The Future Beyond Great Plains | Is Sage Intacct Your Next Step?

Ren Stead:All right, thank you so much for the introduction, gage. Good morning. Good afternoon, everybody. Wherever you are today. I'm very excited to be here with you all. As Gage mentioned, I am a client success manager within our stage Intacct practice, but before joining the team, as he mentioned, I was a consulting consultant in varying capacities for clients across all industries and thus I have vast experience using for an accounting solutions and in particular GP or Great Plains as some folks might know it as. I've also used GP used that at the start of my career for about three years while working in the private sector. So as both an end user and from a consulting perspective using gp, it made sense for me to be here today to present this portion of our webinar and share with you some of my experience and some pain points I've encountered while using it as well as share some of the benefits I see my clients gain when using an accounting software that truly meets their needs, but more on that later.

Quick note before I get started. As I mentioned before, depending on when you first acquired it, you may call it GP or Great Plains Dynamics. Here we use it interchangeably, but for the purposes of this presentation, I'll stick with calling a gp. Alright, so let's get started. I want to first start by directing our attention toward some key dates. As you can see on the screen, if you're a current GP user, you're likely already familiar with these dates as Microsoft released this information well in advance and should have communicated these to all the licensed GP users so you can begin to plan accordingly for those organizations that were considering. Moving to gp, I do want to address these dates and what they mean. Starting with our new licenses. As of April 1st, 2025, Microsoft will no longer sell new perpetual licenses for gp and I want to make the distinction here between a perpetual and a subscription license.

A perpetual license means you can purchase a version of the software outright, so you own that version indefinitely and then by contrast, a subscription license that is paid monthly or annually allows you to use the software rather than owning the version of the program permanently. So in theory, you could purchase a subscription license of gp, but it'll be for a year and actually as of today it will probably be less than seven months. But just keep in mind, you will not be allowed to renew a subscription. So this is not quite a realistic scenario I don't think. For current perpetual license users, you will no longer be eligible for program upgrades beyond your current version unless you're under active enhancement or support plans until those of course expire next. As of April 1st, 2026, you can no longer purchase or renew a GP license, whether that's perpetual or subscription based.

So if your renewal period falls before April, 2026, you may have one final opportunity to renew your license for one more term, which gives you a reasonable although tight window of time to research, select and implement a new solution. If your license remains active through 2026, you will continue receiving limited support and minimal updates until December 31st, 2029. When support for GFP officially ends for all users, this means after this date, Microsoft will stop releasing server packs, new features, regulatory and tax updates, bug fixes, just general support. Finally, and this date is critical, as of April 30th, 2030 first, Microsoft will end all security updates and patching. So you are subject to potential data breaches, subscription, billing and service provider licensing agreements are also expected to end. Essentially this marks the complete end of life for gp. So as you can see, this space out plan is complex, fairly gradual and somewhat complicated, but don't worry, we're here to talk and walk you through your options.

All right, so now I want to shift the focus to the product itself and here I feel it's important to quickly mention as a former user, I can constantly say GP was a great solution for its time. So it makes perfect sense that many of you're here today and I want to ensure your organization, sorry, and I know you want to ensure your organization continues using the very best accounting technology available. So let's talk about why it was great and why there's some better options out there today. DP was acquired by Microsoft in 2001 after having already established itself as a go-to ERP and accounting solution. This is because it had strong elements for what organizations were looking for at the time. It was assigned for mid-market organizations, which at the time stood out as it offered features mid-market companies were looking for, but often felt too sophisticated and robust feeling like enterprise level system in terms of setup and maintenance, it was deployed on premise, which was the industry standard in the early two thousands when organizations wanted control of their data and its security.

It made sense at the time because the industry wasn't quite ready for the automation and integration capabilities we have today. It was highly customizable. And here I want to draw a distinction in a pro tip. Whenever you hear this term customizable as opposed to configurable, I want you to think potential hidden costs. Customization usually requires technical resources, time and additional budget. Karen will discuss how configurable differs later on in the presentation. It has a technically robust design, right? GP was built by engineers with an engineering mindset, meaning the programming was impressive. It was actually one of the first ERP systems written in dexterity, if any of you're familiar with that term. A proprietary programming language and development environment built in-house, which is impressive in the engineering world. However, the bottom line, because it was built by engineers solving accounting problems and not accountants, designing software which you would expect.

It often lacks native features that accountants expect today, such as embedded controls, native approval workflows and audit trails. I sometimes like to say GP was an engineer's masterpiece that accountants learn to use, not necessarily a tool Accountants helped build, which is unique strength of Sage Intacct, but I'm getting ahead of myself. And lastly, improved reporting for its time. GP first introduced smart lists, which provided robust reporting and data export capabilities over time. Smart lists were complimented in largely replaced by more advanced tools such as Smart Lease Builder. More recently management reported, which I think most folks are familiar with, and it eventually powered BI integrations. So again, fors era GPS reporting tools were good for the mid-market ERP space, but now modern cloud systems have since made real time reporting and visualization far more seamless and intuitive.

