Sage Intacct for Project-Centric Organizations

I know a few of you may have no idea what that is. Then we'll look at how Sage Intacct handles project initiation and planning, project costing and billing, project reporting. And then we'll move into what are some of the benefits you'll get out of working with us at EisnerAmper? And we'll follow it up with a Q&A.

So let's get started on some of the common challenges we see every day. And if your organization runs on projects, some of these are going to feel familiar. It usually starts with manual cost tracking. We see costs sometimes living in spreadsheets and your email inbox. Maybe they're living in Tom's head, Bernadette's head, who knows? And pulling all that information together for a single project can take a lot of time. And one of the reasons this is often a challenge is due to disconnected systems, or maybe it's because you don't even have a project tracking system in place. Time and payroll are a perfect example of this. Your team is already doing the work of tracking the hours, but that time doesn't flow into your accounting system on its own. Somebody has to reenter it by hand to tie those numbers back to the correct project.

And for a lot of you, labor's already one of your biggest expenses and this can grow it. Then there's manual billing. Every invoice can be a project in itself. And as you all may know, the more complex your contracts are, the more room there is for error. And tie that in with limited real time visibility, which goes directly back into manual budget to actual tracking. You're comparing where you plan to be at versus where you actually are. And a lot of times that happens by hand. So let me paint a picture for you. When a project manager or someone else comes to you and asks, "Hey, are we still on budget for this quarter? How often is the answer? I don't know, or I think so, or let me get back to you next week." And then when you go to look for that information, how long does it take you to pull it?

And lastly, if you have ASC 606 requirements for revenue recognition, that could be something else that's eating up a lot of your time. For project-based work, getting revenue timing right is absolutely critical. And if it's done improperly, that can create massive headaches when it comes to audit time. Now, none of these challenges are because your team isn't good at their jobs. They're often due because the tools weren't built for how project centric organizations actually operate. And that's exactly the gap that Sage Intacct was designed to close. So what is Sage Intacct? And Karen and I get asked this question pretty much every day, and we like to bucket it into four main categories to categorize all the benefits you're going to get. First off, Sage Intacct is a best in class cloud financial management solution, which is very user-friendly, highly configurable, and most importantly, scalable as your organization continues to grow.

Now that configurability part is something I like to talk about a lot. Every accounting solution out there will tell you it's customizable in some way, shape or form. But in our experience, that customization usually means outsourcing the IT, hiring a third party consultant, or maybe even bringing in a developer to build you something. Intacct focuses on that configurability part, meaning you can do this work yourself. And that matters because it means you get to stay in control. And as an accounting firm, control is something that is non-negotiable. Now what control means inside of Intacct's gap compliance, built in control so you can catch issues early and always having a clean audit trail available to you anytime with numbers you can always trust.

Second is the cloud native aspect. Sage Intacct was built from the cloud from day one. I know sometimes we see systems that maybe started out on premises and had a cloud version that was added on later, but that can be clunky. Intact solves all this because it was built for the cloud from day one. And with that, you get several benefits. For one, you can access it anywhere, anytime. And in Louisiana where Kara and Jim and I are all based, we are no stranger to hurricanes. So sometimes you got to work from somewhere else and having that access anywhere is amazing. That also means seamless updates. Intacct is always looking to improve its platform and they release four main quarterly updates a year that usually happen like at two in the morning on a Sunday. So hopefully you're not working, but even if you are, there's very minimal downtime.

And when you log back on the work the next day, the updates are already installed and you're ready to go.

That cloud native piece also means it integrates easily through open APIs. And that's where I want to touch back on those challenges we talked about in the previous slide. Remember those disconnected systems I mentioned? Open APIs are how you close that gap. Intact acts as a single source of truth by connecting the tools you're already using today so you don't have to have double entry. And lastly, it's secure. We have user permissions, IP address restrictions, two factor authentication, SOC compliance, automatic backups and big question about data. You always own your data so no one else can touch it without your permission. Now third is AI. That's a very big buzzword right now, but Intacct has been at this for quite a while now. In fact, many years. And Sage Intacct is actually ranked number one for AI usage in the accounting software space. The approach is to let AI handle the manual admin work.

Spot mistakes and automate those repetitive tasks. But here's what really matters. There is always a human element involved in every step of the process. Intact never fully automates any decision and nothing can be made without human oversight. On your screen, you can see a few examples of some of the flavors of AI that Sage Intacct offers. So we have like automated AP bill entry where it automatically matches the POs, flagging unusual journal entries before they happen. So hey, did you mean to do this? And close automation workplace that helps keep your month end on track.

