A Better Way to Manage Family Office Accounting | A Look at Sage Intacct

Before we dive in, just want to give a quick brief overview of EisnerAmper. We are a top 20 accounting firm in the United States, and we currently have over 440 partners with 4,500 employees. We are what is known as a value added reseller for Sage Intacct, so we help companies evaluate, implement, and provide ongoing support for Sage Intacct. We're also one of the leading Sage Intacct partners of over two decades of implementation of experience and family offices are a strong focus for us in Sage Intacct as a whole, but they're currently being over 1700 family offices on the platform. Sage Intacct has purposely built to handle the complexities of family offices through multi-entity structures, complex investment tracking, giving you advanced reporting, and also scalability. And with that I'll now turn it over to Emily to walk through some common accounting challenges.

Emily Madere:Hey Gage, thank you so much for that. Hey everybody, like Gage said, my name is Emily Madere and I am really excited to share what Sage has provided a lot of information on family offices. Like Gage mentioned, there's over 1700 folks on Intacct, so they've done extensive research into the challenges facing family offices. Karen and I have done a lot of research on what challenges are facing our family office clients and we kind of compiled them into four buckets. So the first one I'll talk about is entity and asset complexity spike. So at least with the family offices that Karen and I are currently working with and the ones that we've already transitioned to, Sage Intacct, they have a lot of different entities and if the family office is using a solution like QuickBooks, then they're logging in and out of those different entities and that's creating a lot of bottlenecks for them in complex consolidations reporting that they have to do and really extending their month end close cycles.

Another challenge that we're seeing is just regulatory validity and transparency mandates. So of course there's a lot of tax laws that went into effect and then what we're seeing when we're talking to our different family offices clients is they have to be audit ready all the time. So just having a system that can help them stay audit compliant and helping them have a complete audit trail is important as well as having a system that is easy for their CPAs to go in and audit is kind of a priority for them. A surge in targeted cyber attacks is nothing new to the family office space as well as to a lot of our other clients, but wire fraud, ransomware and data theft are something that family offices definitely need to focus on and they're being targeted by these specific groups. This is a problem because there may be limited IT resources in the family office or their system is hosted on their premise system and not in the cloud. Really lacking that security when it comes to financial management.

And the last one I'll talk about is legacy processes versus digital first operations. So a lot of the times we'll see family offices, they're adding on more entities and they're just keeping status quo. They're using QuickBooks. They're like, okay, we'll get another entity in here. And then they look up and they have over 200 entities in QuickBooks and they don't really realize the time that they're spending on these legacy processes within their legacy system. Typically, a lot of them are still using paper-based processes, there's silo GLs, there's a lot of spreadsheets in their environment. This is a problem, especially if the family wants to go to a digital first approach and the system is kind of holding you back.

So a little bit about Sage Intacct and kind of maybe why family offices tend to lean towards Intacct. So Intacct is a best in class accounting solution, so it has the ability to connect into different solutions. Our next slide, we'll talk a little bit more about that. Intacct is gap compliant and is the only financial management solution that is endorsed by the A-I-C-P-A. Its strength is really in that powerful reporting. So Intacct has multi entity structure as well as multicurrency consolidations. It's in the cloud so there's no need to host it on your servers. And then if we have time today, Karen has prepared some talking points on how Sage Intacct is using ai, but I think it's important to note AI is a big buzzword right now and Intacct has been doing AI for a very long time, so this is nothing that they're new to.

So this slide really talks to you how Sage Intacct is best in class and how you have the ability to connect in different systems into Intacct and have an integrative ERP. So there was actually this really interesting article when I was doing research for this webinar on Forbes and Forbes named, I think it was in each category of finance and family offices. They named their favorite system. So a lot of these were taken from that article as well as what our current family offices clients are using. But Intacct can integrate these systems like a DP add, apar bill.com into Intacct. So there's really no manual work that you have to do double entry into two systems. That's one of Intacct strengths.

And then the last slide before I hand it off to Karen is I've already mentioned Sage Intacct is the only financial management provider that is endorsed by the A-I-C-P-A, but then these other two logos you see on the screen here, these are for G two and trust Radius and that's what we like to call the Amazon reviews of software and that's where end users can go out and they can put good reviews, bad reviews, somewhere in the middle reviews on specific softwares and year over year Intacct is ranked number one in customer satisfaction and buyer's choice amongst these two sites. And then once you get the PowerPoints, we've linked the most recent reports at the bottom. So you can go take a look and see how Sage Intacct stands up against its competitors.

Karen Penhallegon:Alright, thanks Emily for that great overview. I am going to actually spend some time though digging into what actually makes Intacct unique in the marketplace and some of the features that make it really great for family offices. We're going to try to spend most of our time though actually looking in Intacct, so we'll actually show you some of these functionalities and different things within the software so you can get a real feel for what it would look like for your team. But everything I think starts with what I like to call Intacct’s-multi-everything-architecture. So Intacct was created over 25 years ago now by finance professionals because they were not getting what they needed out of the existing solutions in the marketplace and some of their principles were cloud first, so they wanted to be always a true cloud solution. But then the other big pain point they all had was multi-entity. And so the ability to keep all of your entities in a single environment was really important. So that is really the core to what Intacct does. It has the ability to automate a lot of entity functionality. So if you have inter entity transactions, consolidated reporting security by entity and many other things, we're going to talk about those as well during the demo. All of that just comes built into Intacct natively.