Okay, so all this sounded reasonable. So why is Microsoft facing out? Gp? GP was eventually branded and sold as a full ERP system out of the box, meaning you couldn't easily start small and scale, you have to implement a full suite from the beginning. It's an on-premise solution, meaning you need access to a physical server or VPN, you can't access it seamlessly from your phone or a tablet to approve expenses, dashboards, or pull data on the go. So if you're someone who carries your laptop in your pocket, you'll love a cloud solution as opposed to an on-premise solution. It typically requires IT resources to maintain the servers, the backup security, which adds cost and complexity. Again, those hidden costs that we talked about before, although it was built very well, it lacks a modern intuitive interface that today's accountant professionals expect. And lastly, while GPS reporting is strong, it can also be complex and difficult to modify compared to modern cloud native solutions. All of this essentially saying we believe it was truly the right tool for its era, but definitely outdated in today's standards.

So what exactly are today's standards? Cloud first is a new standard for SaaS solutions, software as a service. Think real-time features fixes security upgrades without disruption to your day real-time access anywhere seamless integrations with other business applications via open APIs, multi-entity and multicurrency support built in. So no more consolidation entries, no more consolidation reporting, nightmare off Excel, flexible and easy to use reporting capabilities. Lastly, but probably most excitingly, AI powered functionality including automation for ap AR month end close and intelligent assistance, all of these capabilities are automatically developed and deployed in cloud solutions. Oh, okay. Before I move on, I feel like I threw a lot of information at you all Gage, is there a question from the audience I can address before I move on?

Gage Ulrich:Yes, Ryan, we actually just had one come through. They said we don't necessarily use GP as an ERP solution primarily, but we like the option of knowing we could use those modules if we wanted to. Is there a downside to moving to a solution that is only accounting?

Ren Stead:That's a great question and I think this person, whoever's from the audience picked up that I kept referencing GP as an ERP solution. That's because GP was primarily an accounting solution. Yes, but then it evolved was branded and sold as an ERP suite, which is fine if you're someone who's not using the ERP modules, I think you're potentially overpaying for your license. I like that you solutions should be able to allow the option to use and scale as needed, but if you're not currently using it, I would say you're probably overpaying. You want a solution that gives you your core functionality but still allows you to build on as you scale and you grow as an organization. So that's essentially my point. Great question, Dom.

Gage Ulrich:Thanks. I think that's all we offer for now.

Ren Stead:Alright, awesome. All right, so let's talk about some of our options. As you can see on the screen, there are four paths you can take. You buy a short-term subscription license. This will allow limited G access through April of 2026 as I mentioned before. However, these licenses will not renew after that and support will fully end by April of 2031. Do nothing and stay on your current GP version. If you have a perpetual license and while you typically own your software forever, it will become increasingly unsupported and secure and noncompliant, especially if you handle your own payroll and taxes, you do lose those updates once Microsoft stops regulatory patches. So certainly something to keep in mind, you can implement a new solution within the Microsoft ecosystem. As an example, Microsoft relatively new to the market solution business central or bc. I want to talk about this one because I can see why an organization might make the conjecture of the BC being a Microsoft product makes sense, especially since Microsoft is providing low and attractive costs for basic functionality during your first year.

I do want you to keep in mind that this choice is still a full implementation project with comparable costs, timelines and resources needed to any other solution. So I'd view this option as a great opportunity to reassess your needs and the industry standards and evaluate what truly fits your organization best. I'll say you owe it to yourself and your team to again select an accountant solution that is best in class. And then lastly, evaluate a new accounting software. Here you would be choosing a solution that is proven modern and AI powered to dive deeper into this option. I'll pass it over to you, Karen, who has many, many years of experience helping clients explore new solutions, identify, create key selection criteria and demo for us a leading modern platform. Karen.

Karen Penhallegon:Great, thanks Ren. It's like we mentioned, I've been doing this helping clients select and implement ERPs and accounting systems for over 16 years now. So we've gone through this process with the clients many, many, many times and I like to just start out with sort of a walkthrough of what should you do when you're evaluating really any new software solution. So whether it's an accounting solution or any other software that you're considering for your business, this is sort of a high level overview of the steps that we would recommend that you go through to select that system. So I'm going to walk through each of these just a little more detail here. Number one, and this is actually the one that probably gets missed the most, is gather requirements. So before you start Googling software solutions, that's what almost everyone does, right? Or asking your peers or going out anywhere else and looking for software, you need to understand what should that software do for you?

So what are the pain points with your current solutions? What do you need a system to actually do? And this may not just be yourself, you probably need to go to others in the organization who are going to be using this solution. So think about everyone who is being impacted, whether it's someone who gets reports from it, someone who is actually entering things in, people who are doing approvals. I would recommend definitely going out meeting with all those different people and seeing what their thoughts are on what they would like to see in a new system. Once you have those requirements, now you need to identify, okay, what is the priority of these requirements? So what is the most impactful things that we need to think about in the new system? So something that's going to save somebody five minutes a day is going to have less value than something that's going to save them four hours a day and time.

So you definitely want to think through what are those key things that are non-optional. I have to have these and if a solution doesn't have it, then it's gone. Things that would be great to have and maybe things that I call it would be nice to have, right? You can live in a solution without these things, but if it has it, that's even better. So some sort of ranking for those requirements will be very important. And that's going to feed directly into our next box here, which is a requirements matrix, whatever you want to call this. It's some sort of evaluation matrix that you can use to compare solutions and what they can do. So it's a way to take all of those different requirements, maybe group them together in different ways by type by module, however you think of them, put that priority in there with them so that you have something that is an apple to apple comparison for systems.

