Evaluating Your Next Accounting System: Moving from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct

Today, we are going to explore moving from Sage Intel or from QuickBooks, my bad, to Sage Intacct. We'll take a look at some common signs that you may have outgrown QuickBooks and while might be the time to make a change. We'll also take a look at an overview of Sage Intacct, followed by a brief demo. And lastly, we'll cover the benefits of working with EisnerAmper and our proven approach to our implementation strategy. After that, we'll wrap up with a Q&A session. So now I've been talking for way too long, so I will now turn it over to Rand to get us started. Take it away, Ren.

Ren Stead:
Thank you so much, Gage, for the warm introduction. So I'll kick us off with just an overview of how you may have outgrown QuickBooks. So picture this, you were a startup with a small one to two person team. You had that entrepreneur mentality, means that as a CEO, you had to roll up your sleeves and handle all the business functions, including selecting a cost effective and easy to use accounting software. But as you grew and matured as an organization, saying in QuickBooks meant that you needed to adapt your new and mature accounting processes with some workarounds due to those QuickBooks limitations. So you're now in a solution that doesn't consolidate your data from your other operational systems, especially if you have multiple entities, you're now spending weeks potentially every year in Excel, consolidating and manually reconciling all of that data. You're also spending a lot of time logging in and out of QuickBooks file, right?

And with limited access, because you're on a desktop solution, as well as the user limitations that come with a QuickBooks solution. You also don't have that on demand visibility into the reporting, which you need to make real time on demand decisions. You have a long drawn out and manual period and close, as I'm sure many of you are familiar with. And then lastly, your audit season is particularly long and painful. And in addition, you might not be gap in SOX compliant. To simply put, QuickBooks was not designed for scale.

So why now? Why should we be interested in migrating from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct today? Just for many conversations that we've had with our current clients and prospects, we've identified five main reasons. As you see on the screen, our technology evolution, QuickBooks Desktop is facing out as many of you are aware. And many organizations are thinking that QuickBooks Online is the right next step, but we know that's not the case. QuickBooks Online was not built for scale, and a lot of the limitations that we saw in our previous slide remains. Competitive reality. As a professional services firm, we've seen throughout the past two years that your mid-market peers started migrating from QuickBooks about 12 to 18 months ago. So they're already operating faster, more efficiently, saving a lot of time from manual processing and just overall making better decisions. Talent market, similarly, as a top accounting firm, we also know that strong financial operators expect modern tools.

Those recruiting gets harder. And when you're in a legacy software, your best people are getting all frustrated by a lot of the manual work and inefficient processes that we see in outdated solutions such as QuickBooks. The timing window. First mover in your industry get the benefit sooner, as you can imagine. Stage Intacct implementation takes about four to six months on average. So waiting potentially pushes that implementation into a busier period, say a tax season, an audit, or a year end season. And then lastly, as you can see, financial reality. There is a cost of staying, right? Those hours spent on spreadsheets and manually building reports. All that time is time loss that could be used to bring more business to your organization or take better care of your clients. And then additionally, visibility gaps into your data is just as costly because you could be delaying smart moves that you would otherwise be able to make when you have in real time financial insights.

So this is where Sage Intacct comes in. Sage Intacct is a leading mid-market solution. We can identify four main buckets that categorizes all the benefits you get from Sage Intacct. We'll start us off with best in class. Sage Intech's the only AI CPA preferred financial management solution, and that is because it's Gap and HIPAA compliant. It's cloud native. It's been cloud native since day one. It was built for that. So seamless quarterly updates, no disruptions, no downtime. It also has an open API or multiple open APIs that allows you to consolidate different business solutions. As we mentioned prior reporting, Karen's going to dive a little bit deeper into this bucket, but with powerful reporting out of box, report library that you have access to is more dimension based now as opposed to QuickBooks. You only have that one dimension field. So you have greater visibility into your financial data.

That includes multi-entity and multicurrency consolidation. And then Sage Intacct is an AI powered solution. And we'll dive deeper a little bit more into all of these buckets. But as you can imagine, Sage has been working diligently over the last several years to make sure that we bring the most reliable and secure AI powered solutions to the market.

So let's dive a little bit deeper. So Connected Solutions, as I mentioned, Intacct's cloud native, which means that it allows for easy integrations with over 400 marketplace partners. So what that means is it has a native integration already built in with a lot of the solutions that you see on screen. And by no means is this list comprehensive. I'm sure these are some of the ones that you recognize, but like as I mentioned, 400 marketplace partners. If for whatever reason we have a solution that you're using that doesn't have that built native integration with Sage Intacct, because of its open APIs, we're able to build a custom integration. So you're still going to benefit from consolidating all of your data with your financial data and Sage Intacct. And the neat thing about this is that you're now spending less time consolidating, but you're also able to embed your operational data as an example on top of your financial data in Sage Intacct.

So now you have that high level overview of the health of your organization all within one solution.