Lastly, the fourth bucket I like to talk about is reporting. And that is what I like to call the crown jewel of Sage Intacct. You get that real time visibility. So you're not waiting until a month in to know where you stand. As you make entries, the reports update in real time. What makes this possible is dimensions and that's how Intacct does reporting, dimension-based reporting. Instead of managing a massive chart of accounts with many different codes, you simply tag transactions with dimensions like department, location or project in this case. So you can slice and dice your data any way you want to see it at your fingertips. And when we say real time, we mean it for real. So now I'll turn it over to Karen to dig into Sage Intacct's multi-everything architecture and dig into exactly how those dimensions work. So take it away, Karen.

Karen Penhallegon:
Thanks, Gage. That was a great intro. So I like to talk a lot about Intacct and the reason they came to be and why that is structured the way it is. So Intacct in the late '90s was created by finance people for finance people. So they were seeing a lot of the accounting solutions that were out there and they didn't meet their needs. There were some key things that those were missing and that's why they started Intacct. Some of those things are what you see here on this slide that the concept is multi-everything architecture, but what does that mean? So it all starts with multi-entity. So the ability to keep all of your entities in a single shared environment. So if you're using something like maybe a QuickBooks, a Sage50, or Peachtree, Dynamics, those are probably all in separate instances. So every time you want to interact with one of your companies, you have to log in and out or go between the different entities.

With an Intacct, all the entities live in the same environment. They share a chart of accounts. They share the vendor list, the customer list, all of those things. That also means Intacct can build a lot of automation around these entities. So things like being able to auto create do to and do from entry. So whenever you enter in an intercompany, it will automatically balance it for you. Automated consolidated reporting. Everything is going to live in one environment so it's able to report on all the entities at once. And then as Gage mentioned before, security, of course, is key to everything when you talk about your accounting solution. So user security can also be developed around those entities. The next one you see on this list is multi-book. So every accounting system has a book. It's normally an accrual book or cash book, but Intacct has the ability to have as many different books as you might want.

So out of the box, you can turn on an accrual cash gap and tax books. And you can also create as many user defined books as you might want. So whatever reason you can think of for different ways that you might want to report on your data or have specific entries for specific reporting requirements, you can keep that in its own book and then mix and match those on financial reports.

And last, definitely not least, Intacct's really superpowered in my opinion, is the fact that it's multi-dimension. And so what a dimension actually is, we're going to see some examples in a minute, is just the ability to tag a piece of information to a transaction in the system. But it's really more than that. Dimensions are baked into Intacct architecture, so they are available everywhere. Every transaction, every report dimensions are going to be there for you. And it's not like some other solutions out there where dimensions are something that's customizable and has to have coding related to it. Instead, dimensions are just there and it's a similar click of a button to be able to turn them on or off. We'll also see a little bit in some of the later slides that these dimensions can be put into hierarchies or groups to make them even more powerful.

So whether you have a multi-level hierarchy of your dimensions with automatic roll up to the top levels or you're putting them into groups specifically so that you can do filtering either way, this makes them even better than they are just as a plain dimension. And I sort of like to compare it if those of us who love Excel, which is probably most everyone on this call, it's really like turning your general ledger into a giant pivot table where it'll take all these pieces of information now and mix and match them.

So let's look at maybe some examples of dimensions. So some of the things that some of the standard dimensions that we're going to talk about today, all of these with one are standard. The other one is project, which is the whole point of this presentation. So if you use Sage Intacct, you should see all of these. I like to think of them in three separate categories, the where of a transaction, the what and the who. So starting with the where, each of these you'll see underneath here in the darker box, that is the name Intacct gives the dimension. And then to the right, you can rename any of these dimensions so that you can use your terminology. And so whether you use the Intacct name or your own name, we can really customize it just for you. So some of the things you might track might be of course, the entity that a transaction's related to and then location, which is a child of entities.

You can have locations roll up there. Another common one we see is department. Those are fairly standard. And the what category is where you really start getting into things that maybe are not as common to be tracked in your general ledger. So class is sort of a wild card. If you use QuickBooks, you're probably familiar with what they call KLAS. It's sort of the generic that we can use for anything dimension. But moving down item, specifically if you're doing purchase orders or sales orders, what are you buying and selling? So we're able to track both goods and services here. And then all important, we'll see a lot more, of course, of project as we go on, but being able to track your projects as a dimension. That means the reporting is available not just in the specific modules, like in the project module or AP or AR, but actually as part of your general ledger.