If you're looking at different solutions, it can get very overwhelming. So you want to make sure you have a good way to come back and say, okay, we said this was really important and system A did it great, system B did it okay, and system C doesn't have it that way you can really do a comparison between those solutions. Now once you have those requirements and you understand your needs, now you have what you need to go out and start researching your options. So this is where most people start. So very common that we hear that I went to Google, I went to G two or whenever, Capterra, any of those places. That's definitely where you can start. We recommend sites like G two and trust Radius is a great place to go research that's actual end user reviews of software. You can also ask peer groups.

So if you're members of different groups, definitely great to ask your CPA, ask your audit team, what do they see, anyone that you can on what experience they have with solutions. And this should net you a number of different options. I like to say here you want to have probably five or six options that you're looking at and maybe less if you have a very specific industry need. But from that list you need to then exclude things that aren't going to be a fit. So back to that requirements matrix. What are those critical things and what are some reasons maybe that you need to exclude these options? They don't meet those critical requirements. It could even be cost, right? All solutions cost different amounts. If you are a smaller mid-market business, you're not going to be able to afford SAP, right? And so that's going to be automatically excluded.

It may be a great solution but you just can't afford it and that's fine. So go ahead and cut your list down and the goal is to get down to a list usually of two to three top priorities. Now, not to say you can't have more, but the reason you want to work with that short list is because it's very quickly going to get confusing when you start talking with all the different vendors and seeing the demos. It's easy to blur together when you've seen 3, 4, 5, 6 demos. So I always say start with fewer. If you're unhappy with all of those that you have on your short list, you can continue going down your list of other options, but try to pick out those are their best fit and engage with those vendors. What will normally happen after that, don't really have a bullet point on here for it, but the average vendor is going to ask you to engage in some qualification or discovery or they'll call it something like that.

They're going to actually dig into your needs. So it comes back to if you have that requirements matrix and you've had those interviews with everyone you already have that you know what you're looking for and you're ready to answer those questions, those vendors should then do a demo for you personally. We do custom demos for our clients, so we're going to take those requirements and then show you what that's going to look like in the actual solution. And so that's what I would look for as the standard. And then from there you kind of move into proposal and contracting with the various vendors.

I'll pause for a brief second. That was a lot. Any questions out there? No. Okay. Alright, so let's talk about one option. So as Gage mentioned at the beginning of this call, we are sage intact, value added resellers. I've worked in GP as well as SAGE 100 in a number of other solutions as well. So what we just talked about applies to any solution, but specifically we're going to spend the rest of the presentation talking about what is Sage Intacct and what can it do for you if you're moving off of Great Plains. Alright, so I'd like to start just kind of with a quick summary of some of the high spots. So first question, what is Sage Intacct and why is this spelled so funny? So Sage Intacct give you both answers here. It is a best of class leading mid-market accounting solution or ERP, you can use those words interchangeably generally.

So by mid-market we are talking about people that are sort of outgrowing that QuickBooks or the Zero or Peachtrees or those sorts of level of solutions and need something more sophisticated. As for why it is spelled that way, Intacct was created as cloud native from day one. So it's always been in the cloud over 25 years now. It has been a cloud solution and at the time when they came up with the name it was internet accounting, so INT for internet and A CCT for accounting. So that's why it's spelled funny. It stands for internet accounting. Now what I've got on the screen, the graphic here is just some of the high points of what makes Sage Intacct different than a lot of other solutions that are out there. So I'm just sort of go around and talk about each of these boxes here. So best in class, best in class.

What that means is that Intacct is going to be really, really good at accounting and those things that are centered around accounting, financial reporting, AP and purchasing, ar invoicing, your clients. It's great at project accounting or job accounting, construction accounting. So very, very good in those areas. In places where it's maybe not quite as savvy or maybe it's just you don't like the solution that they offer as much, it is going to offer an API, which is an integration tool out to a lot of their solutions. More on that in a minute. I have a whole slide on that that we'll get to a few other things about Best in class software. Sage Intacct is the only A-I-C-P-A preferred financial management solutions. So the AI CPA does not endorse products lightly and of course we're a CPA firm. A lot of people on this call might be CPAs or work with CPAs.

So that's definitely a very important endorsement because it means they really believe in that product and believe that it is a great financial solution. It is GAP compliant. So for the non-accountants, if we have any on the call that's generally accepted accounting principles, but it is the accounting rules that we should all live by. So if you are having to get audits, report to banks, report to stockholders, to boards, to anyone, you're going to need to be GAP compliant. And Intacct is that it's also, I would call it very user-friendly. So it is actually a lot of the designers that currently work for Sage Intacct previously worked for Intuit QuickBooks. So they have some of that same sort of look and feel where it's a much easier to navigate solution. A lot of other solutions you see, especially from the days of the GP or Sage 100 era RI was talking about very engineering designed.

So a software developer ER wrote it and it makes logical sense but it's maybe not the easiest to use. Intacct designed by accounting and finance people. Yes, they worked with developers but they have done the design for the actual solution. So it's much more user-friendly, it's also configurable. So what this means is that rather than doing customizations, so we're not going in and writing code to change things in Intacct, there's no script writing, none of those things. Instead everything is controlled by configuration. So it switches that you can flip in a solution or different things that you can do right within Intacct to change the way that it actually functions for you. So it's much easier, much lower entry cost and easier to maintain for the long term. It's also scalable. So what does that mean? It means that as your business is growing and changing, it's going to grow and change with you. So whether you're a smaller business and it's just getting into Intacct and maybe you just need the basics, that's great. You can start with just the basics. But as your organization grows, if you need to add users, add other modules, add other functionality, it's simply again flipping switches to turn things on and you're going to have access to that functionality. So a very scalable all the way from a small business up to an enterprise level business.

