Sage Intacct for Growth | Smarter Insights, Better Decisions

Karen Penhallegon: Right, so I'm going to talk a little bit here and talk about real time insights. As only mentioned, I'm Karen Pen Halligan and I really spend a lot of my time just helping clients understand what are they missing from their current solutions and almost always, almost every time it's reporting. And so that's the place where we spend a huge amount of our time and a lot of times we hear things like we don't have data to be actionable. So we're waiting until month end or even well after month end until the month is closed to actually see any data and that's really too late, right? In today's world always on, we really need to get in front of our data because it's too late to course correct if you're waiting until six weeks after an action has happened to try to look at data about that.

The great thing about a product like Sage Intacct is we can give you real time data. So as soon as data is entered into the system, it's available, whether it's on a dashboard like you see here with a number of different reports and like we're going to see in the demo in a second, it could be through different reports, different charts and graphs. That data is immediately available and we can really turn that data into more than just straight report. It can become something that's actionable. So we can give you trends, we can give you comparisons to things like budget or to prior periods, things that really you can take and turn around into a decision much more quickly than waiting until you get your financials two weeks after the end of each month. Now, Intacct does this in a few unique ways. One of the things that makes Intacct very different than other solutions is its ability to have multiple dimensions.

If you're familiar with QuickBooks, you might be familiar with the class. That's sort of a dimension, but there's just one in QuickBooks. Intacct comes with just out of the box, seven built-in dimensions in. There are other ones that you can add as well, and these are really, really powerful. There's a lot of built-in data analysis, standard reports, all sorts of filters and things built around these dimensions and all they really are just tags of information that you're adding to a report or to a transaction. So just some of the examples here that we're going to see as we look through some of our various dashboards and reports, I'm going to pull up in a minute. Entity and location, we'll talk more about multi entity and scalability soon, but being able to track individual entities and locations within those entities, tracking things like departments, employees, customers, and vendors, these are all things that we'll see on every single transaction and because on each transaction, it's then flowing automatically into the general ledger and we can take that information and send out reports that include all of that.

I kind of think of it almost like turning your general ledger into a giant pivot table. So now that we have all this data in different dimensions in different fields, we've got the ability to pivot and mix and match those fields into different reports. Now what does that really mean as far as what does your chart of accounts look like because it is very different potentially when you're looking at something like Sage Intacct. If you've been around the ERP world for a while, this chart of accounts here might look familiar. It's a segmented chart of accounts, very common in a lot of older ERPs or legacy ERPs where each piece of that account number means something, right? So in this case we have the main account, we have a location, a department, and a project that are associated with these. Really what we're doing, we talk about dimensionalizing, your chart of accounts is simply taking that and breaking it into its individual components.

So rather than having to repeat maybe your equipment account 15, 20 times, instead, we're going to have a single account for equipment or whatever it may be in your gl, and then we're going to have different columns to select the other pieces of Information Nation. So it has a couple of benefits. Number one, it's really going to shrink your chart of accounts, make it much easier to understand and that's great in a few different ways. First of all, from a reporting standpoint, it's much easier to write reports because we're not having to parse out the data from this one big long stream. Second of all, when your employees or your users are entering data, it's also easier because rather than trying to remember the codes or figure out which one is correct, they're selecting each individual component of the entry. So it's much simpler for them to understand what they need to do during entry. Alright, so I'll take a little bit of a break right now and we're actually going to hop into the system. We're probably going to spend almost half of this presentation in Sage Intacct showing you some of the actual features. So I'm going to show you right now just some of the reporting and dashboarding features within the system. Just give me just a second to share my screen. Emily, can you confirm when you can see my screen?

Emily Madere: I can see it.

Karen Penhallegon: Great. Alright, so just walking through, first of all, just some high level information about Intacct. It is a cloud-based solution. So you see here that I'm actually logged in through a browser. I prefer Google Chrome as the browser of choice for me. So that's what you're going to see today. So all you have to have to get to Intacct is going to be a browser and an internet connection. So wherever you are, as long as you have access to the internet, you're going to be able to get to the Sage Intacct. Secondly, I'll point out just a few features of navigation and information. I'm going to be logged in today as Emma. Emma is the CFO of my particular company. So she has access to everything, but keep in mind that we have very granular or detailed security available in Sage Intacct. So we have the ability to actually control what tasks user can see, whether they can, let's take vendors for example, whether they can add vendors or edit them or view them or none of that. So we have got a lot of really detailed ability to create those roles for your users. So that's very different because it means we can give more people access to the system to get these great reports because we can limit what they can see.