And then finally the who. All of these play a critical role for project organizations. So your employees, maybe they're clocking time to jobs, they have expenses going to jobs. Of course, customers who you're going to need to bill for a job. And then vendors maybe who are providing services or goods for those jobs. All of those are really going to be critical dimensions as we move through the rest of the presentation.

All right. Before we dive into what it actually looks like in Intacct, I want to talk a little bit about what the options are out there as far as the functionality. So Intacct has a few different packages that it provides for project businesses. You can really meet you where you are. The first one, just basic project tracking, is really just giving the ability to have a project dimension. So if you have some very, fairly simple needs, you just want to be able to tag transactions to a project, go run reports and see maybe all the costs associated with a project, maybe all the AP bills, all the invoices, that's perfect for you. The next step that adds onto it is project costing. And so this gives you a few additional capabilities. First, it's going to give you the ability to further divide your project into tax phases, cost codes, whatever you may call that.

And basically to have subdivisions underneath that project. Then along with that, it's going to give you the ability to do time tracking. So the ability for people to either enter or integrate time sheets and use those time sheets to cost the labor to the projects as well as potentially employee expense tracking. So we're going to see more of this later in the presentation when Jim is going to walk us through some of those options. The last piece here is project costing and billing. So of course it's the most complex. It requires that all the previous ones to be able to work, but the big key thing in project costing and billing is the ability to have billing automation. So whether you're doing time and materials billing and you need to actually go gather up all the expenses and generate an invoice for you, or if you're doing a fixed fee or milestone style of billing, all of these can be automated with project costing and billing.

There's also some resource functionality available as well. So if you want to do some things like maybe you can't charts or resourcing and availability inserting, that's also a part of project costing and billing. All right. So now I'm going to hand things over to Jim and he's going to start walking us through some of the actual project functionality.

Jim Killen:
All right. Thank you, Karen. So with that foundation, let's start looking at projects and we're going to kind of look at a life cycle. We're going to start by creating a project and then we'll add cost to it. We'll bill it and then we'll give it back to Karen to talk about reporting. So building the foundation, creating the project, here are some tools that Intacct has that enable you to capture, record and report on project information. First, as Karen said, you can tag every transaction in your accounting system with one or all of the dimensions she just talked about. So if you're an AP purchasing general ledger wherever, you can tag those transactions with as many dimensions as necessary to get the reporting results you need. In Intacct, you build your own work breakdown structure. So you can import one of the industry standard WBSs, or you can create your own cost code structure.

By the way, I use the term cost code and task interchangeably. The cost code structure is supported by a parent child architecture, meaning you can have hierarchical relationships and have your WBS go three, four levels deep without any problem. You can also attach cost types, subcontractors, labor, materials, equipment to the cost codes to enhance reporting flexibility. For the project managers, the people that need visibility into the projects, Intacct contains a user license specifically made for that role. It gives them an uncluttered access to Intacct. It allows them to view projects, review invoices, create budgets, review and approve time sheets without having to wade through all the menu items for general ledger and all the other things that don't mean anything to them. So Intacct provides you a couple of ways to categorize and summarize projects in terms of tracking. Project status and project category are two user definable lists in Intacct that you can use to report out on projects in ways that are meaningful to you.

So if you have projects say in three different disciplines, you can group all of them into three different categories and use that to filter financial statements to report on it.

And Intacct allows you to use projects as a template. So if you frequently work in the same project types or if you frequently work in two or three different project types, but they're recurring, Intacct lets you set up a project, attach the work breakdown structure and use that as a template. So the next new project you get that fits one of those categories, you simply go copy the template and customize it to the particular project with things that are particular, the customer most notably. That just gives you a jumpstart of getting projects set up and gets you working much faster. In Intacct, you can link project budgets to the general ledger and then use the financial report writer to do budget actual reporting. Okay. Let's look at actually some of the setup screens. So this slide is three screen snips from Intacct. The top two are from the project master record.

The on the left is the project tab and you can see there's a row of tabs across the top in the record. And the one on the right is the tab that shows the tasks that have been assigned to this project. Project ID is highlighted. Project ID can be manually assigned if you want to do that for every project or Intacct can turn on an automated scheme for you to create those. When you create a project, you set the dimension values for customer and department and location. And so those then feed into transactions for you. The field at the bottom is a generic detail entry line. It could be GL, it could be AP. All transactions in Intacct can use all of the dimensions. So wherever you are, you're going to see these options. If this was a purchasing entry, the account field would be replaced by purchasing item.