All right, moving on around, I mentioned cloud native already. So built from the cloud from day one. So it's always been online, always been designed that way. It also part of the working with a true cloud software means everyone is on the same version. So everyone here familiar with the GP probably knows you're on a different version every year or two. You have to stop and have downtime when that version is upgraded because it has to be updated on your server and all the workstations have to be updated. And it also means Microsoft is supporting multiple versions. So they're having to maintain code for three to four versions at any given time with a cloud native solution, there's a single code base. So all code is the same for everyone that is using the solution. And that means rather than focusing on maintaining and fixing three to four versions, companies like Sage can invest in innovation instead.

So they're not doing maintenance, they're doing innovation and that means they can do rather than once a year updates, they're doing quarterly updates and there is no downtime. They do them on Friday nights at two o'clock in the morning and so you don't have any downtime in the solution. You come in the next day and all the updates are just there automatically. Another great benefit, it's cloud native and integrates with APIs for other cloud products. So an API is an application programming interface. I don't like to use acronyms that explaining them, but that basically is just a language that two computers can talk to each other with. So two systems, like if you're using something like a bill.com or Expensify or ramp or any of these other solutions, ability for those solutions to talk to each other and put information seamlessly between them, a couple others and then we'll stop and see if there's questions on reporting.

So we'll talk a lot about this during the demo, but the ability to have dimension based reporting really, really powerful. I've got a bunch of slides on that. It's real time. So as soon as data is entered in the system, it's available for reporting. So there's not a need to post multiple registers for data to show up in your financial solution. Everything is not batched. It's posted immediately to your sub and your general ledgers and is immediately available for reporting. And then it has native multi entity and multicurrency consolidation. We'll see again in tech does natively multi entities, all your entities share a single environment. So you can easily have consolidation and elimination entries built in right into the solution. And same thing for multicurrency. If you need to have multiple base currencies and tech can do all those conversions and translations for you automatically.

And then last but not least, AI powered. So this is a great one. AI is taking over the world, right? But Intacct has been in the AI game for a long time. It's been a long-term vision of Intacct and Sages actually CTO, Aaron Harris to bring AI into the accounting world. So Intacct has to add AI and machine learning functionality for about six or seven years at this point, and they're adding more and more all the time. They've got a very robust AI policy. I encourage anyone who's interested in ai, Aaron Harris is a great speaker on it, go out and search YouTube and such for him.

But some of the high level things, they started out with a GL outlier detection, so it detects anomalies in your general ledger entries. They have released a couple of years bill automation for ap, meaning that it will read your AP bill, it'll match it to your pos. If you use pos, it will put all that information in for you to review in the solution and it learns over time and gets better and better at that. And then they've just released something that I'm very excited about, which is close automation. So this is brand new hot off the presses if you will. It is some incredible tools to help you in your month end close. So things like automating reconciliations, giving you much better close reporting, giving you great close checklists that you can work against. There's so much in this one that we could do a whole webinar just on that so I won't spend too much more time on it, but it's a really, really great solution. I talked for a long time on that slide. That's probably the biggest slide we have. Are there questions that I need to stop and answer?

Gage Ulrich:Yeah, Karen, we have a question in the chat right now. So they want to know how does Sage Intacct compare to QuickBooks online and is Sage Intacct better?

Karen Penhallegon:Okay, I'm biased, so I'll start out with that. I think it's better, but it's not necessarily for everyone. So QuickBooks online is designed for small businesses, which makes it great for a small business. So if you're a sole proprietor or a startup company, low cost to get in the door, but it is somewhat limited. Now I'm not a QBO expert by any means. So if you have specific questions on QuickBooks online, I do have a colleague who knows everything about it, we can get you introduced to that person. But high level, it's going to have fewer functionalities and fewer options than something like a Sage Intacct. It is not really dimensional, we'll talk about that more in a minute. But QuickBooks Online is really just has a class dimension and I think maybe one other. So there's not the flexibility of reporting and it doesn't have some of those higher level tools.

You need to do things like really great job costing or automated allocations. Automated project billing, there's a lot of automation tools, cookbooks online, don't get me wrong, it's a good solution for the right people, but when your business starts to grow, you often are going to outgrow those capabilities of QuickBooks online and you're going to find yourself usually doing more and more outside the system. So if you're doing a lot of work in Excel or if you have multiple entities is usually the number one reason people come to us from QuickBooks desktop or online, you're consolidating in Excel. That's not going to happen in Intacct automatically consolidates for you. So if you're spending a lot of time doing consolidation, enter into transactions. That's some of the places where we see QuickBooks online falling short. Great question. Any other ones?

Gage Ulrich:Yeah, thanks Karen. We also have one other one. Going back to reporting, how easy is it to customize reports and dashboards inside of Intacct?