AI powered automation. I know that's AI is the big buzzword over the last couple of years. Sage Intacct, as I mentioned before, has spent close to a decade really refining their models, working with Sage Intacct users and organizations to bring you the most reliable, safe and accurate AI power solutions to you and to the market. So as you see on the slide, a couple of different tools, some are out of the box, which everybody that comes over to Sage Intacct will be able to benefit from. And then some are available as an added subscription, and then some will see down rollout down the line this upcoming year. Excuse me. So as an example, your search help is something that you have access to since day one. It allows you to use natural language to ask product or how to questions. So quick question, a quick answer right in the search help box.

Your outlier detection flags unusual activity, comparing journal entries against historical patterns. And then AI powered imports that came out this year. It allows you to transform data in real time so that you can make any changes if you're throwing an error when uploading your data. And then two of our very popular, well received add-on subscriptions that we've seen to date is AP automation, AP automation with purchasing as well, and then your closed automation tools. AP Automation allows your CJ Intacct to draft all of your bills, whether you import them or upload them, and it fills in all those common fields that you see when entering in an invoice and leaves it in draft mode for you to review. So that saves you the one or two minutes per invoice, keying in every single detail of your invoice, takes care of that for you and moves you from a manual inputter to a reviewer.

Similarly, your closed automation saves you time, but giving you visibility into your period and closed tasks, as well as gives you access to a budget variance analysis report that you can access at any point during the month, so at any point during the period. And then very excited to announce that finance intelligent agents, closed analytics, and cash prediction optimization agents are coming out at some point this year. Sage has one annual conference per year and is happening next week. So we're here at EisnerAmper. We're excited to learn more about that. And of course, we'll send out more information about these agents that are going to be available.

And then lastly, before I pass it over to Karen, as I mentioned before, Sage Intacct, the only AI CPA preferred solution because it adheres to the professional and technical standards of the CPA profession. And this is backed by the reviews that we see on Trust Radius by hundreds of customers, as well as the reviews that we see on G2, which is the largest and most trusted peer-peer software review. And then what we don't see on this slide is the additional feedback that we receive from prospects or from our current clients about their satisfaction with Sage Intacct. So with that, I'll pass it over to Karen to talk us through reporting and then a demo of Sage Intacct.

Karen Penhallegon:
Great. Thank you, Ren. So I'm going to cover a little bit just about Intacct and our team in general, high level, and then we'll dive in and actually take a look at the software itself. But I always start out with this question that we get almost all the time, which is, well, what industries or what organizations work best with Sage Intacct? And do you have familiarity with those? The broad answer is Intacct works for almost every industry out there. It's very flexible. We can do some customization and configuration to make it work for lots of different organizations, but we've picked out kind of our top organizations we see it most often in. So places like construction, real estate, hospitality that includes commonly restaurant groups or hotel groups. Healthcare is a huge area for Sage Intacct if it's great into all sorts of different healthcare practices, whether you're a physician group or you're maybe a sole practitioner or any other kind of healthcare you can pretty much think of.

We've done that. Transportation is another great area. Family offices often have lots and lots of entities and complexity that fits great into the Intacct environment. And then not for profits actually are Intacct's largest industry. So over 30% of Intacct's customers are nonprofits and they get special pricing as well. That's another area that we have a lot of experience in. This is not everyone. It's just a high level overview, but these are just some of the industries we see the most often and Intacct works great in all of these.

All right. Now be a little bit about Intacct itself and something that I think is Intacct unique is the way that it's been designed from day one. So like Ren mentioned, it was built for the cloud from the ground up. It was actually built by finance professionals who back in the late '90s were looking around and saying," The software we're seeing today are not meeting our needs. "And they came up with some of these concepts they wanted to build into a new software of their own. And to me, it all starts with this multi-everything architecture. So starting here at the top, Intact is inherently multi-entity. So that means that you can have all of your entities all in a single environment. They're going to share a chart of accounts. They'll share a vendor list, a customer list if you want. And that way you don't have to try to manage 15 different charts of accounts potentially, or 20 or 30, or 200, like someone we talked to recently.

All of it is in a single environment. That makes a lot of other things easier too. So being able to do consolidative reporting is a natural piece of that. When the entities share the same chart of accounts, it's much easier to consolidate them for reporting and Intacct does that automatically for you. We'll also see during the demo that we have automated inner entity as well. So inner entity transactions are often in place we see a lot of the annual work when you're in QuickBooks. And we'll talk about that whenever we see the actual demo. The next one on here is multi-book. And so every, of course, accounting system has a book, right? For the most part, it's usually accrual book. This is how QuickBooks generally works. You can sort of fake a cash report, but it's really just reporting. It's converting your accrual to cash.

It's not truly a separate cash book. Intact though actually has separate books built in. So out of the box, just a check box, you can turn on accrual, cash, gap, and tax books, and you can also create an unlimited number of user defined books. And so any way that you need to report, you're going to have that flexibility. So if you have some stakeholders who want cash reporting, some who want accrual, maybe your bank needs gap reporting, and then at the end of the year you need tax, we can do all of those within Sage Intacct for you.