Aside from that, the use of the dimensions is the same. So when you look at the detail below as you come into the detail line and you put in the project, then Intacct reads the project master and starts to populate the dimension values for you.

Customer location department all pull over from the project. Now task is one that doesn't automatically pull because there's no way to know which task you're entering a transaction for. However, the task list that's in the dropdown box will be filtered for just this project so you don't have to wade through everything in your entire task catalog. And finally, let me just point out that on the right hand side of the entries line, the billable checkbox is selected and that is being pulled from the top right tab where the task is noted as billable. So having these dimension values populate from the project master is just a way to one, reduce errors and two, speed transaction and billing. So the next thing we want to look at now that we have a project set up is we want to look at project costing and billing and we'll do costing first.

So we've talked already about how you can tag in group costs using the dimension structures, AP purchasing, credit cards, projects. You can tag all of those and then group them in ways that provide meaningful reporting to your team. AP bill automation is an option in Sage Intacct and it's quite good. I'll go into a little bit more detail on that. All transactions can be marked as billable or non-billable so that your client billing stays accurate. And then Sage expense management is a module that we'll talk about. But what this does is it gives your field personnel the ability to capture data without bringing you back a crumpled up dirty piece of paper.

So as an old controller, I appreciate that. So AP automation, you have two ways to intake bills. You have a dedicated email inbox. It could be ap@xyz.com. Or if you get a paper invoice in the mail, take it to a scanner and drop it in a file location and then drag and drop it into the bills list screen in Intacct. The email inbox will automatically put everything into the bills list screen and accounts payable. And the original invoice document will be attached at that point. The AI then looks at the document and starts populating fields in the invoice entry screen based on what it knows about the vendor from your prior transactions and also what it knows about the vendor from the Intacct universe because the AP bill automation shares its learning with all subscribers in Intact. So there are those subscribers to Intacct, tens of thousands around the United States.

And Intacct needs perhaps three or four exposures to a particular vendor to know the layout of that vendor and to be able to process that. So take Cintas, for example. If that's a vendor of yours, Intacct is probably already seen Cintas about 20,000 times. And so when that invoice comes in, it knows exactly how to find all the information it needs. Intact is also going to prevent duplicate invoice numbers from being posted. There's a lot of architecture in Intacct to prevent duplications, which is a good thing. So you don't pay bills twice. And along the way, if you have purchasing turned on, Intacct is going to match the invoice to the purchase order. So when the AI is done with that invoice, then it's ready for a human review to make any final edits and then either post it or push it into the approval workflow.

Now, when it's posted or it has been approved, approval is actually a posting mechanism. That immediately posts that transaction all the way through the ledgers, all the way up to the financial statements. It's true real time. It's not batch processing. So time to pay the bill. Lots of options. You can of course pay manually with on - premise solutions like checks or uploading payment files on your bank's portal. Or there are many third parties who have integrations prebuilt to Intacct who will manage that payment process for you. The thing with all of them is all you do is hand them the information when the bill's ready to be paid. Basically you say, pay this. And they will already have relationships built with your vendors and they will know which vendors want to be paid by check, by ACH or by virtual card. The one noted at the top right is MineralTree, which is a longstanding marketplace partner with Intacct.

And Intacct recently embedded their functionality in for a separate subscription, MineralTree appears as a payment method available in the pay bill screen in Intact.

All right. So that's AP. Now expense management. Expense management is an integrated module that allows your field personnel to capture transactions. That's really what it's all about. You have the ability to set spending rules once and enforce the policies automatically. This automation feeding into Intacct, your turnaround on reimbursing employees is going to be a lot faster and a lot less manual work. The amount of automation that you can achieve with these depends on the particular card and the level of integration they can provide. The expense management module is card agnostic. It's bring your own card. But for a lot of cards, when the employee swipes the card, the program is going to send them a text within a few minutes. It says, "Hey, you just spent something. Can you give me a picture of that receipt right now?" So all they have to do is from that text message, click the picture tab, submit.

Now it's going to go back and look at the rules you have set and then to go back to the employee and ask for any additional information that you've set. Do you want to know the project? Do you want to know the customer? Whatever it is. So they can, within that text, just reply back and they're done. It's coded for you automatically and it's going to reconcile to your credit card statement because this is going into the Intacct system and you can have a bank file feed set on your credit card that automatically brings the transactions in from that side and a matching rule that ties them out. So when you go to the reconciliation screen for the credit card, this transaction's already reconciled.

