Intacct Mini Application – Vendor ACH Audit Package

• September 9, 2016
• Kathy Jastrzebski

Last month, we reviewed how to set up ACH functionality in Intacct and how to create your first round of ACH payments. (Read that post here). You may wonder, how secure is the ACH information stored on your Vendors? In Intacct, we have the ability to control who has access to that information completely in a user’s permission (under the Accounts Payable module – see the screenshot below).

What you don’t yet have is the ability to know if someone modified or removed a Vendor’s ACH information. While the audit log in Intacct does create a record when a Vendor is edited, deleted, or added, it does not keep track of exactly which changes have been made to the record (specifically what fields have changed). Wouldn’t it be great if you received an email notification when a Vendor’s ACH information was added, edited, or deleted? That would surely give you some peace of mind! Well, with a combination of smart events and custom fields, Intacct allows precisely that!

Purpose:

When users add/modify/delete Vendor ACH information, monitor changes made to that information and send an email to specified recipients that changes have been made.

The Solution?

1. Create hidden shadow custom fields which hold the ACH information in the Vendor’s payment tab.
2. Create a Smart Event Email which is triggered under the condition that ACH info in standard fields does not equal ACH information in hidden shadow fields.
3. Create a Smart Event API call that triggers to update these fields when ACH information is added/changed.

How does it work?

It’s a very simple but creative solution!

• Create shadow fields (hidden from the user interface) that mirror exactly what is stored in the Vendor’s ACH fields.
• When the Vendor’s ACH original fields change, that triggers an email because the condition on the email compares the shadow fields to the original fields. If they do not match, an email is sent to notify someone that one of these fields has been changed.
• Now, the third step is very important because we want the shadow fields to update so that you receive the notification that the ACH information has been modified only when the information is changed in some way. If we didn’t have this step, the shadow fields would always be unequal and every time you made any type of change to the Vendor record you’d receive a notification email.

One last thing! Why does it work? (Hint: No, it’s not magic). The Smart event email triggers before the smart event API call. If it was reversed, it obviously would not work because the shadow fields would be updated before they could even be compared to the originals.

Interested in the ACH Audit package or need help customizing your Intacct company? Feel free to reach out to your CLA Intacct team!

Tags: Accounts Payable, ACH, Vendors, Accounts Payable, Automation and Customizations | No Comments »