Moving on to multi-book. So most every single accounting system out there has a book, right? That's the core of what accounting is, but Intacct actually has the ability for you to have an unlimited number of books to track in your solution. So natively out of the box you can turn on an accrual, cash gap and tax books, those are just check boxes. But then you can also create as many user defined books as you want. So any way that you need to maybe report a little bit differently or if you need to break out the investments in a different way, you can easily do that with these user defined books. We often see that's being handled in Excel spreadsheets today. It's a very manual process that's done after the financial reporting. We can actually incorporate that right into the solution for you. The last on here I think is really intact superpower and that is the ability to be multidimensional.

So a dimension really, if you're familiar to QuickBooks, it's like a class, but it's even better. It's a class on steroids, but it's really just a tag or a piece of information that you're adding to your transaction. So we're going to see some examples of those in just a minute, but it allows you to then take those dimensions, we're going to put them into things like hierarchies or we can group them together in different ways and add that into the reporting. Now this isn't totally unique to Intacct, but the way that these dimensions are built in from day one is unique. And so Intacct has a real focus on these dimensions being very easy to use. It's not something that you have to know how to create code for to go create a new dimension. They're really built into the system and baked into all the reporting from day one.

Alright, let's see some examples of dimensions. And so this is just some of the ones that we see. So the dimensions you're seeing here are the standard and the common dimensions that we see quite often. And Intacct, we can rename our dimensions. What you're seeing in the darker boxes is actually the intact name of what it calls it, but then what we often see it actually used for in the lighter boxes, and I like to divide these into three categories as you see the where of a transaction, the what and the who of the transaction. So the where primarily usually is entity, that's the number one thing. We must have a balance set of books by entity, so we have to have an entity related to it. You can also have locations that are children of entities or very commonly. The other common one is department. So you can see me break down any kind of department structure that you might have. We'll see some examples of that as well in the solution we get in just a minute.

Moving on to that middle box, what these tend to be a little more flexible. So the class dimension is sort of a little bit of a wild card. We have a lot of clients that use this to track individual investments, so that's a pretty common strategy, but there's a lot of different ways you can use this depending on the type of entities that your client has. Are they running operational clients or is it truly more of an investment structure? So we can track all sorts of different things here. Also, if they have project or job based information, we can track projects and jobs as well. And then last but not least, the who of a transaction. Every transaction is usually going to have somebody related to it, whether it's a specific family member, if you're breaking things down in that way or customers or clients or everyone has vendors, so everyone has someone they have to pay and so the vendors also would be a dimension. Alright. All right. Before we jump into the demo agenda, are there any questions out there that we need to pause for?

Gage Ulrich:Yes, we do have a few questions. Thank you. So first for Emily, can Intacct be linked to Addepar investment consolidator.

Karen Penhallegon:Are you muted? Emily? We can't hear you.

Emily Madere:I muted myself. Yes, Intacct can be connected to Adeppar, it's through a connector called Knowledger, but a connection does exist.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you Emily. Also, the next question, does SAGE allow for the use of different accounts and reporting based on client preferences?

Karen Penhallegon:So I can maybe take that one. We may need to have a little bit of a deeper conversation about that. Yes, you can certainly create any chart of accounts, any dimension structure that you want. There's a few different ways that can be arranged, so it can be a little bit complex. We'd want to dig into what you're looking to accomplish. I think with that, so it sounds like maybe you're a multifamily office, which would be a little bit of a different structure than we would put a single family office into. It would get complicated, but we can have separate environments that still have all of us single families entities within them, and then the multifamilies can be in their own separate environments as well.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you, Karen. Also next, can QuickBooks data be imported into Intacct and what is the approximate cost?

Karen Penhallegon:That's a tough one in a couple of ways. So can QuickBooks data come into Intacct? Yes, it's not necessarily a one-to-one because there may be some changes you're going to make to your structure of your charter accounts and dimensions, right? So there's usually some mapping that you would need to do before you bring it into Intacct. QuickBooks is our most common conversion, so we do see a lot of QuickBooks data and it's no problem to get that information into Intacct for sure. As far as cost, that one varies because it depends a lot on how much do you want to bring over in what level of detail, how much data do you have, how many things do you have to map? So there's a lot of different factors into that. What I would probably say from a cost standpoint, if we would want to talk with you one-on-one to evaluate what you're looking, how much you're looking to bring over from a data conversion, we have a data team that can help with that, that will do data conversions for us. A lot of our clients though, honestly do it themselves, so it's not something that you have to have us do. You can actually do your historical data conversion yourself if you choose.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you. And if clients want to use different accounts in their chart of accounts, is there a way to consolidate the accounts through mapping for family office consolidated views and reporting?