The other way that we talk about getting cost into Intacct is with time sheets. And so in Intacct, you can track all time types. It's custom configurable. You can set business rules on the time sheet that enforce certain behaviors like making sure that it's accurate, not accurate, pardon me, making sure it passes some completion thresholds. You can configure approvals to meet the workflows that you want. Do you want the time sheets to go to accounting first for approval and then the project manager or vice versa? We can do that. Automated labor codes, automated labor costing, pardon me, you heard me say a minute ago talking about accounts payable bills that when you post that, it goes all the way to the financial immediately. Same with labor costing. And depending on the way you set it up, it might go back and look at the employee's rate on his master record or it might look at the project record for what his class of employees being costed out at.

Either way, when the time sheet is posted, that labor cost gets calculated, posted to the project and is viewable all the way out through financial statements.

So there's some AI suggested entries, kind of a function that will look and make suggestions based on experience and based on perhaps project attributes. And so here talking about time types again, you can create an unlimited number of custom time types and you can have them automatically calculate premium pay. So it doesn't just have to be a one 5X OT. It can be 2X, it can be holiday pay. You can have all of those created. So when the project is entered, the default information from the project master and or the employee record is automatically populated just like we saw back in the original setting up where it had the transaction example at the bottom of the screen. So the project drives the dimension loading. Now you can kind of pick and choose if you need to. So the department could be defaulted from the employee record and the location could be defaulted from the project.

Also notice that some lines are marked billable. That's being fed automatically from the project master.

Time sheet duration has four options, daily, weekly, biweekly, semi-monthly, set it to whatever your business does. And then finally, applying business rules could be as simple as not letting a time sheet be submitted without 40 hours or eight hours a day. It's just a measure that you can use to help achieve better completeness. So we've created a project and we've accumulated cost on it from three different sources. And so now let's look at project billing. It's time to get paid. Billing in Intacct can be done on many different methods, all of them that you need. You can do milestone billing, you can have billing schedules, percent complete and T&M. T&M not to exceed.

Billing rates are flexible and custom configurable. You can set up billing rates and rate cards by project. You can attach them to a customer. You can set individual billing on items and employees, very configurable. Billing and revenue recognition can be split in Intacct. There is a module available that allows you to treat those two as separate workflows you have a need. So for example, if you bill 50% of a project upfront, but you're going to recognize that pro rata over 90 days, the revenue rec module will do that for you. It will allow you to do the billing and manage your receivables. And it will also allow you to manage the revenue rec separately by running it through unearned revenue accounts and flipping it back out to recognize revenue accounts.

So here, this is an invoicing screen. And at the top there's a little summary about the project that can be very useful. So our projected billing amount, our budget was 954K. Then we can see what we billed to date. So we've almost billed this project complete. Also, what we can see is our project duration, which was our estimate for hours and our actually bill to date hours. So having this here can be a very valuable tool because I can see I'm quite close on dollars, but I've got a delta on my hours. Now that can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the type of project and the type of billing that's being done. But this is just a summary that you can look at and say, I may need to go look at a little more detail on this.

All right. Now in the next section, you'll notice you can see behind the bubble it's labeled time sheets, the next block and where the rows are. This is just an example. In the actual billing screen, there is a block for all the different types of inputs to billing. So here you can see the line items and they can be selected individually or you can choose the select button in the title row and select everything that's been presented to you that's ready for billing to run to the invoice. Some things you can use to adjust as you go. Quantities can be partially billed and the unbilled portion retained. Billing price can be adjusted on the fly.

And as I said, this example is just time sheets, but it would look similar for AP bills, employee expenses, purchasing expenses, credit card expenses, general ledger transactions will flow into here and they all have their own separate section on the invoicing screen. And in the case of expenses that are marked up, there's a markup amount that you will see here instead of the quantities on the example. So anything that you don't bill is reserved on the project and presented to you in this screen the next time you come do a billing run. And so with that, we've kind of taken a high level run through the entire project life and all that remains now is to take all the data that's been accumulated and turn it into useful information. And so that's what Karen's going to show us in project reporting. So Karen?

Karen Penhallegon:
Great. Thanks Jim. Real quick, I'm going to overlock. I want to just do a check. Is there any questions or anything out there?

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah, perfect. I was just about to interrupt you. So we do have a question out there. Is the time sheets just for tracking hours and projects? And is there anything for processing payroll?