Karen Penhallegon:Great question. That's another good question. I think it's very easy if we have time during the demo, which we may not, I can definitely show some of that. So out of the box with Intacct, you're going to get about 180 reports of those, about 40 of them are financial reports. So you get out of the box, all different flavors of profit and loss, balance sheets, et cetera. You also get about seven or eight dashboards depending on the version or the flavor of your company, of your healthcare versus nonprofit, et cetera. Those you can duplicate anything. So most of the time what we do is start with an existing dashboard or report or you can create something from scratch and then you have unlimited ability to customize those. So you can put reports. So different types, different types of widgets on those dashboards yourself or our team can help with that. You can take any of the standard financial reports and modify them. And so it's very flexible. There's also a lot of training on it. There's about an eight or nine hour course just on the financial reports alone that you can take from Sage and then we often also help clients with that as well. Questions?

Gage Ulrich:Yeah, thanks Karen. I believe that's it for now.

Karen Penhallegon:Okay. Alright, so I'm much on our clock to make sure we have time here. I'm going to go ahead and try to move through these next few slides. We've talked about some of these things already, but this is a little bit more about best in class and kind of what that means. So we've got Sage Intacct as our best in class solution. So the things that it's good at are things like accounting and ERP. They've got a new HR and payroll tool that you can use. They've got analytics tools, planning tools, all that comes within the solution. But if there's either you don't like Sage's version of it, which is perfectly okay, or you think another solution fits you better or there's something unique to your industry, we can connect out to other solutions. And there's two ways that that might happen either through those open APIs.

So both solutions are cloud solutions. A lot of times they will both have an open API and in fact there's over 400 marketplace partners that have pre-built integrations with Intacct. So people like Salesforce, adp, bill.com, Expensify all have pre-built integrations. So there's a large, you can just go Google Sage and Tech Marketplace, you can see all the different marketplace partners out there that have pre-built integrations. If for whatever reason maybe you have an older solution, something that's custom in-house and then it's not available for an API, you can still do import export, right? So you can import all sorts of things into Intacct. The most common probably being GL entries that we see. But we can do all sorts of different, what we call data feeds where you're actually importing data into the, alright, just a few more things about Intacct and I'm going to dig a little bit into the actual structure of the solution.

And before we show the demo, we talked about some of these already as EPA preferred provider financial applications. I mentioned earlier this, so you have something reference back to G two and trust radius. So two of the best rating sites out there if you want to go out and actually look at real user reviews in Texas is rated number one in customer satisfaction for I think I want to say nine years in a row on G two. I think it's the right number. And then trust rate is year over year is rated buyer's choice and also true certify, which means they ethically source all their already use. A few of the things we've already talked about here are the four main function releases a year. Those are not just minor updates, those are truly new features and functions to the solution. But Intacct also in Sage have a culture of being very customer-centric. So they have a customer for life program as well as a buy with confidence guarantee. So you can be confident that you're getting the right solution for you.

Alright, so a couple more slides and we're going to see a demo for about the last 15 minutes or so, but this is a little bit about intax architecture, and this might go back a little bit extra to the question about what makes it different than QuickBooks online because a lot of the things on this slide are what makes it different. But Intacct was built really like I mentioned before by finance professionals and accountants and they saw a real lack in some of the solutions that were around back at the time in some of these key areas. So for example, they called us the multi everything architecture, but the first one being multi-entity. So if you're looking at GP or something like that, you actually have separate companies. And so if you have a new entity you need to set up, you're setting up a whole new chart of accounts, a whole new vendor list, a whole new customer list, excuse me.

They don't necessarily talk to each other unless you have another solution that lays on top of GP to get the companies to talk to each other. You're probably doing your consolidations in Excel. Intacct takes all that away. So all the entities live in a single shared environment. You have auto balancing entries between them. So all of your due to and Duero entries can be automated. You can also do consolidated reporting right out the box. And you can also control user security by this as well. So if you need users to only see some of your entities, you can control the security that way.

This middle option here. Another unique thing about Intacct is, and so what does that mean? Every accounting solution has a book. It's usually accrual or maybe cash in the case of QuickBooks, it's accrual, but then it will do a conversion to cash for you. Intacct actually has separate books. So out of the box you can turn on, again, it's a configuration accrual, cash gap in textbooks, maintain them all separately and report on them separately with different entries to each book if you want, you can also create an unlimited number of user defined books. So whatever flavor of reporting you might need internally, maybe your bank wants to see things a different way than you do or you have different stakeholders who want to see the information differently. We can accomplish that with a combination of these books. And then to me, really intact superpower is this last one, it's multidi dimension, so the ability to tag information.

So in the case of gp, your older solutions, often what we thought of as a dimension was actually a segment of your account string. So your company, your main account, maybe you have departments, locations, whatever it is that you're trying to track in your financial reporting. Intact is going to take those and split them out into their own fields. So no longer are we going to need to have a chart of accounts that is 4,000 accounts long. We can for every single combination of the various dimensions. Instead we split everything out into their own sections. And these are built into Intacct. So other solutions, well say they're multidi dimension but they're customized dimensions. So they have to go in and either write code or do things like that to create these dimensions. For Intacct, they're built into the system. So they're there from day one, all the reports already exist for them.

They're built into all the screens. You don't have to do anything but turn them on. Also, they can be built into hierarchies and used in groups so that you can do a better job of reporting off of them and the easier job of reporting. So let's take a look at some examples of the dimensions. So these are common ones that we see actually of these all but one are standard out of the box dimensions that everyone gets included. And then one is an add-on. But I like to group them into kind of three categories. So where the what and the who of a transaction. So where did that transaction occur? Under what entity for what location or for what department? We can rename these whatever we want in the system. So whether you use cost centers, business units, whatever you call something, we can rename it.