A couple of things I'll point out here. Right now I'm sitting at what's called the top level, so we're going to talk more about multi-entity in just a few minutes and some of the benefits there, but just given a little preview of that, all of our entities within our solution are sitting in one company. So if you're in a QuickBooks or Sage 50 or Peachtree or Sage 100, those are all separate files that you have to go back and forth between, right? Maybe you're logging in and out, they have different charts of accounts, they have different vendor lists, so it's a lot of extra work to move around between those entities. Here at the top level of my company, I'm able to see and interact with any of those entities so I can create transactions in any entity, I can do reports in any entity, and these are also permission able, so we can actually determine what users have permissions to which entities as well.

Alright, moving down just a little bit right here. This is our application picker. So this is a little dropdown list of primarily how we can navigate throughout the system. I'm going to also show you some shortcuts as well, but this is all the applications that I currently have access to as Emma and generally for navigation, we might come in and actually select, say general ledger, and over to the right it's going to pop out all the different general ledger tasks that are available. If the user doesn't have access to a task, it simply doesn't show up. So if they don't have access to the modular tasks, they're simply not going to see it. Excuse me. Now there's other options as well though. I like to use shortcuts. So if you don't want to have to navigate through the large applications list, one of those options is called bookmarks, and that's what I'm going to use today.

Works just like a bookmark that you would see within your browser of bookmarking pages within Sage Intacct. So you can see here I can bookmark any page and then I can rename these pages, I can reorder them and do what I will with my bookmarks list. So let's go and look at one of our examples here just to show how lists and bookmarks work. So this is my location list. So you can see here intax built-in hierarchies that come with dimensions. So in this case I've got three entities set up plus an entity for eliminations, for consolidations, and then underneath that in my hierarchy I have some locations as well. So anything that is below this top level or if there's more levels below this even is going to automatically roll up. So branch A one and a two will automatically roll up into entity 100 when I run reports. So it gives me a lot of flexibility because I can either look at the detail level or I can look at the top level and see all that information that's been posted. So just one quick example of how dimensions work and that hierarchy that we can see.

Alright, let's head back to our dashboard for a few more minutes. So you can create unlimited dashboards in Sage Intacct. So whether you each user has a unique dashboard that they want, you have dashboards that maybe have different purposes, as many dashboards as you can imagine, you can create. I've got an example here today called the executive dashboard. You can see here just some other dashboards that I have set up. It could be by role like AP or AR or it could be something like this executive dashboard, which is sort of a high level of review of the company. Intacct comes with a few standard dashboards that you can start with, but you can build your own as much as you would like. I want to take a closer look at this dashboard though, just to give you some idea of the power and that real-time ability that we have in here.

Starting here across the top next to where I selected my dashboard here, my data in my demo company is a little old, so I have it backdated. This normally would default to as of today so that you could run everything as of the current date, but you can also enter in any as of date that you'd like on the dashboard along with the date, I can have up to three more filters for a dashboard. I have a couple of filters here as examples. I've got departments available to filter and I've also got locations. So see here under my locations I've got my entities as well as those locations that we just saw on the previous screen, but I've also got the dimension groups. So along with creating hierarchies, we can create groups of dimensions as well. So whether that is putting things into regions, if you look at your data that way or operating versus non-operating entities, however you might think of your data, maybe you have revenue departments versus cost centers.

All of that can be created as groups and then we can filter on those. So let's just say for example, I want to filter just for entity 100 only when I click apply, it's going to update everything on my dashboard just like that. And now I'm looking at only information for entity 100. And then down here, for example, in this profit and loss, if I just look at this for a quick second here, before this had all of my entities, now it has each of my locations as well as things that were coded to the main entity. So it's all dynamic, it's all working based off of what I've selected in the filters and automatically knowing that, hey, that hierarchy exists and I need to show the data that's sitting below the entity in this report. For example, let's turn that back off so we can see all of our locations.

So now just to talk through some of the different widgets that you're seeing on this dashboard or components across the top here I have what's called performance cards. Performance cards are generally sort of quick pieces of information or KPIs. They could be a piece of financial data, like revenue, they could be a calculation. I happen to have profit margin, but I've seen a lot of other calculations used or it could be even something that's data, like in this case I have number of clients, maybe it's number of projects, objects, all sorts of different use cases for non-financial data to show up here. Now that's great. We can see this information but I think it's even more important is there's a lot more power to these performance cards than just showing you a piece of data. First of all, I can control the time period they're associated with.

These happen to be for current month. So you can see it says this month right here underneath each one I can change that to any period I want. Intacct has a lot of standard reporting periods available including the month, the quarter of the year, it could be a week a day, even a rolling 12 months is available here. So any of those time periods that you want to select can be displayed on one of these performance cards. The next thing you can do is actually do comparisons. So you'll see here it may be a little bit small, but each of these has a comparison. That's how it's getting this nice pretty green arrow. In the case of these first two, it's versus budgets, I'm comparing them to budget or I can compare it to the prior period and we've got these indicators that are telling me whether it's a green arrow or a red arrow, it could be a thumbs up or a smiley face of how that comparison is going.