Karen Penhallegon:
Yeah. Great question actually. So that could have different answers depending on your payroll solution, unfortunately. So in Intacct, there's not any native payroll built in, but Intacct does integrate with a lot of payroll solutions. Whether or not time sheets integrate varies between different solutions. There are definitely some out there where you can enter time sheets in Intacct. They will flow over to payroll and then you process your payroll over in the other system. I've got some examples in a few minutes here, but ADP, Workforce Go, I think MITRE might be another one that does that. Some payroll solutions only integrate journal entries with Intacct, so they can't actually integrate the time sheets themselves. But what we can also do is export that data out of Intacct in a format that you can then upload it into the other solution. So that's also an option so you don't have to try to do double entry between Intacct and Payroll.

Or if you prefer using your payroll solution to capture the time, as long as you're getting the level of detail with the projects that you need, then we can also export from the payroll solution and potentially import it into Intacct. So we've got a little bit of flexibility there on how the time can go between here and payroll.

Jim Killen:
And Karen, there's also a part of that question about is it only for payroll? And I think where that's going is you can create time sheets for pieces of equipment by creating an employee record for a piece of equipment. Have a contractor, a demolition contractor that has all of his heavy equipment set up as each piece set up as an employee record, which allows him to track time sheets, and he uses that to aggregate hours for maintenance and repair purposes.

Karen Penhallegon:
Yeah. Or if you bill your equipment out by the hour, potentially that's an option as well that I've seen. Great point, Jim. Thank you.

Gage Ulrich:
And one other one. So we have a couple of project managers and can they get into the system and see things they might need to see without seeing everything finance sees?

Karen Penhallegon:
Yes, that's a great question. Absolutely. So you have very detailed control over what people can see. So if you want them to only see say a certain dashboard with certain reports on it, we can do that. If you want them to have the ability to drill down to the actual expenses, we can do that. Maybe they should only see their projects or only certain entities. So we can definitely tailor exactly what those PMs can see while still giving them access to be able to do their jobs, report on their projects and get the budget information out is usually the main thing.

Gage Ulrich:
Thanks, Karen. And we did have another question come in building off of that previous question about time sheets. And it says they were told that Sage has a payroll solution called HCM. Is that correct?

Karen Penhallegon:
There is a Sage product. I think it is called Sage HCM. It's been a while. I haven't looked at it in a while. It is not part of Intacct. It's a separate Sage project. Frankly, I don't even know. It might integrate with Intacct. I don't have anybody using it, so I can't speak to that. I'm going to have to do a little research on it, but it is a product that exists, but it is separate and apart from Intacct.

Gage Ulrich:
And one other one that came in. In your opinion, which payroll solutions have worked best with Fintech?

Karen Penhallegon:
That's a tough one. There's so many out there. And I think it's more about what payroll solution fits your needs. So you'll need to look at a few things if you're evaluating payroll solutions. Of course, the solution itself and how it fits your HR and payroll need, but then what is that level of integration? Do you need times to integration? Do you just need GL? I'd usually say to go ahead and start actually in the Intacct marketplace. So if you just Google Sage Intacct Marketplace, there's a selection there where you can look at all the payroll solutions that have pre-built integrations into Intacct. And then you can kind of go research them and reach out to each of them individually to find out more information. Or I'm happy to schedule a call later if you have questions on that as well. I've got a few examples on a slide in a few minutes, but it's not all inclusive because there's a lot of them out there.

Great questions. All right.

Gage Ulrich:
Thank you so much, Karen. I think that's all we have for now. So I'll let you get the show back on the road. All right.

Karen Penhallegon:
Well, let's talk about, like Jim said, what is the result of all the other things that we've done? So our goal, we've gotten costs in, we've built our customer now. And now we want to know, well, how did we do? How did we actually perform with this project or how are we performing in projects? And that's where the reporting comes back. So a few different things about Intacct Reporting. We've talked some about it already, but it really is real time. As soon as transactions are posted, then you're going to see those transactions in reports. You don't need to wait on month end close. You don't need to wait on a batch to post any of those things. So that's kind of the key first thing to remember. The next thing is that you can really filter and group the way that you need to see it for your business.

So whether you look at things by project, by the type of project, by the customer, the type of service you're providing, by your PMs, by whatever it may be, whatever you can imagine, we can create filters and groups around those things and create reports specifically the way that you need to see them. Now I say create, there is some customization, but there's also a ton of out of the box reporting. So Intact just itself comes with over 200 reports out of the box. About 40 to 45 of those are financial reports. And some of those are project reports. So over 25 reports are specific project reports built for the solution. Excuse me.