So that's the where dimensions, those are all included. The what dimensions. So class is sort of a wild card. It can really be whatever you want it to be. We've used it for things like equipment. We've used it for things like investments or loans or service lines, all sorts of ways that we've used. Class item tends to work with purchasing or sales. So you might have purchasing or sales items that you use, but you can also do inventory and check inventory items. And then projects is the one on here that is an add-on, but you can easily add it on tracking project or job costing or if you're a construction company, there's a lot more underneath this project that I could just go on about for days. It comes with about three other dimensions underneath it, but that's the main one really is project. And then finally the who of a transaction, what employee or customer or vendor is that related to. So all of these are available on every transaction. So really is going to turn your GL into a giant pivot table is the concept here. So then things being buried in a segment or buried somewhere in a transaction. Our general ledger has all of this detail in it and we can take it and pivot on it any way that we want.

All right, I'm going to hop into the demo next, but before I go there, are there any more questions?

Gage Ulrich:Yes, we actually have a couple Karen. So we have one, it's mentioned since we're on dimensions, is there a set number of dimensions we can create? We're thinking we need around 10 and they also asked, adding to the dimension question, can we set the number? Oh my bad, can we set the dimension name to what we want it to be? And are there some out of the box dimension names that are already in Sage?

Karen Penhallegon:Those are a great question. I'm going to take the second question first actually because it's a little bit easier one probably because I'm showing on the screen right here. The darker boxes are intact. Standard names for these dimensions except departments just abbreviated, but this is the names that Intact gives the dimensions, but you can rename them anything you want. So we have the ability to call a dimension anything which is what sort of in the second little lighter color boxes off to the side. So yes, we can certainly rename dimensions. Technically you can have an unlimited number of dimensions because you can purchase what they call user defined dimensions beyond the standard ones. However, I have a single client out of, I'm doing this 15 years, I have one client using a single user defined dimension. Believe it or not, people often come to me and say, oh I have 15 dimensions and we can actually work with you and understand what your reporting goals are.

And a lot of times they aren't necessarily dimensions, but it's different ways of looking at the same data. So if you're grouping together vendors or customers in different ways, grouping your projects in different ways, whatever it may be. So we would work with you to understand what are those reporting facets you're looking for and what's the best way to get them into the system. And it may or may not be that making you pay for more dimensions. That's our goal is we don't want you to pay for something you don't really need, right? But if you need them technically you can have a thousand dimensions if you want. It is absolutely an option. Did I answer all the questions I think on that one?

Gage Ulrich:Yes. And we also have one other question. So how does Sage work with intercompany transactions? If you do one journal entry and one local location entity, does it mirror the journal entry and the opposite side to the other location entity?

Karen Penhallegon:That's a great question. I might need to show that one in the demo in a second so I'll make sure I show it. But to high level, explain your journal entry would actually cross the two entities. Let's just say you're doing, I'm going to keep it super simple. A cash transfer between two entities. So entity A is giving money to entity B. Your journal entry would literally be cash credit entity A, debit entity B. That's out of balance. It's a no no, right? No, no. So we set the system up to say, okay, A and B use these inter entity accounts and the system is going to actually create the balancing entry. So it's going to say now entity B has a due to entity A, because they owe them money, entity A has A due from entity B. So it's not creating on the other set of books, you're creating the entry on both sides of the books. It's creating the balancing entry for each entity. It may sound confusing, but I will show you the actual screen in a minute and you'll see the actual posting and what Intacct is doing. That was a great question.

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

Karen Penhallegon:Alright, fantastic. Okay, so let me go ahead then. So I'm going to do, I'm pause for a second here and I'm going to share my screen. So everybody give me just a second. I want to leave a few minutes for questions at the end. So I'm going to try to keep this demo a little bit shorter. I'll definitely look at enter anything and if there's anything else people would like to see specifically go ahead and pop into the q and a. I'm happy to pivot and show things if I can in here. I may not have things perfectly set up for on the fly, but I'm happy to show a demo. I think that should be sharing. Can I, somebody give me a thumbs up or something, let me know that we're sharing right now on my team, let me know. Yep. Fantastic, thank you.

I kind of like to work everything when I'm showing Intacct high level from a dashboard view. Now keep in mind if you want to see more of Intacct, just reach out. I can talk about Intacct all day and we'll happily give you a much deeper demo. Let's just keep it high level. But I like to use dashboards because it shows a lot of the different features of Intacct all in one nice place. So this is sort of an executive dashboard is what I like to call this. So it's really a high level overview of an organization, but like I mentioned, you can have an unlimited number of dashboards. So you can see just in this one dashboard group I have probably 10. And that can be for purposes for specific people like your CFO or controller, they might be something like a month in dashboard, all sorts of different reasons you might set up dashboards, whether it's first individual people or for a group of people to use that dashboard.

So a few different things on this dashboard here. These are what's called across the top here, performance cards. So a performance card is like a KPI or a quick piece of information that you're wanting to view. What makes performance cards that a little more unique here is that they're not just a flat number, they are more than that. So Intacct, you can customize these. They can be for different time periods. So if I want to do a month, a week, a quarter, a year, it's based around your reporting periods. So even if you're somebody like a restaurant who has custom reporting periods, like 13 periods, it's all based around that.

