Incorporating Spend Management to Control Spending

• August 2, 2021
• Ashley Klapperick

Did you know that you can automate internal business logic in Sage Intacct for tighter controls around spending? With Spend Management, Intacct can either prevent or warn users if their spending exceeds the budgeted amount along with notifying a budget manager.

Sage Intacct’s Spend Management eliminates the never-ending task of tracking spend across your organization directly within the system. Spend management integrates with the general ledger, accounts payable, and purchasing applications, where spending may need better control.

What can Spend Management do for me?

• Gain insight and analysis into spending against your budget and dimension-based validations
• Warn or prevent users from spending when budget is exceeded
• Send proactive email notifications to budget administrator

Many organizations have several staff members that impact their annual budget. It’s not practical for managers or approvers to run a budget report for each transaction being entered by every single one of these staff members. Meaning, most expenditures which exceed the budget are caught after-the-fact. Intacct provides a variety of ways to help organizations automatically take care of this tracking and validating from the front end, right within the system. This blog post will cover how to see the big picture of your company’s spending within the Purchasing application.

Enabling Spend Management with Purchasing

Enabling spend management with purchasing is flexible and easy to setup with only five simple steps:

• Determine the budget you want Intacct to validate spend on:

• Enable overbudget notifications and who should receive the email notifications of over-spending

• Select the validation factors for spending and applications you wish to utilize the feature:

• If using Encumbrance or Committed Spend tracking check the box to include in spend management:

• Select all purchasing transactions (if multiple) that you want validated by spend management:

• Include all items and expense accounts you want spend management to validate during processing:

Now that the setup is complete, the expense validation will look at the budget, starting date, duration, dimensions selected and the transactions being created. Every transaction with spend management enabled will be validated by taking the budget calculated for the time-period selected in the setup minus the actual expenditures (including encumbrance/committed spending if enabled) at that point in time. After an expenditure is posted it’s factored into future validation immediately.

What’s Next?

Want to learn more and see this functionality in action? Watch the recording of our latest webinar from July 27th. We walk through:

• How purchasing integrates with Accounts Payable
• Create workflows that eliminate excess spending
• Automate spending logic with Spend Management

Don’t want to miss a future webinar? Register for the remainder of our 2021 Sage Intacct webinar series here.

Tags: Accounts Payable, spend management, Accounts Payable, Purchasing | No Comments »