Karen Penhallegon:Yeah, there's a few different ways you can do that. Yes, it depends again on the structure that we would set up. So we don't want to talk about the specific scenario, but there are ways to rearrange the accounts and the account structure just in a financial report standpoint. So you can have different financial reports for different purposes or you can truly, if you have separate entities, separate complete instances of Intacct, you can also consolidate those. There's a mapping process that goes through.

Emily Madere:Thank you Karen andGage. I think maybe some of these questions can be answered in the demo. So Karen, if you don't mind showing us Intacct.

Karen Penhallegon:Yeah, absolutely. So before I hop in, I'm just going to give a quick overview of what we're going to talk about for the next 30, 40 minutes or so. I'm going to start out with just a reporting overview. I think that's a really critical part of Intacct is how the reporting works. I think that's missing for a lot of people with think QuickBooks moving then through multi-entity both from a transactional standpoint and a consolidation standpoint. There's a couple of different nuances there that we'll definitely go through and talk about how can Intacct help automate a lot of those processes. Then if we still have time, I'd like to show a couple of the different AI features. I also have some slides in here so if we do run out of time toward the end, we can leave you with the slides at least, but I'd love to actually show you some of the automation and AI that has been built into Intacct. So on that note, let me actually pull up and share my screen with Intacct. Give me just a moment here to get it shared and I'm going to ask Emily or Gage if you could confirm when my screen is sharing.

Emily Madere:I can see it.

Karen Penhallegon:Wonderful, thank you. Alright. All right. So I mentioned I kind of want to start out just with a little bit of an overview of some of the different ways that Sage Intacct can do reporting and some of the complexities there that can be simplified. So this is a Sage Intacct dashboard. Always like to start out with a nice overview dashboard. Intacct can have an unlimited number of dashboards. It comes with eight or nine out of the box dashboards. You can start with. You can also build your own. This is sort of a little custom dashboard I put together really just using some of the standard features of Intacct, but to give you a flavor of all the different sorts of types of reporting that you can have within the system. A few different pieces and key components here that I want to walk through and then we'll hop back and actually do some drilling into some of the transactions.

So across the top here when I'm navigating around, you're going to see me using these bookmarks over here on the right hand side. I've got some of my favorite places bookmarked in the system. There's a lot more functionality than that, but we probably don't want to always go through this entire dashboard or application menu to get to everything. So I'm just going to use the shortcuts that I have pre-built in. But keep in mind these shortcuts are not the only things that the system can do. I'm just using that so you don't have to go through the big menu every single time. I'm also going to be logged in as a sage in tech administrator today, but what I want everyone to keep in mind is that you can actually set up and we will help you set up roles for each user. And if you're on QuickBooks today, these are quite different than kind of the QuickBooks built-in roles.

They're very granular. We're able to go down to specific tasks, specific things you can do on a task. So can you add vendors? Can you edit vendors? Can you delete them? Only view them. We're able to control that for every single user. So it means that we can actually send this out to a lot more people and make these available to a lot more people. Some of our family offices actually have family members that log in to look at the dashboards. Sometimes we keep it a little closer than that and it's just finance team members, but we can actually extend Intacct out quite a way without endangering and allowing people to do things that they shouldn't do or see things they shouldn't see.

All right, moving down into the dashboard itself, I've got a few different sort of widgets on this dashboard to talk through and I'm using some of the different dimensions of Intacct right within this widget. You see here, I'll start with just what I like to call the performance card widgets. Over here. They're little KPIs or quick pieces of information that you might want to keep your finger on. I have revenue expenses very high level. This could be though non-financial data, maybe it's statistical account that you're watching and keeping an eye on. Maybe it's a calculation that you're actually wanting to keep an eye on any sort of calculation or KPI can be put into these. Not only will they give you that number and you can do some formatting on those numbers as well. They're also going to give you the period of time that you're running it for.

I have these set to the current month, but that could be a quarter, a year, a week, whatever time period that you might want to pick and they'll do a comparison for you as well. We can do comparisons either to budget or to prior period. So you get the choice. Do you want to focus on a budget comparison or prior period? I'm using budget here and you can see these either in dollars or in percentages. Usually. The big thing I like to point out here is it's really more about giving you a clear indicator of what is going on. And so you can see I've got very clear arrows in my case. You can have smiley faces or thumb up, thumb down, but these are going to tell you, Hey, you're doing good, or maybe you need to look at something. So it gives you a very, very quick view.

Rather than maybe having to run a couple of reports, go do some math instead. I'm just seeing quickly I have a green arrow on my revenue, I'm over budget. Okay, great things are going well. So that's the idea of these. We want to take something that may have taken multiple steps before to go figure out to you. Just look on your dashboard and right away what the status is. Some other examples we can also create of course, charts and graphs. The system comes with 25 or 30 of these out of the box, including the two you're going to see right here. You can create your own as well. And these can also incorporate that dimensional data. So for example, I have an expense by department report or graph. So you can see here it's actually breaking down into my dimension, which is department and I can hover over these to see the amount.

