Sage Intacct Dashboards for Day-to-Day Users
Dashboards are a great way to provide a more user friendly experience for your team, but are often overlooked after an implementation. Most organizations find dashboards beneficial for their board or executive team members, by providing them with a one-stop-shop to view reports, KPI’s, and graphs. However, benefits that dashboards provide for day-to-day users often get overlooked, as the assumption is they have to navigate through the applications menu.
You might be thinking ‘my day-to-day users need to access Sage Intacct menus to perform their daily tasks’. This is a fair statement, but let’s see if we can provide these individuals with one centralized location that they can utilize as their home page and navigate more efficiently to the applications.
Today, we’ll focus on two dashboard components added in R3 2021: providing quick access to menu items and communication directly within a dashboard. Let’s look at how these two new features benefit everyday users.
Custom Navigation
Individuals that are in Intacct everyday may perform a variety of tasks, or very specific tasks dependending on their role. Custom navigation provides the ability to create links right within the dashboard where the user can navigate directly to the page with one click. Each user that utilizes the dashboard will have access to the link, thus providing a centralized home page for all.
Scenario: Month End Close links
If you recall from our December 2021 webinar, we discussed the numerous tasks to be completed every month, quarter, and year end close. These tasks may need to be completed by one or multiple individuals, depending on the size of your organization and different roles. So let’s create a month-end list of links aligned with the tasks they need to complete.
Navigate to the dashboard you want to adjust and click the + to add a component:
In the dashboard component pop-up complete the following steps:
- Component Type = General
- Component = Custom Navigation
- Component Title = unique to your purpose
- Link Details = Link name for each menu item, menu item you want a link added to.
Once you have completed the link selections, click ‘Save’ to add the component to the dashboard. Each link will appear as a hyperlink within the component. Now your team can utilize the component within the dashboard as their navigation panel for this workflow.
Billboards
Tired of sending reminder emails out to your team, or having to follow-up with team members to confirm completion of a task? Utilize Billboard-style messages to display text content on a dashboard to remind users of particular:
- Considerations
- Procedures
- Reminders
- Qualitative notes
Scenario: Month End Reminder
Month End is coming, and you want to make sure your team is aware of when to close the subledgers and start tying out to the general ledger. Add one billboard or multiple billboards with reminders for these individuals.
Navigate to the dashboard you want to adjust and click the + to add a component:
In the dashboard component pop-up complete the following steps:
- Component Type = General
- Component = Billboard
- Component Title = unique to your billboard purpose
- Billboard Content = input message you want the team/individuals to view
Once you have completed populating your message, click ‘Save’ to add the component to the dashboard. Change the message within the dashboard as often as needed. If using billboards across multiple dashboards make sure to update each when needed.
What’s Next?
You may also like to utilize the new ‘Attachment’ dashboard component to provide users with links out to internal documents that may pertain to their role. Join us for our complimentary webinar on January 25th at 10am (PT)/1pm (ET) to understand much more about dashboards and how they can provide a more user-friendly experience for everyone.
Reading this post after the webinar? Reach out to your CLA Sage Intacct team for more information.
Ashley Klapperick is a Consulting Director with CLA’s Intacct team. Ashley brings several years of team building, company collaboration and software experience in a variety of industries. She has a passion for leveraging technology to lead finance teams through strategic software implementations with a mission of increasing internal efficiency through business process improvements.