Intacct Dimensions: Items
The Item Dimension’s Mission: The Item dimension allows you to simplify your chart of accounts, while allowing you to still track item differentiation. We leave your chart of accounts with the responsibility of managing the high level umbrella of item categories (revenue streams) and allow your items to specify actual variances of these revenue streams (products or items). Best of all, not losing the capability of running a report on Customer by Item purchased.
Item is one of the tougher dimensions that often get’s misused or neglected. So let’s approach the explanation of the Item dimension through a real-world example. Imagine we work at Apple in their accounting department and our team has decided to move to Intacct. We’re working on restructuring our chart of accounts and have just been asked what we would like our items to be. (You probably think – why do we need items? What exactly are items? Especially if you’ve never thought of your company as selling “items”).
Let’s say your revenue accounts look something like this:
You’ll notice right off the bat – each account represents a different revenue item. What if you could simplify your chart of accounts? What if every time you add a new product, you wouldn’t have to change your chart of accounts by adding a new account? Those Apple press conferences would be a lot less painful for you as the accountant and you could actually enjoy the cool new products those engineers are coming up with! Intacct helps with this with it’s Item dimension.
In our Apple example, your new Chart of Accounts would look like this:
Your Items would be:
Each Item is tagged with a GL group which is then tied to your GL account in the Order Entry Posting Configuration. (If using standard process workflows, it’s directly tied on the item – even easier!).
Then, in reporting you can report on these individual Revenue streams summarized, or you can expand by items showing details.
Below, is a sample report which shows sales by customer expanded by items.
Also, just like the customer dimension you can add custom fields, group items, and create dimension structures with your items.
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.