I'm sorry it's a little bit small on the screen, but I can also click on show data and it will give me the dollars behind that as well and click back into it and I can also download these. So if you're wanting to pull this out very quickly, maybe drop it into a PowerPoint or some other presentation, you can quickly get a copy of it. A nice high quality image straight out of this dashboard here. I've had a couple of different examples of these graphs. There can be line graphs, columns, bars, et cetera. All those graphs you're used to in Excel are also available right here in Intacct.

And then last but definitely not least actually probably my favorite thing in Intacct is financial reporting. I mean that's really what this is at the end of the day. It's a financial tool, right? It's your accounting system or your ERP and so you really need to be able to at the end day get the financial reports out of it. I'm showing you some standard ones here, but Intacct’s financial reporter is really great. It comes with I think almost 40 standard financial reports out of the box, but you can also create an unlimited number yourself. These are some of the out of the box reports that I'm going to show you today, a couple of them. And then I also have a custom one a little bit later that I'll show you and we'll drill into that as well. But what you're seeing here is a profit and loss statement as well as a budget statement, a actual to budget, just some simple examples here for us, but you can use your imagination to think what these might could be.

I've got a fairly simple structure here. I just have three entities set up for the demo purposes, just so we don't have too many to look at a time, but you can actually see that across my columns here. I'm using that dimension of the entity to break out my profit and loss statement and it's automatically going to do a roll up for me here at the end. So didn't do anything special. This is just a standard report that you can get automatically all of your various entities and locations rolled up into a single amount. In a minute we'll talk about consolidations as well, which we can do the automated eliminations and consolidations added on to that functionality as well. So there's one kind of simple example of something by a dimension. I've got department down here as well. So if you're doing budgeting, whether it's by entity, department, employee, any sort of budgeting you might want to do, we can handle that.

And as you can see, Intacct can do not only budget to actuals, but I can do different types of variances and conditionally highlight those as well. So definitely important. Again, it's all about drawing your eye to what is important here. I can see right away my admin department, which probably should not have any revenue. I've got a big old red number on it because I've got revenue coded there. That's probably a clue that something is wrong and maybe it's a miscode or something is wrong that I've done in the system. I can go drill into that right from here to go see it.

Alright, now speaking of drill downs, everything you see here is also drill down capable, excuse me. So I can drill down into these performance cards. I can drill down into the charts and graphs to see the transactions behind here. I can drill down directly into the financial statement from here as well. Everything you see that's blue can be drilled down on and I can also open these up full screen as well. So if you see the little magnifying glass on any of the widgets, it allows me to run that report or graph the full screen and you may actually see a little bit more functionality built in. For example, I could actually expand some of these out a little bit more maybe I'm curious what's actually in utilities and facilities. I can expand that out and it will show you what's actually included down to the GL account level of that financial statement. So you choose the level of summary that you would want to see, but you can always drill down further into it or roll it back up again dynamically on the report. Now this is sort of a general chart of accounts, right? This can be customized and it would be to specific client's needs. So it's a little more generic here in this demo, but again, you can have whatever different accounts that you need in here and whatever different groupings, we can also customize those groupings as well.

Alright, let's drill maybe a little bit further. So we're at the financial report level. Let's actually drill down and see what happens when we go into one of the GL accounts. What it's going to do for me here is it's actually going to run the general ledger reports. This is your GL detail report. This is a report that I use all day every day. So something that we definitely see a lot of, but usually you're going to drill down to it from a transaction.

Emily Madere:Yes, does not work. Yeah, if you're showing the report, I can't see it.

Karen Penhallegon:Let me try to reshare because sometimes it does not like when I try to share multiple screens. Lemme try one more time. Sorry about that everyone. Thank you Emily for stopping me share again and I'm going to try again. Let me know when it's back up and I'm going to try clicking again.

Emily Madere:Okay, yeah, that worked. That worked.

Karen Penhallegon:Sorry about that guys.

Emily Madere:Yep.

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, so this is the general ledger report. Now that you can actually see it, it's going to be, like I said, probably primarily what I use when I'm doing some investigation or just drilling down. It's going to have every transaction from whatever you drilled into, whether it's a group of accounts or a single account like we see here. You could also customize what is shown in this report for you. So if you want different dimensions to appear or different information you can. From here though, I can keep drilling downs. I can see I've got a couple of bills right here. If I actually click into the dollar amount or the date either one, it will open up that actual bill. And so this is an example of an AP bill. We're going to see some more of these a little bit later as well when we talk about AP automation.

But here I've got just an example of a very high level AP bill At the top I can see some high level summary information on it. Is it paid? How much was it? If it was paid? I have a link to the payment method. If I scroll down just a little bit, I'll get into the kind of bill header information. Who is it paying, when was it due? I can also have attachments really on any transaction or any record in. So attachments on your vendors, on your bills, invoices, journal entries, anything you can think of. So you can attach your backup or in the case of ap, you can attach the actual AP bill from the vendor in here so you can have it as your backup. So you see here, if this is our bill will also see down in the bottom section of this that you can allocate this across multiple entities. So we're going to talk about multi entity in just a minute, right? But here's the first example of I'm actually able to allocate this bill out across multiple entities right here on this screen. That could be a multiple departments, entities, whatever you want to allocate it across. You don't have to enter separate bills for different entities in. We can do them all in one.