Moving on, last but definitely not least when we're going to spend a lot of time on is multi-dimension. And so a dimension is really just a piece of information that we're tagging to a transaction. So whether it's the customer associated with that transaction, the location of that transaction, it's a piece of information. But what we're doing is then taking these dimensions and using them to report on. And what Intacct does that other solutions don't do, you might think of this a little bit like KLAS within QuickBooks, but it's really KLAS on steroids, is that it has a lot of power built into these dimensions. So it's not a custom field or something you're customizing. They're baked into the system from the beginning throughout the use of the system. And we can put them into hierarchies and group them together in different ways for reporting. So we're going to see all of that during the demo as well.

Now I have some examples here of dimensions. So kind of the common ones that we see, all of these, but one comes standard out of the box. And so we use these for all of our different clients. I sort of think of them in three buckets. So the where dimensions, so where did this transaction occur? And this is where your entity lives. Also, if you have locations, locations are a subset of entities in Intact. So you might have multiple locations in your entity or maybe departments, cost centers, whatever you might call these. So we can actually customize the dimension names to be whatever you call that field. Then you have the what dimensions. So what is this transaction about? KLAS is sort of a generic one. We use that in all sorts of different ways. For nonprofits, we might use this to track restrictions. For some clients, we'll use it to track assets.

So if you have equipment that you need to track repairs and maintenance for, things like that. Item is generally what you're buying or selling, right? So if you're using purchasing and you want to track the actual goods you need to purchase, or even if you are actually using inventory and to do inventory tracking, we can use the item dimension. The one on here that is an additional cost is the project dimension. So if you are a job based or a project based company, Intacct has great job and project costing functionality. So we can do really, really great things with that. And the last piece is the who of a transaction. So is it related to an employee, maybe to a customer, to a vendor? Or the great thing about it is this is not just one selection. We can select a combination of any of these dimensions within the transaction.

So unlike having just a single class dimension that we're trying to fit everything into, instead, we are using all a combination of these to actually create the general ledger entry. Okay. With that, we're going to actually hop into the demo. Before I go, are there any questions so far?

Gage Ulrich:
Yes, Karen. Thanks for asking. So they'd like to know, can Sage automate credit card and bank downloads/bank rules like QuickBooks Online?

Karen Penhallegon:
Great question. Absolutely. We can automate bank feeds as well as credit card feeds. It does depend, of course, on your bank or credit card because they have to allow the connection on their end, but most of them do. We can do automated both matching rules from reconciliation standpoint and creation rules. So you're able to set up the rules that you want to follow and then you can either have it automatically do the feed down every four hours, or you can actually do it yourself through an import if you want. It uses the same rules either way, so you control that. Great question.

Gage Ulrich:
That's all we have for now, Karen.

Karen Penhallegon:
Excuse me. All right, great. Okay. So just to give a little brief preview of what we're going to talk through for about the next 20 minutes or so, 20, 25 minutes, three main areas I want to cover in this demo. First, we'll talk about reporting and dashboarding and intact. I've got a little slide here and we're also going to go and actually move around some reports. Then I want to focus a little bit on multi-entity and entity automation. This is probably the number one thing that we hear from QuickBooks switchers that they are lacking in their current solutions. So we're going to talk a little bit about that. And then I want to give you a little preview of how accounts payable bill automation works. Another, like Ren mentioned, very, very popular tool that we're seeing used and saves our clients so much time. So I want to make sure we cover that today.

All right. Before I jump into Intacct, what I'm going to do here is I've got some, I'm going to call it callback slides for us because you might not be able to remember what you see after you leave here today, but you'll be able to download the presentation. And so this hopefully will help you remember what you saw and be able to call back to it later. So we're going to talk about all of these today as we go through our actual demo. So give me just a moment to get my screen shared here. Okay. I just want to confirm maybe from some of our team, can y'all see the screen sharing?

Ren Stead:
Yes, we can see you.

Karen Penhallegon:
Wonderful. Thank you. All right. So like I mentioned, I want to start off with just want to be an overview of some Intacct reporting functionality. So what you're looking at right now on the screen is say Gentact. It is a dashboard. I am logged in right now as Emma. You'll see Emma Penny up here on the right. I will point out Intacct has very, very strong controls. We can actually do very granular rules and roles for our users. So keep that in mind. It's not quite like QuickBooks in that aspect either. We're able to control very specifically who has access to what in the system. I'm in my WD capital company here, and I've actually got a number of different entities set up within this instance is what Intacct calls them. But what I'm looking at is a dashboard at what Intacct calls the top level.

So the top level is actually where I can, excuse me, see or transact in any of my entities that I have set up. So I've actually got three different entities in my organization here, and I can make entries and report on them, any of them from this top level. And so that's where we usually are going to operate is at the top level because we've got the most flexibility here. Now this dashboard is what I like to call an executive dashboard. You can have an unlimited number of dashboards with Intacct. It comes with seven or eight out of the box, depending on your industry. You can also create as many as you want. And I like to have kind of an overview dashboard to talk through of all the different types of things or some of the different types of things you can do. This particular dashboard, I've got a few filters turned on.

