2020 release 4 highlight: transform decision-making with Sage Intacct intelligent GL

If you’ve been following Sage’s CTO, Aaron Harris, for a few years, you’ve heard his vision for eliminating the accounting close. If you’ve ever wondered how to get an accountant’s attention, I can affirm that suggesting you can eliminate the close will do it!

Aaron’s vision is that by using the unlimited power of cloud computing along with artificial intelligence (AI), accountants can achieve the nirvana of continuous accounting, continuous trust, and continuous insights. Companies would gain ongoing visibility into the state of the business, not just after closing the books—delivering unmatched insights to improve decisions and understanding of the business today and freeing CFOs to focus on guiding the business into the future.

The reality of it sounded so far away when I first heard this vision two years ago. But, I’m excited to announce that the future is here—2020 Release 4 makes multiple components of that vision a reality.

Introducing Sage Intacct Intelligent GL

Sage Intacct Intelligent GL, available only from Sage Intacct, uses automation and the power of AI to free your team from manual effort and arm you with trusted and actionable insights so that you can be a strategic leader to your business.

Continuous accounting

Continuous accounting uses technology to completely automate routine accounting activities, with the ultimate goal of eliminating the close. So, your books are always ready for reporting. To achieve continuous accounting, you must eliminate manual entry, automate reconciliations and consolidations, and automatically adjust as new data comes in.

Eliminate manual entry

To ensure your financial information is always up-to-date, you want to eliminate manual data entry and capture data in real time. Our open APIs and prebuilt connector to Salesforce already go a long way to achieving this. Now Release 4 delivers two new capabilities to continuously capture data for service and nonprofit organizations.

• Sage Intelligent Time – Sage Intelligent Time is the first artificial intelligence (AI) powered application built directly into the Sage Intacct platform. It provides continuous, timely, and more accurate insights to better manage billable time in services-based businesses. Using an AI-powered personal time assistant, it enables service professionals to complete their timesheets more quickly and accurately by automatically reconstructing their workday—helping to ensure all billable time is captured to reduce revenue leakage, improve project profitability, and increase revenues.
• Advanced CRM Integration for Nonprofits – Sage Intacct Advanced CRM Integration for Nonprofits allows for seamless integration between Sage Intacct and Salesforce for a variety of nonprofit fundraising workflows. It provides you with timely visibility to assess progress toward achieving your mission, while potentially saving hours of time rekeying data each month.

Automate reconciliations and consolidations

To “soft close” daily, you want to automate reconciliations and financial consolidations so you know that your numbers are accurate and complete. Previously released functionality, such as bank feeds, automated reconciliations, and our multi-entity capabilities, make it easy to perform these activities daily so your books are always reconciled and consolidated.

Automatically adjust as new data come in

As new data comes in, you want to automatically adjust for it so that your data is always as accurate as possible. For instance, Dynamic Allocations, released last year, can be set up to run and adjust automatically with no manual intervention.

Continuous trust

Continuous trust means that your books are always accurate and compliant by using technology to test and validate the data flowing through the system.

Outlier Detection for General Ledger, new in Release 4 and only available from Sage Intacct, uses machine learning to flag anomalies in journal entries during the approval process, shifting review from a time-consuming, manual, error-prone experience to an automatic, continuous, and proactive one. Transactions are compared to history to identify potential for error, and the reason a transaction is flagged is provided for transparency. Instead of reviewing everything, you focus on the entries that pose the most risk.

Continuous insights

With your data always up-to-date and validated, you get real-time, actionable insights directly from your system of intelligence.

Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer, new in Release 4, is a visual, multi-dimensional analytics tool. With data visualization, you get clear, understandable insights at-a-glance. You can explore your data for more insights. And, you turn insights into action with visual storytelling and narration. It’s an easy and intuitive tool that eliminates the need for spreadsheet “gymnastics” to get your insights. So, you get timely, accurate insights and more time for analysis, allowing you to transform your business strategy with data-driven decisions. Sage Intacct makes it easy to get started with your analysis with over 200 prebuilt, interactive visuals.

To learn more

Watch for other blogs in the 2020 Release 4 Highlights series, including deeper industry functionality and upcoming blogs on Salesforce integration for nonprofits and visual analytics.

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 or attend one of our daily coffee break demos.

If you’re already a Sage Intacct customer, you can learn more in the Sage Intacct 2020 Release 4 release notes within Sage Intacct.