So not only can you use those reports that are out of the box, we can take those reports then and say, okay, maybe they're not perfect. Do you want to make some changes to them? We can copy those reports and make changes to them. Or you can, right? You don't have to depend on us for that. You have the power to create and modify the reports yourself. Now some examples of things that we often see kind of call it what is your dashboard or your project at a glance? Common things that we'll see, of course, profitability reporting is a big one. How are your projects performing? How are different types of projects performing? How are different PM performing? If you're doing that time tracking, what is utilization like for your employees? So being able to report on maybe even goals is something that I use it for personally.

So tracking employee utilization goals and then time against those goals. Or also very critically budget to actual. So if you're estimating or budgeting your projects, being able to have that budget come automatically out of the system with the actuals next to it so that you can always see where your project is at. And something that's nice here that I'll add to is this can also include committed costs. And so what that means is saying if you have purchase orders, now purchase orders aren't technically yet a cost to your company because you haven't gotten the service yet, but you know it's coming. We can actually include those committed costs into your budget and actual reporting so that you can truly see what have you spent already and what are you going to spend that you have planned based on your POs? So a couple of very important critical things we can do then.

So a few examples, I want to just walk through sort of a high level project dashboards. You can see some of the options and some of the ways that you might be able to report. First on this dashboard, if you see kind of the top right, this is a sort of a project manager dashboard, if you will, or maybe a project overview dashboard, but you can create filtering on any dashboard. So you can filter by as of date. I don't know, I have a date in here. Usually you would kind of do as of today so you can really see real time, but you can also backdate that. So you can go back into previous periods and look at the dates and look at the projects. And then you can have up to three dimension filters. So whether you need to filter for specific entities or locations or departments, or in this case, I have a project filter built around project managers.

And so I can filter per each project manager. Another key thing here is if you are actually a PM or you have someone who is a PM, you want to log in, we can have that filter be automatic. So it'll only show that PM's projects when they log in. In this case, this is more of a high level view that maybe someone is looking at different PMs on the same dashboard. All right, next we have these performance cards across the top. And so these just show some different ways that you might want to be looking at information within the system, whether it's financial data like revenue or different types of costs or gross profit or margin or maybe non-financial data. So in fact calls statistical information, that could be the hours worked, open jobs, headcount, any sort of thing you can think of that you're tracking.

We have examples of all sorts of things that can go in here. We have a car wash that tracks the number of cars they clean in a statistical account. And then you can take that information and really blend it with the other pieces of data, the other financial data that you have in the dashboard. Now these performance cards are more than just a number though. They are very flexible. You can choose the time period they are for, whether it's a year, a quarter, a month, even a week or a day. And then we can also choose to compare them to something. So you see the nice green and red indicators. That comparison can look at either a budget or a prior period. So if you're say depending on your PMs to do the budgeting and to maintain against a budget, they can quickly come in here.

We could set this up to be a budget style dashboard. Maybe they have the different types of costs summarized and quickly can tell them whether or not they are on budget for all projects or a particular project.

All right, moving down. We'll see some different types of reports. Now drill down is really critical. You don't have to give people access to drill down, but I think it's important because that's where people are going to really answer their own questions. So whether they're drilling into those performance cards we saw or drilling into these financial reports that we see below this, they're able to actually drill down all the way to the source transaction. So this little snapshot you're seeing here, I call it the project snapshot report, sort of a twist on a normal financial report. It's a summarized P&L. So we can do project profitability in the traditional P&L. But in this case, I've got my projects as my rows and I've got some summarized categories going across. These can be whatever categories you want. It doesn't even have to necessarily be sort of a profit and loss statement.

It can be anything that you want to report on. But the beauty of this is then this PM or whoever it may be can click on any of these and drill in and get details. And so they might want to drill in and see, "Hey, maybe I'm going over budget and my expenses. What are these other expenses? Let me drill in and actually see the AP bills." Maybe they see something out of whack because it was miscoded or things happened. So I think that's really important to be able to give them that power to drill down and answer their own questions instead of just getting a piece of paper and then coming back to you and saying, "Hey, why am I out of budget? What's going on here?" And then last thing on here, really, it's all about the flexibility. So whether you have T&M projects, fixed fee projects that you want to look at more of how am I doing against my fixed fee?

Different ways to look at expenses or look at revenue. It's all about making this exactly what you need to run your business.