So you can see here we can filter both by date, which my date is a little bit old here, so we'll pretend it's pre- COVID for a little while here. And also I can filter by up to three different dimensions. And so we'll see a couple of my examples of dimensions in here, as we talked about earlier. I've got filters for department as well as location. Now, the nice thing about these intact filters, they're going to allow you to filter either on single values, like a single entity or on groups of those values. So back to being able to kind of customize how you want to do your reporting, I could set up regions or different ways that I'm grouping my locations. And then when I select one of these filters, it will filter the entire dashboard for that information.

All right. Moving down to the actual reporting part of the dashboard though, which is where we want to focus. The first thing that hopefully drew your attention is these widgets across the top. These are called performance cards. So performance cards can be used for kind of KPIs or quick pieces of information that you need to have top of mind when you log into your dashboard. They could be financial data, like you see we've got revenue, they can be calculations. I've got a profit margin calculation, or it could even be non-financial information. So I have clients, but this could be number of jobs, it could be number of anything you can think of, and then we can take that information and blend it into our financial data. So maybe you want to understand your employee burden better. And so if you count your number of employees, you could have a calculation where it actually takes the burden amounts, did the by number of employees, there's your average burden.

Things like that can be dynamic calculations. Now, these are not just numbers though. What's great about these is that it's actually looking at and doing an analysis for you. So in this case, I have the ability to choose not only the time period I want to look at, which I happened to pick this month, could have been a year, a quarter, a week. I'm also comparing it to something. So I could compare these to either a budget or to a prior period. I've got kind of both examples on here. And I can either look at it, the percentage difference or the actual dollar difference for any of these. And what it's going to do is then take what I'm comparing and create a nice little green or red image for me. So whether you like smiley faces or thumbs up or flags, whatever you want to use here, the point is that when I log in, I'm going to immediately get an indicator of exactly how things are performing.

So I don't have to go run multiple reports or go to try to figure out the numbers. It's going to give it to me right away as soon as I log in.

Moving on, I'm actually going to draw your attention to the right side of the screen for just a moment and look at some charts and graphs. So Intact comes out of the box with about 30 graphs called financial charts and graphs. You can create as many more as you might want, but this is just some examples. And this is where we're going to start seeing some of our dimensional data blended in. So as an example, I have this operating expense by department chart right here and I can see my different departments listed here. I can hover over them to see the amounts like some, if I want to actually see the amounts. I can even just click show data right here to flip back and forth between the actual data and the graph. Now, if I click into one of these, it actually will open up a popup window that gives me a drill down of what is within that little wedge of my pie chart in this case.

And I could continue even drilling down from here into a specific transaction. We'll see that in just a moment. I'm going to drill down on a financial report as well. But the nice thing about these dashboards is you can drill down from almost anything on the dashboard all the way into that source transaction. So if you are spending your time answering questions about why is this charge here, what is this? Instead, you could give someone the power to actually take care of that themselves and to answer their own questions.

All right. Last thing on my dashboard that I will talk about here, and I'm going to show some different examples of these is financial reports. And so I've got probably the most common report that we end up using, and that's a profit and loss by entity or by location report. These that I'm showing you right now, these are all standard out of the box intact reports. So you get them day one. You can of course customize them to your needs with your accounts and your groupings, but this is just a general version of those reports. I'm going to go ahead and open this one up full screen just so we can see it a little bit better and talk about this report.

Okay. So I'm seeing here, like I mentioned, it's a profit and loss by entity. So I've got on my rows a summarized P&L here, an income statement. My columns though are my entities. So I can see here I've got all my entities and then a consolidated view right here. So automatically Intacct is consolidating these amounts for me and totaling them up real time. Next, you'll see that I can actually expand these out for more detail. So this is a summarized report, but if I'm curious maybe what's behind some of these numbers. So maybe I'd like to open up operating and maintenance expenses. I can open that up and it will show me the actual accounts that are underneath that. And I can do that for any of these. You can also create the report to be that detailed in the beginning if you want, or it can start summarized and you can get more detailed.

So let's go look in one of these accounts. Let's look in repairs and maintenance. This might be a good example and drill in.

So what's going to happen when I open up this account, it's going to give me the general ledger report. So this is the detailed report of the actual journal entries that made the number up that I clicked on. So whether it's journal entries or things that claim from accounts payable or receivable, everything is going to show here. And then you can actually customize this to show So the dimensions that matter to you. I have department and location on mine, but it can be all sorts of different dimensions that you might want to see on your view. But we can keep going. So we can drill down even further. So I click on one of the numbers here. I'll actually open up in this case the AP bill. So this is the accounts payable bill that created that journal entry that we were seeing a moment ago.

I can see high level information here at the top about the bill. Has it been paid or not? What vendor was it for? Bill numbers, all those things. We'll also be able to see the attachment. So if you are using AP automation or you could even attach if you are not, attach the PDF of the bill. And that's going to be available for you to view at any point in time. And this does get actually saved into the cloud with your Intacct data. So it's not like it's referencing back to your server or anything. This is stored in the cloud with Intacct. So it'll maintain that record forever for you. And then here toward the bottom, I'm going to see my actual entry. So you'll see here, these are the entries or the detailed lines of my bill. And what I want to point out here, what we'll see in just a moment too, when I get to the next section of the demo, this is a multi-entity bill.

