Transforming businesses: a look at Sage Intacct release highlights from 2021

We’re pleased to announce the arrival of Sage Intacct 2021 Release 4. The release arrived at the same time as Sage Transform, our annual customer event, where we recapped many of the product highlights from the last year.

At Transform, company leaders shared how their finance teams knocked down barriers and empowered their teams with Sage Intacct’s cloud financial management software. Dan Miller, EVP of Sage Intacct, used his keynote address to highlight how Sage is focused on helping small and medium-sized businesses do more than just survive. Instead, Sage is empowering them to thrive despite challenging times. Using Sage Intacct empowers finance teams by automating their low-level and repetitive tasks, freeing time for users to make impactful business decisions.

“This past year, Sage has been at the forefront of helping customers navigate the business challenges caused by the pandemic. We’ve seen digital transformation efforts accelerated as companies focus on returning to pre-pandemic growth levels,” said Miller. “Sage continues to expand the capabilities of Sage Intacct and the benefits provided by the digital network to streamline processes and improve business insights. This helps our customers focus more time on their company’s mission and making a difference in the communities they live and work in.”

During the keynote, Sage leaders focused on three ways that Sage Intacct helps finance leaders: owning their time, growing their way, and empowering their teams. Coming out of Sage Transform, it’s a good time to look back not just at Sage Intacct Release 4, but also at the significant investments that we’ve made throughout 2021 for our customers to obtain these key benefits.

Own Your Time

Sage Intacct enables leaders to “own their time” by streamlining workflows – using automation to eliminate repetitive, manual steps so they can dedicate more time to higher-value work. For example, earlier this year, we introduced General Ledger Outlier Detection. By implementing AI and machine learning, Sage Intacct proactively and continuously reviews entries, reducing manual corrections and addressing outliers in real-time, allowing teams to gain a deeper review of their entries and increase accuracy while dedicating their time to what is most important.

Within the past year, Sage Intacct also launched Sage Intelligent Time, which revolutionizes time entry for professional service firms. With accurate, real-time time entry, finance and operations teams can increase revenue, price more accurately, streamline billing, and manage resources more effectively. The time assistant gets smarter with every review, continuously increasing in accuracy and therefore saving professionals more and more time. Users have access to continuous insights, allowing them to close on time, bill on time, and let project managers make financially minded decisions about their projects.

In addition, Sage Intacct expanded its seamless payments experience to more U.S. customers. With Sage Intacct Vendor Payments powered by CSI, businesses can streamline and automate their vendor payment process. The new offering enables customers to pay vendors quickly, speed up reconciliations, and offer more payment methods – all while reducing payment transaction costs. By no longer having to manually print and mail checks, companies can potentially save 25 percent or more per payment. In Release 4, we streamlined the setup for organizations with multiple entities. Who knew that owning your time could also equate to saving so much money?

Grow Your Way

Sage Intacct provides users the product breadth and depth to deliver the capabilities their organizations need to thrive and grow by continuing to deliver deeper, vertical-specific product capabilities. We enable and promote best practices with pre-configured workflows, reports, and dashboards. For example, in the past few releases, we covered additional billing use cases such as committed usage billing, prorated billing, and more in Contracts and Billing. The new functionalities give additional insight with flexible invoice generation, as well as pre-built reports within our Interactive Custom Report Writer.

We’re also moving beyond financials and providing capabilities to manage operational processes. For example, we’ve made enhancements to manage the process of tracking and managing inventory in transit between warehouses. We’ve also enhanced Intacct so you have greater flexibility and visibility into inventory available quantity totals. You have flexible calculation options to include in transit or on order inventory in quantity available totals, as well as visibility into inventory quantity available amounts at order entry time. Also, when you view the item details, you can see quantity available amounts at the item level and by warehouse.

For organizations that have or aim to have operations around the world, compliance with tax legislation across all entities is critical. Sage Intacct Multi-tax, simplifies compliance with tax requirements by delivering end-to-end, out-of-the-box tax automation capabilities across 4 continents while delivering a flexible tax engine to maintain compliance with the requirements of other local tax authorities.

Empower Your Team

To succeed as strategic leaders within their company, finance leaders need the tools to connect, collaborate, and make decisions with individuals across their organization. Sage Intacct empowers finance teams by arming them with deep insights, helping them execute critical tasks, and meeting users where they are and how they work.

Starting with a strong core is the first step—you need your standard reports, graphics, and analysis. Sage Intacct offers that strong core—but it also offers many more tools for diving deeper. To empower finance leaders, we introduced Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer. Interactive Visual Explorer allows users to explore financial data using a multi-angle, multi-dimensional graphical tool. With data visualization, it creates clear and easily understandable insights. You can immediately look to the future with predictive analytics to identify trend lines, clusters, forecasts, reference lines, and outliers. Teams can turn these insights into action with visual storytelling and narration. Best of all, it’s turnkey and works directly in real time on your Sage Intacct financial data, so you don’t need specialized skills or IT to start exploring your data.

Sage Intacct also empowers your team by providing capabilities that help you align and manage the execution of key processes. One example of this is in checklists. Working checklists enable users to effectively manage and track their internal processes. If desired, policies and processes can be managed consistently across the teams and entities. Tasks can be broken down from high-level to granular assignments, with increased process visibility because you can check status with just a couple of clicks and identify bottlenecks. This is all filterable on a dashboard and ready-made for executive reporting. Checklists allow you to manage processes efficiently – with capabilities such as the ability to assign people and set dates and dependencies, you know who’s doing what and can ensure that steps are followed consistently. Through this documentation of tasks, you are also increasing your auditability. Best of all, it’s part of your core financials, so it doesn’t cost extra. You can just set it up and start getting the benefits right away.

Sage Intacct also continues to support companies and users working the way they want to work with Sage Intacct Planning (formerly named Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning). Throughout the year, we continued to focus on what sets Sage Intacct Planning apart from other FP&A software solutions: user experience, integration, and discoverability. Improvements to company and user management, modelling, and populating and utilizing data imported from Sage Intacct provide greater accessibility and visibility to finance and business users.

This is just scratching the surface of how Sage Intacct provides tools to empower your team. With other developments in the past year such as Interactive Report Viewer, Interactive Custom Report Writer, and Data Delivery Services, our tools promote greater financial reporting accuracy and proactively provide leaders interactive analysis and insights that can be translated into action.

Looking ahead

These highlights are only a few of the many new features and enhancements for Sage Intacct in our newest releases. From richer reporting and analytics capabilities and improved AI capabilities in GL Outlier Detection that can identify anomalous journal entries to streamlined vendor payments, improvements in 2021 have been all about owning your time, growing your way, and empowering your team. As we move on to 2022, look forward to more automation, machine learning, and cross-industry functionality that will deliver time savings, increase trust and accuracy, and provide new insights for your organization.

If you are a current Sage Intacct customer and want to learn more about our latest update, check out our Release 4 highlights in the release notes available within the system. if you’re in the market or curious about exploring a new financial management software solution, attend one of our daily coffee break demos.