Sage Intacct: Financial Management for Growing Firms

Most companies would agree that effectively managing finances is critical for sustainable growth.

Sage Intacct is an advanced financial management platform built to empower expanding businesses with scalable and automated capabilities to gain control over finances.

In this review, we will explore Sage Intacct's core financials, analytics, automation, and scalability features that growing enterprises need to optimize financial operations.

Introduction to Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is a powerful cloud-based financial management software designed for growing businesses. It provides real-time visibility into finances and automated workflows to streamline processes.

Overview of Sage Intacct's Capabilities

Sage Intacct offers robust core financial capabilities including:

• General ledger with multi-dimensional chart of accounts
• Accounts payable automation and workflow
• Accounts receivable management
• Flexible, multi-dimensional reporting

It's built to scale with business growth and supports complex financial processes without extensive IT involvement.

Key Benefits for Growing Businesses

Sage Intacct provides essential benefits for high-growth companies such as:

• Real-time financial insights for better decision making
• Ability to quickly scale across entities and locations
• Flexibility to handle changing business needs
• Seamless integration with other business applications

These capabilities make Sage Intacct well-suited for businesses experiencing rapid growth.

Implementation and Onboarding

Sage Intacct and its partners provide resources to smooth the transition:

• Dedicated customer success manager for onboarding
• Online training videos and courses
• Pre-built templates to configure workflows

These facilitate change management when adopting Sage Intacct.

Suitability for Specific Industries

Sage Intacct offers industry-specific editions for:

• Software and SaaS
• Healthcare
• Nonprofit
• Professional services

These have pre-configurations to accelerate adoption in each industry.

Core Financial Management Capabilities

Sage Intacct provides robust core financial management capabilities to help growing businesses streamline processes and gain real-time visibility into financial data.

General Ledger and Multi-Entity Management

Sage Intacct offers automated journal entries and a flexible, dimension-based chart of accounts that adapts as your business grows. The system provides real-time reporting across multiple entities and locations, making it easy to view consolidated financials. Sage Intacct also supports complex intercompany transactions across business units.

Accounts Payable Workflow Automation

With Sage Intacct, you can streamline the entire AP process from purchase to payment. Key features include:

• Paperless invoice processing with optical character recognition
• Flexible approval workflows to match your business needs
• Integration with major credit cards and bank accounts
• Automated payment processing to simplify payables

Accounts Receivable and Billing

Sage Intacct provides the AR capabilities growing businesses need, including:

• Recurring invoices and automated subscription billing
• Flexible credit terms and cash management
• Revenue recognition tools to comply with accounting standards
• Reporting to gain insights into customer billing and payments

Cash Management and Reconciliation

Sage Intacct can help you better manage liquidity with features like:

• Daily bank reconciliation and transaction matching
• Cash flow analysis and forecasting
• Cash management reports to optimize liquidity
• Bank account management and fraud detection

With its robust core financials system, Sage Intacct provides the foundation growing businesses need to streamline processes and gain insights.

Analytics and Reporting

Sage Intacct provides robust analytics and reporting capabilities to give businesses real-time visibility into financial and operational data for better decision making.

Interactive Dashboards

Dashboards in Sage Intacct allow finance teams to monitor key metrics and quickly analyze trends through interactive charts, graphs, and visualizations. Users can create customized dashboards with drag-and-drop widgets to track critical KPIs. Drill-down functionality enables deeper analysis into the numbers.

Report Writer and Report Designer

The Sage Intacct Report Writer provides a user-friendly interface for building custom reports without IT assistance. Users can select dimensions like departments, locations, projects etc. and drag-and-drop to include data fields in reports. Formatting options include charts, subtotals, and more. Reports can be scheduled, saved, shared and exported. The Report Designer offers added customization for power users.

Budgeting and Forecasting

Sage Intacct's project-based budgeting helps businesses allocate resources more efficiently. What-if scenario analysis enables modeling different assumptions. Driver-based forecasting uses metrics like revenue growth rate to predict future performance. Waterfall visibility quickly highlights budget vs actual variances. Together these capabilities improve planning and forecast accuracy.