So this bill actually is crossing two different entities, 100 and 200 in this example. So you can actually code to as many different entities or as many different dimensions as you might need within each individual transaction. And what's going to happen when we went to pay this bill, it will create the enter entity due to and do from entries automatically for us. And we'll see that in just a few minutes when we look at entering into the automation. There can also be other details here. So you pick what you want to see, want to call this main line. And then below in the detailed section, you might have other information that you don't use as often, but you still want to include it. So if maybe you're using, this is for a specific employee that you want to tag it to or for a specific customer.

All of that can be included as well.

Okay. Let's go ahead and head back to our dashboard for a couple of other report examples, and then we will dive into some actual transactions. So a few other just examples, actual to budget reporting is also out of the box. So you can have as many different budgets as you might want, and you can budget by dimension. And so you'll see here that I've got budgets by department, and it's doing an entire company budget, as well as breaking it down by department for me with conditional highlighting to call out anywhere that I am severely over or under budget. And then over here on the right, I've got some other examples of how we can actually use our statistical data or non-financial data, like tracking new clients or tracking profit per order. All sorts of different ways we can come up with to utilize Intax super flexible reporting.

All right. I'm going to pause for just a moment and see if there are any questions before we jump to our next topic.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah. Karen, we did have one question come in and someone would like to know how quickly can they add on a new entity inside of Intacct?

Karen Penhallegon:
About 30 seconds is all it takes to add an entity. Maybe a little bit more if you need to add other information, of course, but no. Adding an entity as easy as adding a record. It takes almost no time to create that entity. And then you would just need to add bank accounts or any other information you needed for that entity as well. Less than five minutes, easy.

Gage Ulrich:
That's great, Karen. Thank you.

Karen Penhallegon:
Any other ones or are we ready to keep going?

Gage Ulrich:
No, we don't have any others at the moment. You can keep going.

Karen Penhallegon:
All right. Wonderful. Okay. So next I want to spend a few minutes talking about multi-entity and entry entity. And so I've got a little comparison chart here for you of some of the things that we see from clients who switch from single entity to multi-entity environments. So when you're working in individual instances, some of the common pain points, you're logging in lots of different places. So if you're with QuickBooks, you might have 20 different QuickBooks entities you have to log in and out of. Chart of accounts, Drift is a huge one. The same account number may mean different things in different companies or have five different account numbers for the same thing across your companies, because there's inconsistency in the way that it's being maintained. You also have to administer vendors, customers, employees, anything else you're tracking has to be administered. And then we just saw a minute ago, consolidations and eliminations where it's automated and intact are all manual.

So if you want to consolidate, you have to pull data into Excel or into another reporting tool. And then enter energy transactions. I've lost count of the ways I've seen workarounds for this. Probably the most common is actually entering AP bills or AR invoices into QuickBooks, different companies to account for the due to and do from between the companies that or lots and lots of journal entries. All of these things can be eliminated in a multi-entity shared environment. Since you have a single database for all entities, you have one chart of accounts, one list of vendors, one list of customers. They all share reports. So you don't have to build a report five times. In five entities, you build it once and all the entities can use it. There's automated consolidation. And if you do a lot of eliminations, there's also a module you can add on to automate eliminations as well.

If you're multicurrency, that module can also automate your currency translations. And then as we're about to see, what I'm going to show in the demo is the fact that enter entity automations and, sorry, transactions can be created automatically. So let me pop back over into my demo screen. Give me just a moment here.

And let's talk about an enter entity transaction. Okay. So I'm going to scroll down to the bottom of my ... Excuse me. Battling a little cold here. The bottom of my transaction on my dashboard here. For a specific report that I have built and we build this from almost all of our clients, it's very easy and simple, but it is really key to understanding your enter entity reconciliation. So I have here super simple example. We can do lots of different ways of doing inner entity, but my particular company, I basically have one due to and due from account for each of my entities. And then what I've done is have it split out by entities here across my columns. And so just as an example, I can quickly see the entity 100 should have a due from 200 of 71.51. If I look down here at the due two, there's my matching amount right there.

So I can see that these two numbers tie. I'm reconciled. If I want to go make an entry to clear those, I could, or we could just leave it since we know that they're in balance and they wash each other out.

All right. Let's see this in action. So I'm going to go ahead and use my bookmarks over here to go create one of the simplest possible transactions in Intacct, which is a funds transfer. So that's just transferring money from one bank to another, right? I'm going to go ahead and create a new one and we are going to transfer money from 100 to 200. Let me backdate this so we can find it more easily. And let's try to make an amount that we can remember. So I'm going to make it

$222.33. There's other information you can fill in for this if you need to, but that's really all that's required. So I'm going to go ahead and click save. And then I'm going to head back to my dashboard and we'll take a look at my report now. So of course, I just transferred cash from an entity 100 to entity 200. That is an out of balance entry. So what I'll see now is Intacct is going to help me with that. So if I look, my number here just changed actually when I drill into this, I should see the number that I just, the entry I just made. There it is. 22233. Let me open this up. All right. So what Index has done, this first section here, this entries area, this is the actual journal entry that my funds transfer created. Very simple. As I said, I picked the easiest possible example when I moved money from one bank account to another, but this is an out of balance entry.