All right, we'll see more of this later. So I'm going to go ahead and close back out of here and head back to my dashboard. Okay, we're going to go ahead and move into the multi entity section of the demo now and the inner entity section I'm going to share go back to our PowerPoint again. While I'm doing that, are there any questions on reporting on gauge?

Gage Ulrich:Yes. So does Intacct make it easy to break categories by location? For instance, if you have five locations per entity, is there an easy breakdown option in reporting?

Karen Penhallegon:Yes, I want to dig into that a little bit more to make sure that I understand, but absolutely if you can have multiple locations per entity, I can show you, I've actually got that set up in that's demo so I can show you what that looks like and it's going to automatically roll those locations up into that entity for you. So you would code of course to your locations, you can run that same report we saw by entity by location. It'll split them all out for you in detail and then you will see both either the detail level or the top level.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you Karen, I also have another great question for you. Is there a job cost function to track cost by projects?

Karen Penhallegon:Absolutely. So yes, job or a project is a dimension that you can have an Intacct depending on the level of complexity of your job and project costing. Some people just need the ability to track regular expenses to that. We can do that. You can code AP bills, AR invoices, anything like that to a job, general entries, whatever you might want. We also can do more advanced functionality for project costing and billing if you need that. So time sheets, TNM, billing, all those sorts of things.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you. And can files be attached to a transaction by vendor master and other options?

Karen Penhallegon:Yes, I think we just saw that, but yes, you can attach things to the vendor as well as any transactions.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you Karen. I'll let you continue for now.

Karen Penhallegon:Alright, excellent. So I've got a couple of slides in here that I call them callback slides. So later if you want to download the presentation, this is just a little example of what we just talked about, so it's going to have a callback to remind you. We talked about when we're reporting, before I jump into multi entity inter entity, I wanted to spend just a couple of minutes talking about Intacct options that are available here and provide this chart for you because it depends on the level of consolidation functionality you need, which level of Intacct, which module you would need in Intacct. So what we just saw right now is Core Sage Intacct the ability to have multi entity to roll up those entities, all of that standard intact. If you need to consolidate and have automatic eliminations, essentially that would be the next level down, which is domestic consolidations.

So that'll actually take your entities, it'll create a consolidation book for you of those entities and post eliminations into a separate elimination entity for you. So it does it all automatically. It can do it overnight every single day if you want or on demand, you can set up a schedule for it and you'll always have consolidated financials with eliminations in that scenario. The third level down global consolidations is specifically for those who are operating in different base currencies. So if you have UK entities, entities in wherever, anywhere in the world that are working in different base currency, you can actually have currency consolidations as well as the standard eliminations that are available in domestic consolidations. And then that last one, advanced ownership is really for people with complex ownership. So if you have a lot of different partial ownership, a lot of multilevel consolidation, some of this we can accomplish just with the standard Intacct through grouping and hierarchies, but if it gets to a level great complexity, this does make it a lot easier. So it's something that we can offer as well.

Emily Madere:Okay. There was a question in the chat, so if you didn't hear, yes, Sage Intacct does support multiple currencies and can do the conversion and translation. Yes.

Karen Penhallegon:Yep, absolutely. We can do that. Alright, I'm going to try to share again and this time share the right thing so that you can see if I have any popups come in. Okay, so a couple of things I like to show specifically as far as inter entity transactions. So we have consolidations which you'll see a sort of process that runs and then you just report on it. But within an actual entity transaction like the AP bill we saw earlier, Intacct can actually create your due to and due from transactions for you. And so what I like to show here is actually this report you're seeing on the screen, this inner entity reconciliation report is a little customer report that we will build for clients very often if they have a number of entities and it gives you the ability to sort of check off my entity in balance.

So it's going to give you all of your due to and due from accounts by entity. So you're seeing here for example, for entity 100, here is what is due to and from both of the other two entities. Then I can look at these and easily tie the numbers out. So 100 and 200 relationship is currently in balance, which as long as you're using the automated enter entity, it should always remain that way. But you can also use this to easily see what if you want to make a manual elimination entry, you can see your manual entry here. Now let me show you this in action though. So we can actually create an enter entity transaction right now and I'll show you how it will impact those accounts. So let me come in here. I'm actually going to go over and do just a real simple transaction of funds transfer. So I'm going to be transferring money from one account to another. Okay, go ahead and create a new transfer here. And I'm going to say that entity 100 is going to transfer money to entity 300.

I need to backdate this that we can actually see it within our dashboard because our data here is old in our demo company. Let's make this maybe $250. You can have attachments. You'll see here other descriptions. I'm going to keep it simple and we're going to go ahead and just post this transfer and I'm going to head back to my dashboard, let that all refresh for me and we should then be able to drill down and actually see that transaction. So give it just a second here to load. Okay, so if you're noticing, you probably aren't paying as close attention as I was, but this transaction right here, that's a line here. So entity 100 due from 300 has gone from $500 to 750. So I can drill into this and actually see the transactions it defaults to the current month transactions. So December, 2018 and I can drill all the way back into the originating journal entry.