Scorecards and KPIs

Sage Intacct allows organizations to define and track key metrics across the business through interactive scorecards. Users can monitor KPIs like revenue, profitability, cash flow etc. in a centralized dashboard to align operational activities with financial goals and objectives for the company. Conditional formatting and trend graphs help quickly identify risks and opportunities.

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Automation for Finance Teams

Intacct provides automation capabilities to streamline financial processes and boost team productivity.

Transaction Automation

Intacct has pre-built integrations and templates to automate data flows from other systems, reducing manual data entry for transactions. Users can configure rules to categorize transactions, allocate costs, send notifications, and more based on specific criteria.

Paperless Workflows

Digital workflows in Intacct eliminate paper-based bottlenecks. Features include:

• Approval workflows to route invoices, expenses, and other documents for digital sign-offs
• Ability to attach images and files directly to transactions
• Digital signature capture for faster, paperless process

Automating these workflows improves visibility, controls, and efficiency.

AI-Powered Assistant

Intacct's AI assistant monitors transactions and workflows to identify process bottlenecks and improvement opportunities. It provides proactive recommendations to streamline financial operations.

The assistant uses machine learning to continuously analyze data and workflows over time to surface automation suggestions personalized to the organization. This helps finance teams work smarter.

Rule-Based Notifications

Users can set up event-driven alerts and notifications in Intacct. As soon as a specified condition is met (e.g. invoice overdue, budget exceeded), the system automatically triggers notifications to the right stakeholders.

Configurable rules for notifications enable real-time visibility into financial data and processes. This helps teams take quick, informed action when needed.

With robust automation capabilities above and more, Intacct empowers finance teams to reduce manual work and operate more efficiently.

Scalability for Business Growth

Sage Intacct is designed to scale with growing businesses. As companies expand, Sage Intacct offers modules and capabilities to meet more complex needs over time.

Multiple Reporting Currencies

Sage Intacct enables companies to report in virtually any global currency at both the local and consolidated level. This allows finance teams to standardize reporting across locations. Key features include:

• Report in 100+ currencies with real-time exchange rates
• Set up multiple reporting books per entity
• Automate currency conversions and eliminate manual adjustments

By supporting multiple currencies, Sage Intacct removes a key barrier to expanding globally.

Global Consolidations

For multi-entity organizations, Sage Intacct automates the consolidation process including:

• Handling different accounting standards across entities
• Managing intercompany transactions and eliminations
• Consolidating results across global locations
• Analyzing performance by region, business unit, product line etc.

These tools simplify consolidations and provide real-time visibility into results across the business.

Contract and Project Accounting

For project-based businesses, Sage Intacct has advanced capabilities for:

• Contract billing rules, milestones and revenue recognition
• Project costing and WIP accounting
• Billing schedules, invoicing and unbilled AR
• Time and expense tracking

These features are critical for managing project profitability and recognizing revenue accurately.

Add-On Marketplace

Sage Intacct offers an extensive marketplace of third-party apps that extend functionality. Popular add-ons cover areas like:

• Advanced budgeting and forecasting
• Warehouse management
• Fixed assets
• Payroll
• Sales compensation

So companies can easily customize Sage Intacct to support their growth needs over time.

Conclusion and Summary

Sage Intacct is well-positioned as a scalable cloud financial system to meet the growing needs of small and mid-sized businesses.

Key Takeaways

• Sage Intacct provides robust core financial capabilities for accounting and finance. Features like automatic revenue recognition, project accounting, and dimensions provide strong financial controls.

• The reporting engine and dashboards enable real-time visibility into financial and operational metrics for data-driven decision making.

• Workflow automation and seamless integrations with other business applications boost productivity.

• The cloud delivery model and multi-dimensional scalability allow the system to rapidly adapt as business needs change.

Best-Fit Organizations

The advanced capabilities and flexibility of Sage Intacct suit fast-growing companies that need to scale operations rapidly. Typical profiles include:

• High-tech manufacturers
• Software/SaaS providers
• Engineering and construction firms
• Advertising agencies
• Retailers

For these industries, Sage Intacct delivers the financial rigor and agility to power growth.

Competitor Comparison

Compared to NetSuite and Microsoft Dynamics GP, Sage Intacct offers easier upgrades, faster implementation, and lower total cost of ownership. It matches NetSuite's functionality but is more affordable and configurable for changing business needs.

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