Intact is going to recognize that. Entities cannot be out of balance and intact. So it's going to go look and see the setups that we have in there for enter entity transactions. Now, you can set it up where you don't want entertain transactions to happen. It will actually give you an error message if you try. In this case, I have it set up to allow those and I have the specific ... Sorry, GL entries or general ledger accounts that I want it to post to. And so automatically it's going to recognize that because the credit side of the transaction, they're giving cash to 200, it's going to debit the receivable account. And then to offset the company that's receiving the cash, the debit, it's going to credit the liability account that it owes money back. So this entry down here, completely automated. And the same thing happens if you pay bills on behalf of another entity, receive cash on behalf of another entity, even journal entries.

All of them can be set up to automate this process for you. So just one quick example, but there's lots of different ways that you can use that functionality.

Okay. One more thing to show, spend the next five or 10 minutes on it, and then we will leave the rest for questions. But before I move to the next part, are there questions on enter entity, multi-entity? I can answer.

Gage Ulrich:
Yes, we do have a few questions that have come in. So we actually have two questions kind of about historical data. So in anticipation of making a move, how does Sage capture our years of GL and vendor history?

Karen Penhallegon:
That's a great question. So usually what we recommend is bringing over general ledger detail for your history. We can help you do that, or we have a team that can help with it as well, so it's up to you. You can bring over history that has dimensions in it. So as long as your source data has the vendor or the customer on it, we can bring that GL detail over. We don't generally recommend bringing over what we call sub-ledger data, so like AP history or AR history, just because it's a very complex process. It can be done, but it takes a lot more time to bring that over because you have to bring over invoices, payments, and there's a lot more into those postings that happen at Intacct than simply a journal entry. So generally we'll do GL, like I said, GL detail. But if you put those dimensions onto those entries, you can use all of the intact financial reports around those dimensions.

So you can do vendor and customer reporting on your history. That's a great question. Happy to talk more about questions. We can always schedule more time.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah. And another one. And Sage, can you set up user limit to a specific entity or maybe limit it to AP, AR within their specific roles?

Karen Penhallegon:
Absolutely. Yes. We can limit users to only have one or more entities that they can see. We can also do that for departments if you're departmentalizer than using entities. And from a role standpoint, in combination with that, we can also limit access down to individual tasks even. So not just AP as a whole, we can say they can view vendors, but not add them or create them or edit them. We can say they can enter bills, but they can't delete bills. So we have very, very detailed security that we can put in place. Great questions.

Gage Ulrich:
Perfect. And one last question. Is there any limit to how many entities we can bring into Sage Intacct? No,

Karen Penhallegon:
There's no limit. There is a cost. So there's packages of entities that you would buy, so there is a cost to that, but we've got a client actually that we're implementing right now that has over 200 entities. So there's not a limit to the number of entities.

Gage Ulrich:
I believe that is all of the questions we have for now, Karen. I'll let you continue.

Karen Penhallegon:
All right. So I'm going to try to spend five minutes on this one. I'll make this a little quicker because I want to make sure we leave some time at the end as well for wrap up and questions. But last topic I wanted to cover, of course, was AP automation. And I'd like to start out with just a little visual about this to make it kind of clear, where does the automation actually exist? And so there are sort of two places in an AP process where automation may come into play. The places that little chart, you see the ones with the dotted lines or areas where we're looking at automation. The way that it works for Intacct is that you can receive in the vendor invoices either by email, so they can email directly to a special inbox, or if you get them on your own email or you need to scan them because they're paper, you can just drag and drop to upload them into Intacct.

Once those PDFs or image files are uploaded, then Intacct is going to run essentially an OCR, but a very, very good one on the actual data. And this is all AI powered. So what it's doing is it may have seen over the lifetime of Intacct, maybe it's seen 20,000 of that particular type of invoice. It's going to know where certain things on the invoice are. If it's the first time it's ever seen it, it's just going to read it and try to figure it out itself. And so it's going to find, most of the time it finds the vendor, it's going to find the due date, the dollar amounts, all those things that are common to every invoice, and it's going to put all those into a draft invoice for you. Now, we don't take humans out of the equation because humans are critical when you're in AI to making sure that the data and information is correct.

And so a human then would come in and actually just review what it filled in. So common areas that we see, at least initially, that need to be updated are things that are not clear on the document itself, right? There's not a clear field that says X, Y, Z. Maybe there's missing information, like maybe there's no vendor intact to match the vendor on the bill and GL coding. But what it's doing is every time that you're changing and updating one of these invoices, it's going back into that machine learning cycle and it's saying, "Oh, well, next time I'll know better what to do. " And so next time you receive an invoice like that, it's learned and it's going to do a better job. And so what we've found is that you need to give it one to two months at least to learn your invoices, your vendor's patterns.

