Intacct Platform Services: Custom Applications
What are the driving forces behind moving to a new accounting software? Obviously the process of implementing a new software adds work for your entire accounting/finance team. So the benefits must outweigh the drawbacks in order to move forward with choosing a new software and implementing it. Either:
- The direct software and maintenance costs have gotten to a point where there are other solutions available that provide the same benefits for a more reasonable cost.
- The processes currently in place are draining the time and resources of your team. When your company was smaller, it may have been acceptable to have less than efficient business processes. Eventually, due to growth, these processes can easily take over a senior staff’s day to day tasks. The new solution can optimize efficiency, thus avoiding having to hire additional staff to fill the role created by this inefficiency (additionally allowing more time for driving the growth and future of the business).
With Intacct Platform Services, you can customize your system around your business processes. In this specific scenario, we’ll show you how we transformed this process from two individual time-consuming steps into a single efficient step!
Example of Current Business Process:
Background:
This business revolves around creating both an AP Bill and AR Invoice from one service: a patient’s hospital visit. The company receives a bill from a Vendor (hospital), then marks it up a percentage and bills the party responsible for the paying for the visit. They would like to track profitability by patient hospital visit. They also have many custom fields to track within their AP Bill and AR Invoice leading to a large amount of time spent on duplicate data entry.
Imagine you have the following existing workflow:
- Enter AP Bill: You receive a bill from a Vendor for Patient A’s hospital visit. At this point, you enter in the AP Bill to pay the hospital. (You must also enter information to identify the claim this bill is associated with (containing multiple fields)).
- Enter AR Invoice: You then markup this bill by a certain percentage and create an AR Invoice to the party paying for the patient’s hospital visit.(Also making sure to identify the claim this invoice is associated with and all those custom fields).
It’s apparent the current process involves duplicating work. (The amount of data entry due to all these custom fields doesn’t make it any easier).
Wouldn’t it be great if you could simply enter the patient’s claim on a single screen and then have Intacct automatically create both the related AP Bill and AR Invoice for you?
With Platform Services you can do exactly that. (Customizing your accounting software around your business processes!)
New and Improved Efficient Business Process:
Step 1: Enter Patient Claim
Enter in the Patient Claim information including everything from header information about the actual patient you need to track (HIPAA compliant of course).
(Note: The Patient ID and name fields are autopopulated from the Project – you could also autopopulate additional fields).
Step 2: Enter AP Bill Info
On the same screen, enter the AP Bill information you would like Intacct to create (vendor, GL accounts, and amounts).
(Note: For simplicity, we only have a single GL account here, you could potentially have multiple accounts and amounts).
Step 3: Enter AR Invoice Info
On the bottom of your screen, enter the AR Invoice information Intacct should create (customer, GL account, and amounts). You could even actually have the amount of the AR Invoice calculate based on a certain markup percentage assuming the markup is constant.
Step 4: Save
Click save and watch Intacct do the rest! With a single point of entry you’ve created two transactions!
Not only does this improve efficiency, but also reduces risk of data entry errors. (Learn more about maintaining data integrity with Smart Rules!)
Hopefully this post has broadened your imagination of what is possible with Intacct and maybe even inspired a platform application of your own! Our goal is always to take you out of the seemingly inescapable mountain of work that builds because of inefficient business processes so if you do have an idea for a Platform Application that you would like either built for you or guidance on, feel free to reach out to your CLA Intacct team!
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.