So I'm over budget on revenue and the reason this is important is because this data, you could probably get it the same way. You could go look at the reports, run a couple of reports, compare the numbers, say okay, yes, am I over budget? Yes, but here I didn't have to do any of that. I opened the screen, there's a green arrow, I know that I'm over budget so I can also change this. So I don't want to see the actual dollars over, I've got to change it to a percentage so that if a percentage means more to you, I can do that. So it's all about turning what is a flat piece of information into actionable data that I can use rather than having to go dig and find that analytical data.

Alright, moving on just to a couple of other things that are available here on our dashboard. We're going to talk more about financial statements in a few minutes, but I've got a couple of examples of the standard financial statements. The first is this profit and loss by location. Now this is what's called a summarized profit and loss. What you're seeing here is our high level account groups rather than our detailed accounts. This is perfect for a dashboard. We may not want to see a very long profit and loss on a dashboard, but this summary profit and loss is really great. So I'm seeing my rows as those accounts account groups and then across my columns I'm seeing my entities or if I were to be filtered for an entity, the locations below that entity. So this is a standard report that comes with the solution. You can have it day one when you get into Intacct. We're going to drill into this one a little bit more later, but just note as we're going through that, anything that you see that's blue and a lot of things even that aren't necessarily blue are drill down links. So I'm going to show you some drill downs in a few minutes, but just keep in mind all these are drillable to actually get to that data behind it.

Moving down to just another quick example, the actual versus budget by department. So another example of taking that dimensional data. So I've got the same rows here as we saw on the original p and l, but instead of putting my entity locate or my location dimension in the columns, I have split this out by department and I'm pulling in budget information. So for each department I've got actual, I've got budget, and then I'm looking at my percent variance. Could also look at dollar variances if you want. And then I've got conditional formatting. So conditional formatting, very similar to what you might use in Excel is available in your financial reports and whether that's just highlighting things that meet certain parameters or in this case doing a color scale, it's all about, again, drawing your eye to things that might be a problem. So if I see something that is dark red or dark green that might call out to me right away of, hey, this is something that could be an issue. I've got something charged to admin here. I've got no budget in admin for revenue, so maybe this is something that's miscoded or something else is going on. So it really is about calling out those things that you need to go look at so you don't have to dig through the data and figure that out yourself.

Alright, last thing I'll talk about on here is going to be charts and graphs. So Intacct comes with some really powerful financial charts and graphs. There's about I'd say 35 or 40 financial reports available out of the box and about another 20 to 25 charts and graphs. And then you can create your own as well. These are some of the standard ones. I've got things like operating expense by department, vendor aging, or I can create my own. For example here I've got a new client trend, so I'm tracking that new client statistical data, non-financial data and actually putting it on a trend by entity so that I can see exactly how each entity is trending on bringing in new clients. All of these reports, sorry, these charts are drilled down capable. I can hover to see the data. If I hover over admin or sales, I can see the actual numbers, I can click to drill down into them or I can even just click show data and it will give me the raw data that's behind that graph. So I just need to know the actual numbers without hovering, you can get that as well.

Are there any questions so far Emily? I can't see the question so I just want to check.

Emily Madere: Yes, we do have one question. Someone asked how many charts and graphs can you have? And then someone asked, how often are people who are not in finance are using the dashboards?

Karen Penhallegon: That's two really good questions. So charts and graphs, that's an easy one to answer. Unlimited as many as you might want to create. Like I said, I think there are about 20 or 25 that come out of the box, but there's no limit on how money you can create for yourself as far as non-financial people using the system. It really does vary widely between my clients. Some clients are a lot more protective and only accounting and finance are getting into the system, but I've got quite a few clients that, for example, they're project-based businesses, whether they're in construction or some other project business and they have their project managers all have access and so they have dashboards that are set up specifically for those managers. Same thing, I've seen this as well work in other industries. Maybe it's some hospitality like restaurants, different places like that where you have department managers or division managers and they have dashboards set up.

Those managers can't enter anything, they can't edit anything, but they can come in, see their dashboards and they can drill down and actually see what is behind the numbers. I've seen it really be most effective, especially when you have people who are budget managers, they're responsible for a budget and accounting and finance might spend a lot of time telling people, this is your budget right now, this is how much you have left in your budget. If you drop that on a dashboard or in a report that they can go run, they don't have to call and ask finance or accounting that information for that information anymore. They can go see exactly what their budget is and drill down to the actual transactions that have hit their budgets. There's no questions as to whether things were actually for their department. We are not to AP yet. We'll talk about that in a few minutes. But there's also approval capabilities. So a lot of times we will have non accounting users as approvers, so they're actually approving things that are going against their budget. That's another great use case that we see for non accounting employees.