And then at that point, the goal is for it to really be 95 to 99% accurate. There may still be things that come up that need to be changed because there's some things that a human is going to catch, but that is the goal is that it's much less of what you would normally have to do than if you're manually entering all your APN. The last piece of this, there is an option to also automate payments. So if you choose to pay out of Intacct, that's not a problem. You can print checks and you can produce ACH files, but also if you'd like to outsource that, Mineral Tree is a partnership with Intacct or right from within Intact solution, you can tell it to them to print a check to the vendor, ACH them or use a virtual card and the vendor actually gets to control how they get paid.

So that's another solution that is out there if you wanted to sort of automate the entire AP process that you can do the bill automation piece without the payment automation, so you don't have to use that one.

All right, let's do a real quick view of what this looks like, and then we will wrap things up for you guys. So one last screen share, so I can show you an actual example of a bill that came through AP Automation. Okay. That should be sharing right now. All right. So I'm going to go ahead and just hop over really quickly into my AP bill screen. And so in the Intacct bill screen, or if you're using purchasing, there's also a way to do this with purchasing where it matches to POs as well. My company's a little more simple. I just have bills without purchasing. I'm going to have the option to filter for all of my draft transactions. And so this is going to pull in anything that is in a draft status, which is where all of my AP automation vendor bills are going to end up.

And I can see here I've got a number of different AP bills. This source is going to tell you if they were from AP Automation where they came in through an email or an upload. So these are all uploads in my demo company here. I can then see to the right of that, if there happened to be any issues that it identified, it was going to say resolve here. There may still be problems with these other ones. They still need to be reviewed, but these are clear issues that are problems. They could be, there's no vendor that they could find for it. It's a duplicate transaction. Anything like that could be causing this to have an issue. Let me actually open one that maybe it matched like this one.

All right. So here is my shore waste management draft bill. I haven't touched this. It just the system did all of this for me. If I pop open right here, now it's going to be a little bit hard to see because my screen's a little small. I apologize for that. Over to the right, it puts the actual invoice. We can pop this out to a separate screen. If you have multiple windows or multiple screens, you could do that. But I can see here this was my actual invoice from the vendor. I can see where it got the vendor name and pulled that in for me. It pulled in the bill date for me, the invoice date, as well as the number. So it got all that information for me automatically. It got that my terms were net 30, so I have the correct due date here.

So I can see all that information came straight over, and then also here is where it coded it. Like I said, this is the most commonplace that we see you might need to review because everyone has their own coding methodologies, but it's going to actually also pull in, you'll see the memo here. It has the memo straight from here, as well as the dollar amount. And it gets based on this vendor's history and on this bill that it was going to go to repairs and maintenance, which is correct in this case. So if I'm confident this is correct, then I could submit this bill through an approval process, or if I'm the last person to look at it, it could be posted at this point. I'm going to go ahead just and cancel in this case and leave it in draft. That's just one example you'll see if I looked at one of the ones that has a resolve on it.

It actually will tell me at the top of the screen what it is that I need to resolve. In this case, I have some invalid values looks like in my bill. And so I could come in here and make those changes and fix that information. So it's going to give me a little heads up if it catches anything that it can identify as an error.

All right. I'm going to go ahead and stop my sharing. Are there any last questions related to Intacct or the demo before we go ahead and wrap things up? And then we'll leave some time for questions at the end as well.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah, Karen. So I see a question here in the chat and it's actually a common occurrence we see and it's about a compliance. So they've struggled with recognizing revenue in QuickBooks. So is there any way that Sage Intacct can automate that revenue recognition process to help them stay gap compliant?

Karen Penhallegon:
Absolutely. So revenue recognition is definitely a complex topic and a big one. So I'm going to say a little bit of, it depends on your specific situation. So whoever that is, I might reach out to you later and talk more, but yes. So whether you're a construction company and you need to do some automation of your revenue from that, a project-based company, you need to do project revenue recognition with ASC 606 or any number of other different reasons you might have that. Intact has revenue recognition functionality built into it. So it can do that based on a lot of different factors in the system. So we absolutely have automation tools for that. That's a great question.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah. Thanks, Karen. That's all we have for now.

Karen Penhallegon:
Well, I'm going to go ahead and let Ren. I'll spend a few minutes wrapping things up and then we'll also may also ask questions, go ahead and get those into the Q&A and we'll make sure we try to address those as well.

Ren Stead:
Awesome. Thank you, Karen. I've lost count of how many demos of Sage Intacct, and I always still get very excited to see it because you forget how powerful Sage Intacct is when you're in the day-to-day, but I'm sure our audience, and I can see from the questions we're thinking critically about this solution. Okay. So just to wrap up, and I'll go a little bit quicker than I did before, just to make sure we leave the room for questions. At this stage, you've selected Intact as your preferred solution, and you've partnered up with EisnerAmper. So just a little bit about who we are. We are a top 15 largest accounting and consulting firm in the United States, as well as Sage Intacct's top bar partner. Collectively, we have over two decades of Sage Intacct implementation with deep experience in implementing a multitude of industries and working with different types of organizations.

