What is new in Sage Intacct Release 4?

Sage Intacct just launched their latest version—Sage Intacct 2018 Release 4.

Complexity in our modern world is everywhere. Some might argue that Accounting and Finance have more than their fair share of it. We love simplicity, but we don’t want to be restricted. Sage Intacct was built to take the hard-to-do nature of accounting and make it simple. Over time, we’ve added capabilities to make it comprehensive, auditable and scalable.

Complexity can keep you from focusing on more important things, such as:

• Planning future growth
• Reporting on your business in real-time
• Getting an accurate picture of profitability
• Complying with regulations
• Managing the operations of your business

Read on to learn how Release 4 provides more simplicity in your close, operational, and day to day activities so that you can focus on the important, strategic decisions that help grow your business.

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning

To achieve business goals, you need financial budgeting and planning that’s effective, collaborative, and strategic. Spreadsheets work great when your business is small and uncomplicated. But, as you grow, so do your needs for collaboration, security, and scenario planning. Unfortunately, until now most budgeting and planning solutions have been built to handle the needs of large companies. Budgeting and planning systems built for larger companies require big company budgets and resources to deploy, integrate, and maintain. This makes them unsuitable small to midsize organizations.

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning is a modern cloud solution that was built for small to midsize businesses. It’s powerful, yet easy to use and deploy. Here are some of the benefits:

• Fast deployment – Use your chart of accounts, dimensions, and actuals from Sage Intacct to get up and running in a few days.
• Collaboration across the organization – Easily work with department heads on a common version of the budget and securely share departmental budgets and details.
• Seamless workflow with financials – Get actuals from your financials into your budgets and plans with just a few clicks.

Interactive Custom Report Writer

Operational reporting allows you to manage everyday needs from tactical execution to strategic decision making. For instance, you might need to pull a list of invoices for a customer or track employee time on projects. Release 4 introduces the new Interactive Custom Report Writer, a modern visual reporting tool, that delivers ease and speed of report creation, an enhanced user experience, and the power to address complex reporting needs.

• You can build basic reports quickly and easily with live report data, hierarchical field selection, drag and drop, and automated formatting of subtotals. Data is personalized to your visibility and permissions.
• The modern look and feel will please your users. The reports are easier to consume with aggregated and summarized information and conditional formatting to draw attention to important data. Interactivity enables users to drill, pivot, filter, sort, and expand for more precise answers to their business questions.
• You have new levels of power to address complex needs with advanced features such as calculated columns with calendar and math functions, conditional logic with case and if statements, rolling sums and aggregations, and pivot tables.

Dynamic Allocations

Allocating indirect revenue and expenditures, such as facilities or shared services, allows you to get a more accurate understanding of the performance of departments, products, projects, or other key dimensions of your business. Sage Intacct has long had transactional allocations that allow you to spread payments, receivables, or general ledger transactions as you’re entering them. But, if you wanted to spread the amounts after the transaction was already complete, you had to gather the amounts to be spread and create an often-lengthy journal entry. These calculations were often done in spreadsheets outside of Sage Intacct, making it challenging to go back and understand the initial amounts and the method used if the backup data wasn’t attached.

With Release 4, you can generate allocations based on cumulative activity. With the new Dynamic Allocations module, you set up the source pool, basis (how you want to allocate), and the target once. Then for every period after, you just press a button to dynamically generate them. They’re consistently processed every time, right inside of Sage Intacct. And, a verification page provides snapshots of the before and after for transparency into how the allocations were processed and their impact. So, you save time on your close activities, reduce errors, and streamline your audits.

Revenue Recognition for Nonprofits

Nonprofits with revenue streams that cross over year-end or advance payments need to be mindful of the ASU 2018-18 accounting standard changes pertaining to revenue recognition. For example:

• Conditional grants – You need to plan how to track deferred vs. recognized revenue as conditions are met.
• Events, tuitions or dues that cross fiscal years – You need to state your deferred vs recognized revenue at year end.

Some nonprofits are actively trying to change their policies on collecting revenue to avoid dealing with the new standard because it is viewed as cumbersome. For example, they structure the sale of memberships or tuition so that they are only for the current year. But that might not be optimal for operations. Other organizations plan to track everything in external spreadsheets and then convert them into large year-end journal entries. This decreases your efficiency and increases the risk of error. It may also result in added time and increased cost during the audit process.

Release 4 introduces Nonprofit Revenue Recognition. The new module automates revenue recognition for the different revenue streams you receive and centralizes tracking inside your accounting system. You can automate your revenue recognition inside of Sage Intacct without the need for external spreadsheets. You can collect revenue up front across fiscal years without the fear of extra work. Coupled with Grant Tracking and Billing, you can track progress on conditions required for recognition of your grants. Consistent treatment of revenues by source will reduce errors. And with everything documented in one place, reporting to management, the board, and auditors is dramatically simpler.