Any other questions so far? No, that's it. Those are great questions. Alright, keep 'em coming. I'm going to keep pausing and if you see anything really good Emily, just interrupt me. Okay, so we've got this beautiful dashboard. That's great, right? This information is really good, but I think where the power really comes to me is where is this data coming from? And one of the great things like I mentioned is this is all drillable, whether it is a performance card, a chart, or one of these other reports, I can drill down into all of this data. So just to show you a quick example of that, I'm going to use this little magnifying glass to kind of open this report and what that does is just put it full screen for me so I can see it a little bit better and allows me to actually see what's behind these groups.

So I mentioned this is a summarized report, right? I'm not seeing the individual GL accounts, but I can come in here and let's just maybe say utilities and facilities. I can open that up and actually see the groups and the accounts that are underneath that. So I'm able to get all the way down to each individual GL account that makes up this report. Then I can continue going then. So let's just say B repairs and maintenance looks kind of high. Let's drill into repairs and maintenance. So what it's going to do is open up the general ledger report. It's the GL detail is what some systems call this and it's every single transaction that has hit this particular account. So I can see this as the repairs and maintenance account and I'm getting all the transactions for December in this example, but I don't have to stop here, excuse me.

I can continue drilling down so I can put information on this report that might be helpful. I can put dimensions and things. Maybe I really need to see that transaction. I can keep going. I click on the number here. It is actually going to open up in this case the AP bill that posted. So I can see some summary information on the bill. Who's the vendor, have I paid it or is it open still if I have paid it. You see here it's got a link out to that payment record for me where I paid it. So all this information is right here at my fingertips just from drilling down from the dashboard. I can also have a attachments. So you can see here that I've actually got the bill a PDF of the bill attached so I can have attachments flow in and I can also, if you see down here in my entry section, this is really where I'm doing the real coding for this bill. I've got multiple entities on this bill. So you can see here we can actually enter one single transaction that hits multiple entities. We'll talk more on that in one of the scalability sections in a few minutes here. But all those dimensions that we discussed are here, whether they're right here on the top row or we can go down and see the details to see other information such as employee or item or project if we're doing project based accounting.

All right, if I want to go back, I can simply just cancel it opens up a new screen or window each time that I drill down. So I'm able to go right all the way back to my dashboard with no problems. One last quick thing I'll show you is also just the report editor. I could spend hours talking about the report editor, but I'm not going to because we have a limited amount of time today. But I'm going to briefly just walk through a few of the screens here and show you the ability that you can create and manage your own reports. So Intacct comes with a lot of great reports, but they may not be exactly perfect what you want. That's no problem everywhere in Intacct we can duplicate. So we can take a base report that maybe is close to what you want and duplicate that and then edit it.

Same thing for charts and graphs or you can create one completely from scratch. The two big pieces here that you're going to look at are going to be your rows and columns. Now your rows could be either account based or dimension based. So that means we can have dimensions become our rows, which is sort of flipping the traditional reports on their head versus in this case is an account based report. So it's sort of a traditional profit and loss statement. These rows, like I mentioned, are all built out of account groups. Account groups are exactly what they sound like groups of GL accounts. We help you when we're putting your chart of accounts into the system, we're going to help you determine where should these accounts fall in these account groups. And so it's all just built into the GL accounts themselves and we can change the names and things so the groups are tailored to your organization of course, but what that helps us do is use these standard reports really out of the box because everything is prebuilt.

If these aren't quite to your liking, that's not a problem. You can also build things completely from scratch. So you've got complete flexibility here. I can control how detailed things are if I want to expand and show more detail or less even down to the GL account level in any section. And I can also put whatever account groups might want on here. So if you want to add an account group, it doesn't have to be related to your profit and loss statement. This is currently the net income group, which is what a profit and loss shows, but maybe you want to also put ebitda, that's great. We can actually easily add that to the report. So it's as simple as that.

So just as an example, I'll pull this one in here and the great thing here is we can preview easily and actually see exactly what our changes are doing real time. So that's the account group I just added there. The other big piece of course is columns. In this case I'm doing what's called expanding the column. So I have my account name column. You might want to have number or number and name depending on your preference. But the real power is here in this column, this is where I'm choosing what reporting period do I want? Is it a month, is it a quarter a year? Is it inception to date? Literally everything to date or that rolling 12, we could also have trailing one year and then we've got expansion. So I'm expanding this by location. So what that means is that every location that it finds that has data in it, it's going to become a column. I can do this for any of the dimensions that you see here, or I could expand it even by time period. So if I have a month I can expand it into weeks. If I have a year, I can expand it into months or weeks. So it's going to automatically create the columns for you without you having to do the extra work.

Just another quick example. Alright, so are there any other questions, Emily, before we go back to our presentation?

Emily Madere: No, you're good.

Karen Penhallegon: Okay, I'm going to go ahead and stop sharing and we should be back live on our presentation now.