And then just briefly to show you what our implementation journey looks like. At the beginning, during the plan and defined stages, we spent a good amount of time with you and your team to make sure that we capture how your business operates, your requirements, your processes, get to know you, and just walk you through how your new normal is going to look like in Sage Intacct. Then we move over to that build stage where we take the bulk of our time to make sure that we configure those requirements and help convert the data from your legacy software into Intacct. And then we move over to the model phase. And this one's a lot of the heavy lifting is going to be done by your team. You're going to spend time training in the system, and then also testing your data and validating all of the configurations.

So this is a critical stage, but we'll be here every step of the way. And then we move over to our deploy, right? That's our go live, which includes go live support to ensure that you have that first month closed as successful as possible post-implementation. But then the journey doesn't end there because then you transition to the client success team, which is my side of the table. Here, we partner you up with this client success manager, and our role is to ensure the success and satisfaction of Sage Intacct throughout the rest of your time with the software.

So then just to close us out real quick, and just to recap, right? I wanted to leave you with a picture of what your new normal is going to look like once you've made the move from QuickBooks to Sage Intacct, right? As you can see on the screen, your different systems are not talking to each other. Your entities are consolidated automatically. Your reporting is flexible and available the moment you need it. So best decision making, as we talked about before, and then you get time back with AI powered automations. And then just my last sentiment here, hopefully you guys are getting excited thinking about all the things that you're going to be able to do with all of the time that you'll save once you move from QuickBooks to best in class solution like Stage Intacct. So that's it for me. Back to you, Gage.

Gage Ulrich:
Yes. Thank you, Ran. Thank you, Ren. So we do have a couple other questions coming in, and there should be a poll popping up on your screen right now [Poll #1]. But anyways, so either Ren or Karen can take this, but I've been on QuickBooks for many years, so what kind of learning curve should I expect when moving to Intacct?

Karen Penhallegon:
I'll take first chance at that one, maybe Ren can take another one. I'm not going to lie. There is a learning curve, right? It's definitely a move from a small business solution like QuickBooks to a mid-market solution like Intacct because with more power generally comes more complexity of the system. It is not, to me, that difficult of a learning curve. If you are technology savvy and you're used to using your phone and your computer and your work, I think you won't have any issues learning Intacct. It's very user friendly and it's not so dissimilar from the QuickBooks layout that I think you couldn't figure it out very quickly. That's personally my thought, at least. Randy, do you have any thoughts?

Ren Stead:
Yeah. I mean, I can certainly add to it. So by the time clients get to my side of the team, the client success and support side, users have been in Intacct for a little bit in the implementation phase. So they do get some experience there. I got to say, my first check-in call with the client is usually about a month after go live. And you'd be surprised how little questions I have about, I forgot how to use the software, I forgot where things go. Certainly I answer those questions, but that's just a testament of how intuitive it becomes with just a month or two months of regular use. So I will echo with Karen's answer.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah, thanks. Did

Karen Penhallegon:
The poll update? Yeah, we should have a second poll, I believe as well. Yes

Gage Ulrich:
We do have another poll [Poll #2] coming on screen. Also, we do have another question. So it's actually another thing we've heard in the past and it's last year our audit was a nightmare. So how can Sage Intacct help us with audits going forward?

Karen Penhallegon:
That is such a good question. So a few things that we can do for audits. The one that I think is one of the best ones is that we can actually give the auditors access. So it's a cloud solution. So it's simple to give them view only access that allows them to then go look at everything themselves and run their own reports and pull their own samples. You can also, of course, build specific reports for the auditors. So you're not really limited to what the kind of basic report writer can do. And tax report writer can build very complex financial reports that are specifically what your auditors are looking for. And they can even be permissioned so that you can, rather than as long with permissioning the actual transactions, you can permission the reports themselves. So just the people that need them, maybe just the auditors can see those.

Ren Stead:
Yeah. And what I've seen some users ... Oh, sorry, just to add, what I've seen some users, some of our clients do is, especially if this isn't your first audit, you already know some of the reports or some of the items that your auditors are going to ask for. So you get ahead of that by building all of those reports as an example and just add them to an audit specific dashboard. So you have access to all of those in one place that you can give access to your auditors, as Karen mentioned.

Karen Penhallegon:
Perfect.

Ren Stead:
Thank you all

Karen Penhallegon:
So another question pop up. Procore integration was a question. So for those of you here in construction, we actually, and Sage has a special partnership with Procore. They have a very good integration with them. Integrates detailed transaction level information between the systems. So it's one of Intacct's best integrations actually is Procore. I highly recommend looking at it if you're using Procore. Sage has been in the construction industry over 30 years with its various products, so they are great in the construction arena.

Gage Ulrich:
Yes. Thank you, Karen. I believe that is all we have for now. And like once again, my name is Gage Ulrich and I work in business development, but here's our emails once again on the screen. So if you have any more other questions you're thinking about after this presentation, feel free to reach out to us while always available anytime.

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