It can also do comparisons. So not only is it pulling the data for whatever period you tell it, it can compare that either to a prior period or to your budget. So if you're using budgets, so for example, I can see right here operating expenses, I can quickly see I've got a green arrow, I'm under budget right now for the month and I can see this either as a dollar number or as a percentage number right here on the screen. So the concept of this whole dashboard is turning it from something that could you get this information today? Yeah, you could go run reports and figure out the numbers and figure out the difference between the two. But right here, all I do is open my dashboard, I have a green arrow, I'm good. So it's going to turn that information into something just a little more faster, a little more actionable for you.

Another great example here is that it doesn't have to be financial data. So Intacct also can help you track non-financial or statistical data. So whether you're tracking things like I happen to have number of clients as this, maybe it's number of active projects depending on your industry, it can be all sorts of different things. For hospitality, we've tracked things like number of beds available, number of rooms available, patient visits for things like healthcare or all sorts of different metrics. Anything you can imagine. We have car washes that track number of cars that come through the car wash, right? So it's anything that you can imagine we can track in these and then we can actually put that information and blend it into your data, your financial data. So maybe you want to know average revenue per customer, we can calculate that with this information and have it right in the report for you.

Alright, a few of the things that are on this dashboard over to the right I have some charts. So examples of charts and graphs. These first two are out of the box. You get these automatically things like expenses by the department. If you hover over a chart, you're going to see the data behind it. I know it's probably a little bit small on your screens, but it's going to tell you the number and the percentage of that number can also choose to show that data. So I can kind of see everything either in data or as the graph itself. And I can click on any of these to drill down. So if I want to drill down and see the numbers behind this, why is admin such a large percentage? I can click into that, it's going to pop open a new window that's going to give me the breakdown of buy account, what is in that amount.

I can click into any of these as well and actually see the details behind it. So maybe for whatever reason, professional fees looks very high, I can actually click into professional fees and see the GL detail behind that and see what's contributing to it right here from the dashboard. We'll show some more drill downs in just a moment as well. That statistical data we saw earlier can also be incorporated into charts and graphs. So you can see here the client trending. So for each of my companies, how is our client base growing? Or I can, as I mentioned, blend it into actual financials like gross profit per order. So I'm counting number of orders as well as number of clients.

Intacct also has, I mean probably its best feature in my opinion, but I'm a little bit of a nerd. I love financial reporting. So Probably's best feature as financial reporting. These are some of the standard financial reports here on actual versus budget by department. So we've got our departments here in the columns with our actual to budget numbers, we can do percentage or dollar variances and we can do conditional highlighting or the different types of conditional formatting that you can do in Excel. So it can be colors or different things. So you can kind of see here this could be tailored for specific department managers, for example, to be able to see their budgets and where they stand. And then over on the far right, it's going to automatically give me the total of everyone. So if you budget by department or location or any factor, we can budget by any of those and then put that budget into a report like this.

Similarly we'd mentioned consolidations, consolidated reporting right out of the box. This is the p and l by location report that comes with the system. So I've got each of my different entities, I happen to have three in this particular example company here, their p and ls is each a column. And then here I've got my total for all of my different locations. So this can go down into different levels. You'll see across the top here I actually can also filter this dashboard which, sorry, my data is very old in the demo company. So you could run it as of today or you can run it as of any date as well as up to three different dimensions. So if I did want to say only look at a single location, I can create location groups, like maybe operating locations, regional locations, whatever it may be.

Or I can choose and apply this. It's going to apply to all of the reports and widgets on this entire dashboard. And so now I'm going to see everything just for T 100 and the hierarchy built in is dynamic as well. So entity 100 has two branches underneath it. So I can see both the branches are now on my report as well as anything that was coded to the entity itself. And so it's going to dynamically change all the reports and things for me based on these filters that I have and on how I set those dimensions up.

Alright, I want to leave a few minutes for questions. The last thing I'm going to show and then we'll see if anybody has any specific request, is enter entity. So this is one of the features I often show. So I haven't entered any reconciliation report here, which is basically simply all of your inner entity accounts and all of the entities lined out. Now depending on how you do your inner entity, it may not look quite this way. Everyone sort of does inner entity a little bit differently. We can work with all sorts of different structures. But in general, what this is basically saying is there's a do from excuse me, account for each entity and due to for each entity. And then the other side of the transaction is the entity up here. So we're reading this column, for example, entity 100 is due from entity 258 54, and then there's the corresponding due to 200 is due to 158 54.

So we can kind of see the balance there between the two. If I drill into that, let's go through a drill down here. I can see these are all entity transactions. The system created for me. I can drill further down and actually see that transaction. This is going to pull up the journal entry. Now looking at this, I can see this came from cash management. If you want to go see the originating transaction that created the journal entry, you can click here to go see that. I happen to know this was a funds transfer by looking at it. So it was a cash transfer between two banks. This top entry section here is what the actual entry did. So I used the example earlier. I picked a good one on this one here. I use the example earlier, I'm just transferring cash. So entity 100 transferred money to entity 200. That's of course out of balance. What Intacct did then is it created this second part of this entry. So Intacct created this inner entity entry section where it created a due to entity two hundred's books and created a due from on entity one hundred's books. So that's what it's automating for you. And then if the two were to pay each other back, it would create the reverse side of that transaction.