Emily Madere: Okay, so I'll talk for a little while. So our next item talk about is automation. The automation that lives inside of Sage Intacct. So I think it's important for all of our listeners to know is Sage Intacct releases four main feature function releases a year. So every quarter SAGE is pushing out new features and new functions and as part of their larger picture of Sage, they're investing heavily in automation tools and ai. So this next section you'll really hear us talk a lot about how those two tools work in tandem to help better their client base. So we're going to talk a little bit about each of these today. We're not going to talk about all of 'em, but inter accounts payable, automation, sage ai, which is saved copilot automation during bank rec, accounts receivable automation, and then inventory automation.

So the first one we'll chat a little bit about is AP automation. So this is I think a pretty common theme if any of y'all are using a bill.com or a ramp. But the idea is that you have an email box set up and vendors can email you, email you there, and then sage andt will extract the information sent in the email and digitalize it, review it, and then approve some. Now let's say that as it's going down has a question, it will bring it up to you to review and to fix maybe what's wrong with it or what it couldn't read. If you look at the very bottom of this slide, you'll see the black little box that is us showing you that AI is also part of this process. And then as you get more bills in and the more that the AI can understand the bills you send and how you code them, it'll get better and better if reading 'em and coding them for you.

Karen Penhallegon: I'll add to here Emily, sorry before you move on, I just thought of something else in the latest release, in fact also added the ability to match to pos. So if you use purchase orders and now has the ability that when the AP bill comes in and it reads it, it will also detect if it's related to a PO match to that PO and move it through the purchasing process as well.

Emily Madere: So the next one is automated. Automated big fees. And this isn't the most fun topic to talk about, but I was actually on site at a client last week and they said, well one thing that's top of our list is bank feeds because bank recs are a terrible process. So it's one thing I do like to bring up because it's one of those the silent killers if you will. So we can bring in your bank statements from your bank into Sage Intacct and then have sage do the matching for you so that you're not waiting until the end of the month to do bank rec. You're doing it as it happens and some of our clients are even doing daily bank recs with this process and through SAGE functionality.

And then I think everyone is asking themselves, well what about a chat GPT for systems? And Sage Intacct is definitely investing in AI inside their system and they call it sage copilot. I've seen quite a few demos of sage copilot and I've talked a lot about it. It's basically like a chat GBT for Intacct. You're able to ask it questions and it's going to be able to accurately give you answers back about your data. Sage has invested a lot in patents for sage copilot and I think they put more patents in on anti hallucinogenic patents so that whenever their customers are asking sage copilot questions, Sage copilot is giving them the right answers, which I think is important when you're dealing with accounting and financial data.

Karen Penhallegon: All right, so those are really good points. I'm actually going to show some of these examples in Sage Intacct. I don't have sage copilot unfortunately available to show it's brand new out in the universe. So just a second, let me make sure that I'll share my screen here. There it goes. Sorry about that. So I'm going to talk through some of the other ones. So there are three different areas I want to talk about automation and then if there are other questions I'm happy to answer them as well. I want to talk a little bit about entity and how Intacct can automatically create due to and do from transactions for you. We will see that AP bill automation, I have that set up for you to show you what that looks like if you have the bill automation turned on. And then I want to show you a little bit about cash management, how the bank feeds work.

Those are three of the biggest areas that we hear questions on from our clients. So starting out with intercompany, so inter entity transactions. So it's something we hear quite commonly from multi entity companies is especially if they're in maybe a QuickBooks is a great example is they're having to go back and forth between the companies to figure out their inner entity balances to make inner entity transactions because everything takes two entries or more to split out across the companies. Intacct erases that everything is going to live in a single environment now and you actually can set up Intacct to say this is what the due to and do from accounts are for each of those relationships of your entities. So you can see here I'm a little entity reconciliation report built that has my due to and do from accounts. They are my rows and my columns are my entities.

And so I can look at this and immediately say entity 200 here, 100 has a due from 200 of 5, 5, 5, 5 for example. So it lets me relate. That should then relate to due to on two hundreds books here it is right here. So I can quickly see the balances that they match and then if I want to make an elimination entry against those, I can, or if you're using the built-in consolidations, that can automatically make the elimination entry for you. Now what does this actually do though? Let's talk blend our topics here. Let's add real time into this inner entity automation. So let's just say that I'm going to do a funds transfer. It's probably the simplest of all entries you can do in the system. I'm going to move money from one cash account to another and that's going to create an inner entity transaction because we're going to have an unbalanced entry.

So let me go ahead and just add in a funds transfer and I'm going to say that my entity 100 is going to transfer some money to 200 for whatever the case may be. I'm going to backdate this so that it shows on our dashboard and let's make it maybe a unique amount so I can find it $299. So that's really all that's required for a funds transfer from the two, the date and the dollar amount. I can add other information if I wish, but none of that's required and I'm going to go ahead and just save this. I now in reality, this is creating an inner entity transaction right now because that's hitting two different entities books. So let's go back to our dashboard and take a look and see what just happened.