So this was a funds transfer, it came from cash management funds transfer. Here's the original journal entry that the system made for me. Pretty simple crediting cash in one debit and cash in the other, right? Pretty easy. Then automatically what's happening in the background, I have relationships set up between the entities that tells it, okay, if I have these two entities interact, here's their due to and due from accounts. And so you can see here what it's doing is creating the balancing entries with a due from on one hundred's books and a due to on three hundred's books. So didn't have to do any of this all happened automatically and that all flowed through that financial report I had on the dashboard. Okay. Alright. If there's any questions on multi entity before we maybe go into some of the automation slides.

Gage Ulrich:Yes. Is there any family office entity processing and reporting functionality around investments, public securities and private investments?

Karen Penhallegon:We can track investments as a dimension, but generally most of our clients are managing the investments in an investment tool like add apar. So that's what most people will do. That's what I see. If that's what you're talking about is actually managing the investments themselves, we usually see a third party solution for that.

Gage Ulrich:Okay, thank you. And are you able to cut a check or initiate a wire request directly from Intacct?

Karen Penhallegon:You can certainly cut checks. You can also produce an A CH file. The ability to initiate a wire depends on your bank. So some banks have modules that link to Sage Intacct that will let us do that and some don't. So we're going to have to maybe chat with you afterwards and reach out to see if your bank would be one of those that we could do that for.

Gage Ulrich:Alright, and last one is, while using APIs feeds from banks, custodians, and other financial institutions, how close to real time can the data and Intacct become?

Karen Penhallegon:Yeah, great question. So from the bank feed specifically, the automated bank feeds are every four hours, so they will automatically pull transactions in every four hours. You can also import bank transactions as well, so you could always, if you need it more often than the four hours, you can do a manual import instead.

Gage Ulrich:We actually have one more come in for processing invoices. Can a bill be split by more than one company to be paid out by different companies?

Karen Penhallegon:Yes, yes. You can split the bill out into the different entities on the lines of the bill and then when you go to pay, you can also choose to pay by entity and so each entity would pay that specific line of the bill. Yes, you can do that.

Gage Ulrich:Alright, thank you Karen, you can continue.

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, so I'm looking at my time check here. I'm going to try to go a little quicker through this, but again, these slides are going to be available for everyone and so you can see all of these after the fact, but I want to leave time at the end for some questions as well, but AI is of course a huge topic. We're all hearing about ai, machine learning, all of those things. Intacct has been in this space for a very long time and Sage has, but I just sort of summarized a lot of the offerings into this one slide of some of the different things that are available and kind of bucketed them into what is their intention. There are two of these specifically that I want to talk through in a little more detail because they're the two that I think are probably the most impactful, but there's a lot of other things and they're always coming out. In fact, the AI powered imports that are on here came out about a week and a half ago. Yes.

Emily Madere:I was wondering if someone in the chat can see our screen. I know it gets a little finicky when we stop sharing from,

Karen Penhallegon:Is it not showing the slideshow?

Emily Madere:I am not sure, but you can keep on talking, Karen. I'll figure

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, so like I said, AI powered imports very brand new. That one just came out and so they're releasing something every single time, every single release, and there's four releases a year, so it's a very fast release cycle and we're seeing new things in AI all the time. So two specifically I want to talk about though AP automation, so AP bill automation as well as then close automation, two areas that touch pretty much every single client that we talk to. And so they're two of the most helpful. Starting out maybe with AP automation and talk briefly about how Intacct can help there. And then we will move into close automation if we have time, which we may not AP automation. The goal here really is to take that human element out of the need to code invoices. And so the way Intacct does this, you can send invoices in to Intacct either through an email address, you get a specific email address and they will go through or you can just upload them with a drag and drop onto the screen and it will upload them that way.

Then Intacct is, that's where the AI is going to kick off. So you see those dotted lines are kind of the process that you don't have to do. It's going to read that invoice for you. It's going to create a draft invoice, so it's going to include vendor, the GL coding, it thinks the dimension coding that it thinks the due date, the dollar amount, all those different things that are going to come off the invoice. It's also going to do some exception identification. So did it not find a vendor that matched? Did it find duplicates with that same invoice number and the same vendor? It can also do purchase order matching. If you're doing purchasing and Intacct as well match up a PO to the invoice, then that's where the human comes back in. So it's going to draft those for you, but then a human is going to go in and make sure that they're correct, right?

We trust computers but we can't trust them 100% all the time. But that's where the machine learning is going to kick in because you're going to make a correction. It's going to say, oh, I did something wrong. I need to go back and correct that process. And so the more that you use it and the more often that anyone really uses it, it's going to be learning more and more about the different types of invoices that come in. You can also layer on that approval processes as well after usually somebody from accounting or finance who's going to go in and do the review, initial review and then it can pass through an approval process. And then I'm not going to cover the automation for payables, but there's also a payables integration that you can automate payment so you don't have to print checks or issue ACHs either.

