System Optimization – Are You Getting the Most from Sage Intacct?
Your organization successfully completed its Sage Intacct implementation several months or maybe even years ago. The team has grown accustomed to the navigation and developed new ways of doing things in the system. However, you are still feeling some pain points in your finance and accounting function and are wondering if there is more your system could be doing for you.
There are some common tell-tale signs that your best-in-class modern GL system may not be providing all that it could. Even though you have been live in Sage Intacct for some time, do you find that you are still having some of these challenges:
- Month-end financials are produced several weeks after period close and stakeholders in financial reporting are complaining that they do not have access to real-time data;
- Even though you have made some progress toward a remote work environment, there are still team members who need to go into the office to cut checks or deal with other paper-heavy processes;
- You are still keeping schedules in Excel outside of the general ledger, such as fixed assets, deferred revenues, and inter-entity balances, to name a few;
- Despite your best efforts, your subledgers have gotten away from you and no longer tie to the general ledger.
Any one of these symptoms and more are signs of a deeper issue – that you are not fully leveraging technology to help your finance team work smarter and be more efficient. This is a great time to assess your usage of Sage Intacct and integrated technologies for opportunities towards greater system integration and optimization.
Assessing the Current State
The first step is to assess the current state of system functionality. We typically break this assessment up into a review of the current system configuration followed by an evaluation of related processes.
Within your Intacct environment, each module has specific configuration settings. These are a good starting point for understanding your current system requirements and if they still make sense in your current operating environment. For instance, within the Accounts Payable configuration, you will find the setup for AP bill and payment approvals, including workflows and thresholds. Within the General Ledger module, you can gain information about configurations such as dimensional relationships that filter and restrict data for ease of data entry. Within the Sage Intacct Company module, you can view your Subscriptions, Users & Roles and Inter-Entity configurations. If you are not sure how to interpret any of the configuration settings or would like input on best practices, your Sage Intacct consultant can assist with this review.
The next step is to determine the desired future state. In order to do this, we recommend a comprehensive review of processes across each functional area. Ideally, you will want to map entire workflows from start to finish to identify gaps and inefficiencies. For instance, if your AP process begins at the point of a purchase requisition from someone in operations, that is the start of that workflow. Ask the questions: how is that requisition submitted? Who approves it? How does it become a purchase order and who is submitting that to the vendor and in what format? Are we encumbering those funds? Should we be? How are the goods received? When the vendor invoice is received, what is the process for matching? Who enters the invoice and how is it approved? What are the payment approvals and thresholds and how is payment being made? How long is the turnaround time from receipt of vendor invoice to vendor payment? How much time do my people spend tracking down documentation and approvals?
A similar review should be conducted for each functional area, such as accounts receivable, credit card expense management, and month-end close, to name a few. Staff involved in these areas offer invaluable insights into where they are spending the most time and having their biggest pain points. As you begin to map these processes you will uncover some common trends, e.g. duplications of efforts across team members, manual manipulation of data leading to discrepancies between data sources, areas of risk and weak internal control, and time spent tracking things outside the system that could be maintained within.
Your organization’s biggest pain points are often some of your greatest areas for gained efficiencies and are typically the best starting place for determining improvements.
Common Opportunities for Optimization
Across organizations and companies, we tend to see the biggest pain points and inefficiencies in manual, paper-laden processes and areas where data is not properly integrated between systems. In your review of these areas ask yourself if there are opportunities to better leverage the technology. Today’s modern best-in-class approach lends itself to determining the right system of record for the function and then ensuring that those systems “talk” to one another.
Here are some areas we have found the greatest opportunities:
- Accounts Payable – migrate all AP payments away from paper checks to either a bill pay or AP automation system. Sage Intacct offers a couple of vendor payment options through Wells Fargo and American Express that are pre-integrated with Intacct and offer a great solution for many companies. For more complex approval workflows, greater transparency, and when a greater number of operational staff are involved in AP, we also recommend looking at one of Sage Intacct’s many partners with direct integrations, e.g. Bill.com and Mineral Tree. Vendors, bills, and payments are directly integrated into Intacct with no duplicate entry.
- Credit Cards – this is often one of the biggest single pain points within the finance function, as accounting team members manage countless receipts and credit card statements. This is also one of the most easily solved with an integrated expense management solution, e.g. Expensify or Tallie. These third-party solutions put the responsibility for the coding and the documentation into the hands of the credit card holders, via an app on their smartphone. These apps leverage smartphone cameras, artificial intelligence (AI), optical character recognition (OCR), and integrated bank feeds to match credit card receipts to charges and handle the bulk of the coding. Expenses sync directly into Intacct.
- Billing and Accounts Receivable – often one of the most complex functions for many organizations, particularly if billing is required to be handled in third-party and/or multiple external systems. For users of Salesforce, Sage Intacct’s Advanced CRM integration can help automate this process. When direct integration is not possible, due to third-party or multiple systems, Intacct’s ease of .csv import should help. Design master import templates that align with your billing system’s exports to simplify the process. If batch manual payments are desired, CLA offers the CLA Partner Toolbox to allow for imports of AR payments.
- Data Entry – ensure that transactional screens are configured for ease of data entry input, with dimensions visible and ordered in a way that makes sense for the people entering the data. Use dimensional relationships to filter data based on required relationships between dimensions, e.g. when Location A is selected, only allow selection from a certain subset of departments.
When to Assess
There is no magic timeline that is the right time to reassess your usage of Sage Intacct. There are new releases, and therefore new functionality, quarterly. Your organization changes and grows and its needs change over time. If you feel like you are operating inefficiently, CLA can help you assess your current systems and processes and partner with you to devise a roadmap towards leveraging technology to its full capacity.
Jocie Dye leads CLA’s national Business Opportunity Assessments (BOA) practice. Jocie has more than 20 years diverse experience in financial, operational and IT management and leverages this experience to assist clients in assessing the structure, processes and systems of their finance and operations, with an eye to integration of cloud-based accounting systems and automated processes. Prior to joining CLA, Jocie was the Managing Director of Finance for a national charter school network based out of PA. Jocie currently works with a wide variety of nonprofit and for-profit clients, with a focus in the charter school sector.