All right. Last thing I mentioned just about connected solutions. I already mentioned the Sage Intacct marketplace. There are 400 solutions that might even be 500 by now out there that connect intact.Tons of them that do all sorts of different things. So it's really all about that best in class solution. Intact is fantastic at financial information. It's really great in a lot of areas, but if it doesn't quite meet your needs in some of them, that's okay. We can connect out with that open API to other solutions. So this is just some of the examples. It's definitely not inclusive, but some of the ones we see a lot, I mentioned payroll, here's some payroll solutions we see. I specifically went and pulled ones that did more project-based information, whether you have field service solutions or maybe it's expense solutions like an Expensify if you don't use Sage Expense Management.

Or like we mentioned before, it's payments like Mineral Tree or Core Pay or ill.com. All of these can be integrated with Intacct. I have a prebuilt integration, it's usually quite simple to integrate them. Or if there's not a pre-built, if you maybe have something customer homegrown, we actually have a team that can help you develop custom integrations as well. So you can get an integration from your own system that you've built or a system that maybe just doesn't have a native integration.

All right. So to wrap things up, you've sort of seen, like Jim mentioned, projects A to Z. So we start with the creation of them. How do we have costs and billing go against those? How do we report on that? Well, last thing is why should you listen to us? What do we know about this? And so Gage, you have a little bit of our background, but of course EisnerAmper is most of you probably already clients, top 15 accounting firm in the US, but we're also a Sage Intacct value added reseller. And so what that means is that we are licensed by Sage to not only sell Intacct, but to implement it and support it. So we work with tons of clients to evaluate the solution and to actually implement it for them to meet their needs. We have a dedicated team. We're all certified for Sage Intacct.

Combined probably far more than two decades of software implementation experience. And we've worked in really over 20 unique industries and a lot of those industries are actually industries that have projects as one of their key components. I'm not going to talk in detail about the implementation journey. Feel free to download the presentation here and read this later. But essentially we have a very tried and true implementation method. It has five phases starting with planning the project, getting a project plan put together, making sure that everyone is on the same page for how that project's going to run, truly deep diving and understanding your business and the exact requirements you have and how you want Intacct to work, building out the solution, training and helping you test the solution and then go live. And then we never really leave. So we're also your support team. So it's not like you're going to lose your implementation team.

They stay around for about six to eight weeks after the implementation, but then you go to our client success team. So it's still someone that you're going to know that you can actually speak with. It's not an 800 number or an online chat to someone that you don't know and doesn't understand your business. And so really that's our goal is to really provide that personalized service for every one of our clients that we understand what they need and we're able to help them specifically with those needs to meet them with Sage Impact.

All right. So I think that wraps everything up. I wanted to leave a little bit of time if there are any additional questions. I don't know, Gage, if you can see any.

Gage Ulrich:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, we'll open the floor up. So if you have any last questions, get them in. I do have a couple right here. So the first one is you mentioned an implementation and how long does an implementation typically take? I'll take that question. So our typical implementation timeline is anywhere from around four to six months. With that said, there is some flexibility and we can work with you. We can speed it up a little bit or we can slow it down over a few more months. It's really up to you and how complex your organization is. Next, we all have one coming in. What is it? It's about QuickBooks actually, Karen. One of the software we see a lot when we're moving to Sage Intacct. They want to know what does moving historical data over into Intacct look like?

Karen Penhallegon:
Oh, that's a good question. So it does depend a little bit on the data, but generally what we're going to bring over from a historical standpoint is general ledger detail transactions. So in the case of QuickBooks, you might have it separated out by class, however you might have that. But I know we can pretty easily get the detail out of QuickBooks. What we do is we provide templates that that data needs to go into to be able to be imported into Intacct. Now that's the simple version. Data conversion can be a little more complex though, because as you saw today, there may be actually some transformation of your data because now you might want to start using those dimensions. Maybe you are using sub-accounts or different ways of reporting on that data to try to get the information. Maybe you're wanting to pull the job from QuickBooks or other places.

We can do that, but there's more of a mapping process involved. Now we give our clients the option. You're able to do that data conversion yourself if you'd like. It's kind of the cost-friendly option. We'll help you with questions, we'll walk you through the templates, or we have a team that actually specializes in data conversions. And so in that scenario, you can sort of give them the data dump of your solution, whatever it may be, if it's QuickBooks or something else.

Give them the mapping files of where you want the accounts to go from the old to the new chart of accounts and they will handle the rest. They will map everything, push it into Intacct, and then you simply have to review the end result.

Gage Ulrich:
Thank you, Karen. And I believe that is all the questions we have for now. If there are any more questions, here's our contact information right here. You can reach out to any one of us and we'll get in contact with you and help answer whatever may be on your mind.

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