All right, I'm going to try it one more time to share my screen. Sorry to keep popping back and forth. Hopefully it's going to cooperate. Okay. And so I'm just going to briefly show you if I come in here and look at accounts payable bills. Alright, so this is the AP bills list. I've actually got this already filtered, but there's some pre-bill filters that will come or views that come with a system. One that you can see all of your bills in. So you see here, but also comes with a draft view specifically for AP bill automation. And so I can see the different bills here that have come in. I can see the source. This one was just manually entered as in draft, but these are all uploaded. If it's an email, it'll track the email that was sent from and to as well.

And I can see some of them that are saying they have exceptions. So let's just look at one maybe though that it says it imported correctly. Alright, so you see it's going to bring it in as a draft. This is not posted to your general ledger, it's going to automatically attach here. The bill and, sorry, I'm meant to click on the paper clip there. I'm sorry, my screen's a little bit small so it puts it side by side. If you have a larger screen, it looks really great or you can zoom out a little bit. I'm zoomed in so you guys can see better, but you'll see here it pulled all this information automatically. I have not touched this particular bill. It pulled the vendor for me, the bill number it pulled in the date, excuse me. One the things you might need to check usually be the terms because the terms are not in a clearly defiant spot on this particular invoice.

So it usually the vendor's default terms looks like there's different terms on this invoice and then you'll see it also will do its best to actually code it for you. And so it chose professional fees expense here, made a $0 line. That's a little unclear why, but I'll see a $5,000 row here for project consulting work. And so I can see here that's where it got that information from project consulting work. So all that was done automatically as the AP person. Now I can simply edit this, make a couple of changes and post it. Or if it was already good to go, I could go ahead and just post this and either submit their approvals or post it to the gl. Okay, any questions on that before I hop over and talk about close automation for a few minutes? And then we'll close out the questions.

Emily Madere:I'm not sure if Gage is still connected, but there was a question when entering a large amount of invoices or any data, can you tap quickly between fields? QuickBooks online makes manual entry very unfriendly and difficult and the screen I saw looked very similar to QuickBooks online. Hence my question,

Karen Penhallegon:Everything is tab through. So if I'm entering this bill in, you'll see I'm clicking tab right now, actually not sharing. Again, that is on me. I had stopped sharing. I will show you when we go back into the screen in just a minute, how you can just easily tab through. Yeah, everything is keyboard friendly. There's a lot of keyboard shortcuts actually that I use all the time. Everything can be just tab through and we can do on the lines, especially in the entries area, we can customize that layout so that you can have the fields you need the most in that section. So I can show you that in a second. Great question. Very.

Gage Ulrich:We've got another one too as well. Karen. Does the AI also recognize the entity associated with the bill?

Karen Penhallegon:Yes and no. So if you manually upload the bills, you can tell it what entity you want it to associate them with. For the emailed bills it's going to make its best guess. There's got to be some kind of indication usually on the bill itself to be able to recognize that, right? So I recommend that's something else to double check very closely that it coded as the correct entity, especially if the bill doesn't have a clear entity name on it that ties exactly to the name in Intacct. I mean computers are smart, but they have to match something. And so if the names are totally different or there's not a name on the bill that ties to the entity, it's not going to be able to match it. Great question. It will learn over time. If you have the same vendor who always invoices the same entity, it will learn that vendor invoices that entity and it'll choose that for you.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you Karen.

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, so try to spend a couple of minutes here, but one of the latest things Sage has been releasing lots of different things for is actually called close automation, which is a bundle of a number of different tools actually related to the month and close. I'm going to show you a couple of them very quickly. There's closed checklist, there's a whole bunch of close insights, things like variance analysis, budget analysis, all sort of built into the solution and it, they're adding new stuff again for this every single time they're coming out with some analytics tools. In the next release, I believe that are going to add even more to this, some reconciliation tools to help you with automating your reconciliations. So there's much happening in this area that I think is really important that we spend just a couple of minutes talking about it. It's a very quickly changing area. I'm sharing my screen again here.

Okay, so the previous question we had about navigating through the screens, I just opened a new bill screen here. You can see I can simply tab, I can search the vendors by name or by number. So you can choose whichever one you want. And you can see here you can tab through, enter information in all the standard keyboard shortcuts, work control C, control V, et cetera. All work on here. And then this area down here, we have more information below. So all the different dimensions are sort of down below here, but we can pull these up into the rows you need them or we can put them kind of down in the bottom if you don't. So alright, let's pop over. I had the close open in a little separate window here. So I'm going to show just a couple of quick things on some of the AI automation here.

This little copilot window up here. Copilot is Sage's AI tool or AI engine, sorry agent if you will. That's what they call it. You can both chat with copilot and ask it questions. It can search the help for you and help you find information about Intacct. It also will provide insights for you. So you can see here I went to the insights section. It's telling me, for example, that I have departments that exceeded the budget. I can click to view that insight. It will actually give me a little chart of who has exceeded the budget, what were those budgets, here's the actuals that I could drill down into in the variance. I can ask it to describe the variance for me. I can go run a report about it. I can go view the actual financial report and it also will tell you how to copilot figure this out.