Everything load here. All right, if you remember this number before was 5, 5, 5, 5. It's now different. If I click into this number here, let's take a look and see what's behind here. And I should see my 2 99. There it is 2 99 that I just posted. What I'll see if I click into this is the actual journal entry behind that transfer. So I can see here this top section was the entry that I made when I created the funds transfer. So I took money out of one hundred's entity, one hundred's bank account. I put it into entity two hundred's bank account. So pretty straightforward except that this is now unbalanced because 100 and 200 are out of balance. What Intacct did was see that and create this inner entity balancing transaction for me. So it now knows that entity 200 owes 100 money, so it puts that credit in here for me. And the same thing, vice versa for entity 100 and now has a receivable from 200. So automatically it's creating the balancing transaction for me and if I were to go the other direction, it could automatically clear that out for me as well.

So that's the first sort of automation example. Moving on to our next example, we'll talk a little bit about ap. So I'm just going to hop over to a quick AP overview and talk a little bit about how AP works for just a second and then dive into some actual examples here. I love these overview screens and inact because they give you just an overview of the process. So these are some of the things that I might do with an ap, some common data inputs, and then my common tasks. So generally for AP bills will come in, whether that comes in through the purchasing side or through AP automation, like we'll see they can go through an approval process that's optional, then you would pay them, those payments can come through approval process. Then you could print checks or you can produce an a CH file or however you might want to pay your vendors.

Let's go look at that very first step of the process. And that's where most of the manual work generally is happening is actually entering Bills. Intacct with AP automation has created a new view that is specifically for bills that have come in through the automation process that are draft. So I look at all my bills, my full bill list, I'll see every single bill that has been created in my company. But this built-in view here can create custom views. This is some built-in custom views. It's for draft specifically. And so I can see here anything in a source column tells me that this came in from AP automation. So that could come in through an email to say just email address that's specific to your company or it can be uploaded so you can literally drag and drop it from your computer. What it does then is it looks at the PDF of the bill or if it's a jpeg, usually it's a PDF and it's going to try to create a draft bill for it.

Now, I may run into problems. So you can see here some of these have exceptions, right? So if I hover over this one, for example, matching vendor not found. So the bill that came in doesn't have that vendor name is not recognized, they can't find it in the system or the vendor has a different name or it's a new vendor either way. So I can actually go into this and edit that bill and fix it once. They don't have exceptions, you still need to review. They're not posted. So the system's not going to post anything without your permission, but you can actually come in here and edit one of these other bills to see what it actually did. So this is something that has not been touched by a human automatically. The bill document is I can click a little paperclip to see it's side by side.

I know it's a little small, I apologize. We zoomed in a bit so you can see my screen, but this is where all the information came from. So it's going to have pulled the date, the number, so we'll see those all match. It will have pulled the dollar amount. So I can see down here, pull the dollar amount for me. Where the AI really shows its power is in the coding section because that's where it starts to learn. So it may start to learn that hey, shore waste management, you normally code that to repairs and maintenance. So I'm going to start putting it there. It's normally coded to the operations department. Now you can still override these. You can even see it put the middle on here to match the description for me automatically. But as you make change to this each time and enter the AP bills and update them, it's going to learn how you code those based on the vendors and the informational, the vendor invoices. So that's really where the AI is coming in here. So this can save tons of time for clients. None of this is being typed anymore. It's just a person that looks at it, double checks it and either click submit if it has an approval process turned on or it clicks post.

All right, I've got one last thing to show on automation. Are there any questions so far Emily, before I jump there?

Emily Madere: Let's wait till this.

Karen Penhallegon: Okay, perfect. So last but definitely not least, like Emily said, it's not the most glamorous, the processes, but cash management is really critical of course to everyone's business and having good cash balances is so important to our clients. And so I always like to talk a little bit about just bank rec and cash management. So I'm going to show you an actual bank reconciliation and what that looks like. So I'm going to go ahead and reconcile. I've already started this reconciliation. So you'll see information such as my ending date, my balance are all in here. I can attach my actual PDF of my bank statement, which is always a great idea, keeps it saved in here from an audit standpoint. And I'm going to go ahead and continue and what I'll see if I have bank feeds and whether that bank feed is automated, which it can be if your bank allows it and auto downloads transactions or whether you import transactions, which is the other option for a bank feed.

It works the same way you set up matching rules and what can help you with that. So say if these things match, then you're going to match the transaction. So it's going to hopefully take a lot of that burden off of you flipping through a bank statement and finding matching transactions. So what you'll see is two different tabs in here. One is the bank tab. That's where you'll see your unmatched transactions most likely. This is where you'd come. Our clients who do daily bank recs or weekly are coming in here each day and they're looking at this list and clearing any issues that come in. So these are things that come through the bank that are not in Intacct. You can see in here, in fact, choose to show all transactions in my filter any that have already matched will show and you can actually click into them and see how it matched.