So that's the inner entity. One other quick drill down that I'll show you, you can drill down to any transaction from within here. So even fast sale, let's pop up in our p and l here to full screen. In that little magnifying glass, we'll bring it up to full screen. So this is a summarized p and l, but I can open up any of these little buckets and actually see what's below that. So what is in my revenue groups? What are my specific revenue accounts? Or if I want to look at anything in my expenses or cost of revenue, you can name and customize. These are the standard groups that come with Intacct. These can all be adjusted and renamed for you. But let's just say let's do repairs and maintenance. There's probably some good stuff in there. I'm going to get the general ledger report again of everything that created there and I'll see, okay, got a couple of bills in here that were in this account.

I can actually click into this and it will open up the actual AP bill. So this is an AP bill and intact. I can see the summary information. So when was it dated? How much was it? If this one's been paid, I can see the payment here on printed check and click and see the transaction. If I want information on the vendor, all that high level information about a bill due date, et cetera, I can attach any number of documents. Usually on ap it's just a single PDF, but you can attach multiple documents in here. It'll maintain them for you. And importantly, these are maintained in Intacct in the cloud. This is not a link to a location on your server like we see with a lot of legacy solutions where if you go rename that document, poof, your link is gone. No, this is actually saved with Intacct in the cloud maintained in their backup system.

So it's not going to go away. And I can see down here, this is my coding area, so I can see my GL account that it was coded to any of my various dimensions. This is actually inter entity bill. So you can see that two different locations split this bill. Two different entities, 100 and 200, it went to the admin department. If I click show details, all my other dimensions that I might use are also down here, right? So employee or warehouse, if you have items or inventory, the vendor that it was related to a customer and a project, all of those dimensions are available, like I said, on any transaction. So even if you're doing project accounting, you can associate a project and a customer with AP to give you customer profitability. So you can see all the actual expenses. It also will keep track, of course, anything that's posting, you'll have a link right to the GL entry, which is actually how we got here. But you go back to the GL entry and if you have approvals turned on, it also keeps the approval workflow. I don't have it turned off this particular bill, but approval workflow will show in here and you'll see the approval status and who approved it and when as well.

Alright, that was a lot of talking. There might be some questions. So I'm going to do is pause and see if there are any questions in these last couple of minutes for our webinar here.

Gage Ulrich:Yes, Karen, we do have a couple of questions. So does it have a PO module that you could show and does it have an approval routing?

Karen Penhallegon:The answer is yes to both. It does have purchasing and approvals, but I don't have time to show it. It takes more than three minutes, but if you want to reach out or gauge can reach out to you so we can see who asked that question, we'll reach out and connect and I can show it to you for sure.

Gage Ulrich:Question. Okay, great. And we have another question. Can GL journal entries and AP invoices be uploaded into Intacct thinking from Excel?

Karen Penhallegon:Yes, absolutely. So I can show this really quickly. So you can import all sorts of things into Intacct. There's an entire import data screen that will give you all of the different templates. You download these templates here. Now they're working on a new import service. That is very nice because you can use your own template that's ongoing. Some things are available here and some aren't. Regardless, there are all these Excel templates that you can use, including for journal entries, AP AR, purchasing order entry that we just mentioned, that those are in other places. So yes, we can absolutely import all these different things into the system. Kind of just give you a view of the list there. Great question. Alright, I know we probably need to wrap up, so I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing. If there are more questions, we will reach out to you guys afterwards since we're kind of at two minutes. I know we have a couple of wrap up slides here, Sam, so I'm going to pass it. It may be Rector Ren to give my voice a little rest here and let Ren sort of wrap up things for us.

Ren Stead:Yes, yes. Thank you so much Karen. That was a great overview of the software and I know the questions are coming in and we'll be happy to address those because we can go on and on and on. Ation intact if you can't already tell. So I just want to direct our attention to this last slide here. Going back to the cross section, and I'm going to go fast. We have about a minute, but some things that I want to highlight on the left, if you continue with gp, some of the risks that you're going to encounter, the loss of support, lack of innovation, but really the security vulnerabilities if you're no longer receiving those security patches depending on dependence on IT, infrastructure, again, those hidden costs that we talked about before. And then in contrast, going with Sage Intacct or a solution similar, the benefits that you'll gain, as Karen mentioned, the best in class solution, A-I-C-P-A recommended designed by accountants, all those good things.

And to talk a little bit more about those AI powered features. And what it really means is just how much time automation is going to save your team by eliminating manual entries, those intercompany eliminations and entries is Karen just demoed for us. You get real time data insights, which is what CFOs and executive leaders look for as they start to become more strategic, continuous feature upgrades. We've talked about that, the accessibility, robust integration. And then lastly, transparent pricing, clear subscription and support costs. No more hidden IT expenses, whichever path you choose. Our hope is that you leave today's session hopefully with new insights and considerations to help you make the best, most informed decision for your organization's future. I'm so glad you were all here today. Thank you so much for joining me. And then pass on to Gage to wrap up.

Gage Ulrich:Yeah, thanks friend. Yeah, thank you once again for all joining us today and with Microsoft GP coming today end of its life. There honestly is no better time to give your accounting system a fresh new look. So if you're ready to see how Sage Intacct can work for your organization or if you have any other questions, please reach out to Karen, ran or me, and we'd be happy to guide you through that process. Thank you once again and I'll hand it back over to Bella.

^{Transcribed by Rev.com AI}