And so if you want to know where it got the information from, it will tell you right here. So trust is very important when we have AI solution. And so it's giving you that trusted backup of this is where we got this information. You can go run this, report yourself and see it. The other thing that it can do, if I go back to chat, oh sorry, that's where I ran. That is it can also come back up here and see if it'll give me, let me do a new chat. There we go. It can also see other information here that you can do. So it's going to give you some options. Usually these are common things that you do. For example, I can run the close assistant, which is going to go out and look at a standard close process. I haven't closed my books in a while here.

You can tell, it'll actually tell you what's the status of the close right now. Here's what's left to be done. I can link straight into each of these and actually complete the tasks from my copilot window. Or what you're seeing in the background is the close progress bottoms here, which is the dashboard really all about the close. I can see here the status of my close. It's separated out into your major modules. Whatever modules you might have here. You can break out. You can see the tasks that are overdue. I can actually assign these tasks to individual owners. I can kind of see here are some of the tasks. And if I come here to the task assignments, I can actually see even more graphs and grids about where are we, right? And the process. Who is maybe most behind, for example, by assignee. All this is drilled down capable as well. So I can drill down to any of these. If I come down here into my tasks, let's actually go to the checklist itself. I can go straight to the checklist. Let's look at November.

So if I'm the one managing the close or the one actually doing the close process, here's the entire checklist that I've put together for my close. I can see the status here. I can drill down into any of these and it'll actually take me straight to this navigation link to the task and Intacct. So if I'm ready to close ap, I can click close ap, it's going to pop that up for me to be able to close AP right there from the screen. So it gives you shortcuts for the different places you might need to go. And you can build all this checklist out for yourself. This is sort of a standard generic one, but you can build specifically your close month end checklist. And it's a repeatable process, so you can use a template to repeat it every single month.

I know we only have a few minutes left, so I want to make Sure we have time for a little bit of wrap up, so I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing. And very, very briefly, just one minute here. We do have a very tried and true and tested implementation approach that we use. This is sort of our base model for implementation, but we definitely work with you to customize that. So if you're interested in implementing Sage Intacct, we definitely would talk with you about specifically your needs and how you'd need to work through that. And then as was mentioned earlier, we're your one-stop shop for Sage Intacct, so you're not going to need to go back to Sage after your implementation is done for support. We will continue to support you. So our team here handles everything from sales implementation all the way through your life on support, and then we offer some other services as well. I know data conversion was brought up earlier. That's something we can certainly help with if you need things like process documentation or change management or just assistance and consulting on your technical accounting issues. We also have teams that specialize in these for family offices.

So then we have just a couple minutes maybe for questions. We also have a couple of polls that we wanted to pull up. So I'm going to go ahead and open the first poll and then also we can answer questions while people are looking at these polls.

Gage Ulrich:Yes, thanks Karen. So I have a great question for you. I understand that QuickBooks desktop will be going away soon, is Sage Intacct the desktop?

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, good question. So QuickBooks Desktop is what's called an on-premise software. You're correct in that it's not being sold anymore and will soon be unsupported. What on-premise means is it's installed on your computer, so somebody has to install it and maintain it on your computer. Intacct by cloud, that means that it is not installed anywhere on your computer or server. Sage is responsible for handling all of that piece of it and you just need an internet connection and a browser to connect to it.

Gage Ulrich:Thanks Karen. And how long does the typical implementation take

Karen Penhallegon:On average? Three to four months is the timeline from kickoff to go live? Your implementation team stays with you for six weeks after go live as well, but on average I would probably say three to four months. They can be longer. We can kind of schedule that out to your needs. It can also be shorter. We have to keep in mind that you guys all have day jobs of course. So this is our full-time job, but this is a secondary project for you. So usually comfortably we would say three to four months.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you. And I got two questions. I can be merged in the one. Do you have a rough range or estimate for how much the system costs and does Intacct charge per entity?

Emily Madere:Yeah, I can actually take this one. So Intacct typically ranges between any, I would say it's low end $25,000 annually and it's high end probably $80,000 annually. This is going to be a mid-market solution, so it's not going to be priced like QuickBooks and it's not going to be priced like an enterprise solution like SAP for example. Intacct does price per entity, but there's different packages that make them cheaper and we just have to talk with say to see what promotions they're doing at that time to see if we can negotiate on price with them.

Gage Ulrich:Thank you. Emily and I have another question for you Karen. Do you need to open up new screens to stay in the same section when making updates in other areas of the software?

Karen Penhallegon:You can open up additional Windows or tabs, Intacct? Yes. It depends. I guess I'm a little confused by the question. You can open up as many tabs as you want of Intacct and as many screens as you want in Windows within the browser there are some screens where you can make the transaction right from the screen. Like in a bank rec, you can use bank transactions to create a journal entry for example, or some of the things we saw where you could create transactions and things right on the screen. Generally though, if you're trying to navigate to a different section of the system and you want to keep the one you already have open, you would simply duplicate your tab and your browser and then go navigate on the second tab. Hopefully that answered the question

Emily Madere:And we have one minute left, so I'm going to go ahead and wrap it up. Thank y'all for joining and for staying this long and asking questions. I know we did not get to all of the questions, but Gage and I and Karen will make sure to follow up with y'all and then if you did request a call, we will call you promptly and answer any of your questions you have. Thank you again.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}