Innovation Takes Center Stage at Sage Intacct Advantage 2019

Sage, a market leader in cloud business management solutions, showcased the next generation of cloud financial applications during their opening keynote at Advantage 2019, the Sage Intacct customer and partner conference taking place this week in Las Vegas. These product enhancements, leveraging the Sage Intacct Intelligent General Ledger, underscore the current focus of moving finance teams from looking at a periodic point in time to delivering continuous strategic value to the organization.

Highlights included:

  • Details on new Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities being embedded directly into the Sage Intacct Intelligent GL™
  • New integration between Sage Intacct and Sage People – bringing together Sage’s two mid-market native cloud solutions
  • New enhancements to Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning
  • Expanded pre-built report library and a new interactive visualization tool

“We’re quickly moving from the Age of Information to an Age of Answers. From embedding machine-learning and artificial intelligence capabilities directly into our general ledger to streamlining the process of gaining actionable, real-time insights across the business, we’re helping our customers break through the clutter and accelerate their success,” said Marc Linden, Sage EVP and GM of Medium Segment Native Cloud Solutions. “To enable our customers to transform the way they think and work, we continue to deliver a steady flow of industry-first products and enhancements to our software, so they are poised for the future of finance.”

Delivering on the promise of embedded AI capabilities

Sage CTO, Aaron Harris, kicked things off by showcasing how emerging technology would underpin the evolution of the CFO role from historian, to real time analyst, to a world where they can strategize with certainty. He shared details on how the Sage Intacct Intelligent GL delivers strategic value across three domains – accounting, trust, and insights – through several AI-enabled use cases, including: the ability to leverage AI to accelerate time to revenue with intelligent time capture, improved anomaly detection to speed up the financial close process, and improved insights to predict customer renewal and churn rates.

Connecting Sage Intacct with Sage People

Kathy Lord, SVP of Sage People, announced a new integration between Sage Intacct and Sage People that will deliver powerful business management capabilities through a unified system for financials, budgeting and planning, HR, and people management.

The new integration between Sage Intacct and Sage People brings together Sage’s native cloud solutions for the mid-market delivering a unified system of intelligence, ensuring real time accuracy of employee related data in reporting and analytics. Global workforce information will now be available instantly to finance teams, enabling consistent reporting structures and approval hierarchies, while improving financial controls.

Streamlining the budgeting and planning process

Introduced last year, Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning is a powerful, yet easy to use, cloud-based financial budgeting and planning solution that streamlines and improves the budget planning process. Sage Intacct VP of Product, Dan Miller, showcased several new enhancements designed to make creating a budget as simple as a few clicks, while also providing customers with more flexibility in the budget hierarchy to better match the user’s organization.

New features in Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning include:

  • An enhanced budget wizard that features an intuitive, drag-and-drop capability for adding dimensions from Sage Intacct into the budget structure.
  • Expanded collaboration capabilities that make it easy to work together with business and department leaders to gather data and context around planned revenue and expenses.
  • Drill down from Sage Intacct dashboards and reports to the drivers of the budget in Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning to see how the budget or forecast was created – enabling users to see what they are working on in the context of the source of the information with just a few clicks.

New pre-built reports and ways to visualize data

For those organizations requiring transactional reports, the Sage Intacct Interactive Custom Report Writer, introduced last year, features capabilities to customize reports, including drag and drop, creation of pivot tables, flexible formatting to highlight areas of focus, cross-dimensional analysis, time trending, and more. To provide customers with a jump-start on their operational insights, Sage Intacct has introduced an expanded library of more than 50 pre-built custom reports designed to encourage new ways for businesses to look at their information and improve decision making.

During the keynote, Dan Miller also introduced the new Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer, designed to provide new ways to discover business insights using visualizations. This new offering enables collaborative exploration through advanced visualizations, and the ability to add annotations to reports using an innovative “narrate” mode to find and capture insights during the analysis right in line with the reporting.

Both the Interactive Customer Report Writer and Interactive Visual Explorer are built directly on the system of record – enabling zero-latency, instilling confidence in the data quality, and providing simplified security administration because it automatically shares the existing Sage Intacct permissions and data security model.

Availability

The new solutions and enhancements mentioned in this press release will be available from Sage Intacct and its network of channel partners along the following time-frame:

  • Available this year: New pre-built reports for Sage Intacct Interactive Custom Report Writer, Sage Intacct and Sage People integration, and certain enhancements to Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning
  • Available in 2020: Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer and certain enhancements to Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning
  • Available in 2020 and beyond: Embedded AI capabilities within Sage Intacct