So I can see this was an auto match, I can see what it matched to on the Intacct side. For whatever reason, something's wrong, I can unmatch it, but more than likely you're really going to be looking at these unmatched ones. And so what you do for an unmatched one is simply come in and look and see. It'll have the information across the top and then it'll have all the different transactions below that are in Intacct that it could match to. So a few reasons this could be happening. First thing you probably want to do is search for the vendors. I'm going to search for securities. This is a security supply depot. I can see there's a couple of vendors that have security the name, but here's the one I'm looking for. I can see right here, this is for 13,300. So that matches, but I can quickly see the problem is that the check number didn't match. So that's why I didn't catch it. So it would be a simple, go check the bank and see if maybe they misread the check number and you could go ahead and clear this. If maybe it's multiple transactions, that's fine too. You can check off multiple transactions to match the single transaction as well.

Okay, so that's very high level the bank reconciliation. One last thing actually before I jump back to the slideshow and get to the questions would be you can also create entries from here. So for whatever reason this entry hadn't been created. This little action button here lets you go ahead and create the entry, whether it's a vendor payment, a funds transfer, a journal entry for things that are deposits. You'll have different options here. You can create the transactions right from this screen. Alright, questions?

Emily Madere: Okay, yes, there are two questions that came in for the ap. Can you easily edit the AP bill if you post it?

Karen Penhallegon: Yes. That's a really good question because a lot of older systems, you can't do that. You have to enter reversals and all sorts of things. The answer is yes with some caveats paid AP bills can only be reclassed, which means that you can't change the dollar amount or the date because it's been paid, but you can still change the GL account, the entity, all the dimensions are available to change except for vendor. The other exception to that is if it's a closed period. So things that are closed, you can't edit things in a closed period. You can reopen that period if you have permissions and edit it and then close it back. But normally you can't edit anything that's been closed. But other than that, yes, you can edit them if you have permission to do that.

Emily Madere: Great question, Julie. Hopefully we answered that. The second question that we have was which banks connect to impact?

Karen Penhallegon: That's a good question because the answer is there are hundreds, so it's a little hard to answer. I know all the major banks have connections. There are a few out there we've found some problems with. The problem is usually on the bank side because the bank themselves may not allow us to have a connection. The best I can say is we just have to try it and see if you have one of the major banks like a Chase or Hancock Whitney or one of those, they all connect. But if you have a smaller regional bank or even a local bank, we have to just see if it's available at that point. Okay, great questions. Okay, let me stop sharing.

Emily Madere: Yeah, and that's a reminder to everyone who's listening. Please put your questions in the chat. And we have about 12 more minutes left.

Karen Penhallegon: I need to hurry a little bit.

Emily Madere: Yeah, time goes by fast and you're having fun. So we'll kind of speak quickly about these, but whenever we're first connecting with future clients, one thing we get a sense of pretty quickly is what their system environment looks like. Okay, you have your accounting, but what's your payroll system? If you're a healthcare organization, what is your EMR? What are you using for fixed assets? And most of the time when we're speaking with our prospects, they kind of look and feel like the blue picture here on the left, the integrations in the systems are in silos and they're not talking to one another. What they want to get to is this other image where the systems are talking to one another, they're putting together the pieces, information is being sent to and from various systems to really allow the whole organization to have a good pulse on what's going on.

So I get asked probably multiple times a day, what exactly is Sage Intacct? And the long short version of this is Sage Intacct is a cloud-based best in class accounting solution. So parents already showed us the functionality when it comes to being cloud-based, but best in class and integrations is where I believe Sage and Tech shines. So Sage and Tech excels in accounting, ERP, planning, analytics, payroll, and hr where it necessarily doesn't want to spend its r and d dollars in, it's able to connect to those systems via open APIs and data feeds. So some various systems that Sage Intacct inherently connects to are salesforce, ADP, bill.com, Expensify. We can connect to a lot of EMRs for our healthcare organizations who are listening. I noticed a bunch of y'all are in the attendee list. And any of our construction companies are project-based businesses who have project management tools. Sage Tech can connect into those tools and be able to pull information from those systems and push back information. I'll highlight one of the most robust integrations that Sage Intacct has, and that is with a DP. So Intacct offers a solution called Sage and Tech payroll powered by a DP, which is great information is shared between these two systems in the implementation. If you're looking at evaluating Sage Intacct, it goes in tandem. So it really gives a lot of our clients who are in the project-based businesses who need to track projects, the ability to integrate into payroll pretty seamlessly.

