flow of data you can quickly create budgets, compare budgets to actuals, do what-if analysis, run different business plan scenarios, and then export the final version back to Sage Intacct. To help further accelerate your budgeting and planning we’ve delivered three enhancements during this release:

• Drag and Drop Up to Four Dimensions – Now, when creating budgets, you can view the entire Sage Intacct dimensions hierarchy in the budget wizard. Drag and drop up to a total of four levels of dimensions and sub-dimensions when you set up your budget structure, which saves a significant amount of effort when planning on deeper layers of dimensions.
• Import Actuals from All Sage Intacct Reporting Books – Now you can select all available books, in addition to your default book, from the budget wizard for the import process. This increases the data types that you can use to seed budgets and forecasts for a more accurate and complete picture.
• Import model lines from Microsoft Excel – Building upon the strength of our integration with Excel, the new model line import wizard walks you through the process and saves time by eliminating the need to rekey models from Excel into Budgeting and Planning. You can then add, edit, or remove assumptions without breaking your model.

Sage Intacct continues to invest in delivering automation throughout our products to make the ideas of continuous accounting and the continuous close a reality. Enabling you to spend less time on repetitive processes and more time moving your business forward.

If you’re a Sage Intacct customer, you can learn more in the Sage Intacct 2020 Release 3 release notes within the system.

If you’re in the market for a new solution and would like to learn how Sage Intacct might be able to help you, contact us at 877-437-7765.

¹Benchmarking Accounting & Finance Functions 2019: https://www.roberthalf.com/research-and-insights/workplace-research/benchmarking-the-accounting-and-finance-function