Intacct Dimensional Relationships: Improving Efficiency while Ensuring Data Accuracy
How can you take the odds of correctly and efficiently coding a transaction from 20% to 50%? This question brings to the surface the ever present battle between two opposing forces of data entry: the struggle between improving efficiency while also ensuring data accuracy. Today’s blog post will take you through exactly how you can better these odds by uniting these two opposing forces (without compromising either) with Intacct’s Dimensional Relationships.
You’ve already learned about dimensions (how they replace sub-accounts in Intacct) but part of using dimensions is choosing the correct correlation of dimensions and accounts. Traditional accounting software uses subaccounts to specify dimensional information such as departments, classes, locations, etc. This means your chart of accounts typically is pretty large and sometimes has very similar accounts. How do you teach a new employee to code to the correct accounts that are specific to your company? (Usually this doesn’t happen overnight!) Then, how do you ensure that after teaching them this, they actually retain that knowledge? What if you could take some of the possible guess work that might go into data entry away? Well that would mean a lot less reclassifications! More importantly, you could run reports and trust the data’s integrity. Intacct leverages the power of dimensions and dimensional relationships to do just that. With Intacct you can help the person entering transactions code correctly. How? Well let’s go through the step by step
Background:
Imagine your historic accounting system had the following chart of account structure:
The first 4 digits are your natural account, followed by 3 digits for location, 3 digits for project, and lastly 3 for department.
In Intacct, you have the following dimensions setup in place of the subaccount structure above:
Entering a bill in Intacct looks something like this:
Example:
When we enter Location 303 (New York), we’d like the list of Projects to be filtered for only Projects that are associated with New York. Wouldn’t that be magical? Well that’s exactly what we’ll do here with the dimension relationship we set up.
Step 1: Navigation
Navigate to: Company > Locations > Object Definition
(This is a quick way to get to the object you want to add the relationship to rather than navigating through the Object List under Platform Services which can be overwhelming and confusing).
Step 2: New relationship
Find the Relationships section by clicking the link at top or scrolling down to relationships. Then click New Relationship!
Step 3: Related object
What would you like to relate this dimension to? Which object in Intacct? In our example this will be Project.
Step 4: Relationship type
Choose a relationship type here. This will vary depending on the type of relationship you are establishing. In this example, each of my locations has their own projects and they never cross. (New York never shares the same projects as California). However, there are multiple Projects to each location so I chose 1 location to many Projects. Click Save and you’ve effectively established the relationship!
Step 5: Attaching the values to the dimension
If you are a CLA Toolbox subscriber this is an easy update import. However, if not, you’ll need to manually attach the dimension values here. (Only some dimensions are able to be updated through an import in Intacct currently, unfortunately Location is not one of them).
Company > Locations > VIEW button next to New York Location > Attach Project
Step 6: Enabling dimension filtering
You’ve set up your dimension relationships, but now you want to take it a step further and actually have the user see a filtered list of projects upon choosing a location (rather than choosing an un-related project and receiving an error after trying to save the entry).
Go to: General Ledger > Open Setup > Configure General Ledger > Scroll to the very bottom section titled “Dimension Relationships” > Check the box that says to Enable Filtered Drop-down lists > Save
Step 7: Test your new relationship
Create a Bill and notice that after choosing New York as the location, you only have the two projects associated with that location to choose from.
Probability of choosing the correct Project before: 20%
New probability of choosing the correct Project: 50%
May the odds be ever in your favor!
Did this post peak your curiosity? Want to know more about dimensional relationships and how you can use them to your advantage? Reach out to us at intacct@claconnect.com!
Kathy Jastrzebski is a manager with CLA’s Intacct team. CLA is an Intacct Premier Partner with a partnership that spans over 20 years and more than 1,000 successful implementations. Kathy brings five years of accounting experience along with seven years of Sage Intacct implementation experience. Along with her accounting experience, she has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams worldwide through system implementations with a mission of increasing department efficiency through business process improvements.