Karen Penhallegon: So I'm going to talk a little bit about scalability. So this is some of the areas that we see growth in a lot, right? So your organization is growing. That usually means more headcount. Maybe it's new locations that you're opening, you developed a new product or service, and all of that hopefully leads to greater revenue. But what if your system's not ready for that? If you have an on-premise system, maybe it's QuickBooks desktop or one of the other older systems out there, can you easily get new employees access to that, right? Do they want to work remotely in the new world? That's very much remote. If you have an on-premise system, the answer might not be yes, it might be. It's very difficult if you have multiple locations. Are you running out of space and operating power? We've seen for Sage 50 and for QuickBooks that as you get to a certain level of data in the system, it really breaks down.

I've had clients come in because their balance sheets don't balance in QuickBooks just because they don't have enough data face. What if you have a new service or a product that you want to offer but you can't do inventory or you can't do project based accounting in your system? Or a lot of times acquisition and mergers is where we're getting our growth, but if you have multiple entities that you're in a system like QuickBooks, then you're managing 2, 3, 5, 10 different entities in all these different instances of the solution. So it really is a case of growth is great, but are you ready for that growth? And that's where Intacct can really help. The first thing I like to talk about with Intacct is it's multi everything architecture. We've talked on a little of these already. It's multi entity. We saw the auto balancing entries. There can be auto consolidations for you as well, and that you can have out of the box accrual, cash gap and tax books as well as mini user defined books as you might want. And then we've seen multidimensions too. So all of this is combined together to give you that ability to scale more easily. And the idea is to scale without having to add more employees to the accounting and finance team, but to give them the power of a great system to do it for them.

Okay, A few other things just about Sage and Sage Intacct. It is the only ICPA preferred provider of financial applications. It's been that way for over a decade now. So that's really important, not just to us, we are A CPA firm of course, but also to clients who want a trusted solution. This is the only one that A-I-C-P-A endorses. Also, from a user standpoint, intech is top rated in customer satisfaction, both on trust radius and on G two. So if you're going out and just looking for software in general, this is two fantastic sites to use because it has actual user reviews and you can compare software functionality very easily to fantastic sites. Additionally, the SaaS CFOs that stands for software as a service CFO rated Inact number one in five of their major categories. And then from the sage side of things in general, there are four feature and function releases each year. So you're going to get constant updates and constant new information coming in. New abilities and functionality. I know we're running a little short on time, so I'm not going to go into detail on the next slide. You guys can of course download this or ask if you have questions. This is just a really high level overview of Sage's Solution Map and some of the solutions that you can find within the system.

Emily Madere: Okay, and efficiency is our last one. Of course, I don't spend too much time on here, but I do think it's important to show how Sage Intacct has helped companies. So this is pulled from various case studies from different organizations and the ones highlighted are the ones I was going to talk about. But like Karen said, definitely download this presentation to read. These. Personal healthcare avoided $80,000 in annual salary costs by implementing Sage Intacct Mob seen embraced self-service reporting, avoiding 200,000 in consulting costs Marathon Venture, shortened monthly close and increase visibility and dapple save 60 plus hours a month on manual processes. These are from real organizations who save time and money with Sage Intacct.

So we have talked about all of these different items here today. Hopefully you have gained some value out of this presentation and of course asking some fabulous questions in the chat. We have only a couple minutes left, so please put your last minute questions so we can get to those. I wanted to share a little bit about I iam, Sage and Tech practice. So IRA is a value added reseller of Sage Intacct, which means we are licensed to sell, implement, and provide customer success for Intacct. If you are on the market for a new solution, Sage Intacct is on your list to evaluate. We would love to be able to help you. Sage Intacct.

Sage Intacct supports a lot of industries we've talked about, I know construction and healthcare today, but nonprofit is a huge industry for Intacct, professional services general business, and for our client base, we really span all of these industries. I would say probably construction, healthcare, professional services, project-based businesses, but we have all industries under the sun for our client base. I wanted to stick this slide in here to touch upon our implementation methodology because like I said, you would be purchasing software through us and we would be implementing it. So we have a pretty robust methodology when it comes to implementation. We don't have too much time to talk about it today. However, if you had any questions or you wanted to talk through what that might look like for you, definitely put something in the chat, but we'll be reaching out after this webinar and then okay, our last slide. Any questions? I Okay, Karen, we do have one. So how long does a typical implementation take?

Karen Penhallegon: Good question. So I'd say the average implementation from kicking the project off through go live is about three to four months. We tailor that to the organization, so it depends on the complexity of what you need and how many integrations and things that you're working through. On average, three to four months to go live. Our implementation team stays with you about six weeks after go live, and then at that point you would be transitioning over to our success and support team. You always stay with EisnerAmper’s, with always someone who knows you and knows your business regardless of where you're in the process. We customize that length of time to what you need. So if we go through a project plan with you and you think you need more time or you need to speed things up, we're going to work through your time on that. I've had implementations as short as four weeks for new companies and I've had 'em go out to six months for somebody who wanted extra time.

Emily Madere: Okay,

Karen Penhallegon: Great question.

Emily Madere: That's all we have today, everybody.

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