What’s New in Sage Intacct 2019 Release 1?

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Sage Intacct has just launched the latest version of their award-winning cloud financial management software, 'Sage Intacct 2019 Release 1'.

Sometimes as accountants, we feel like we’re drowning in the operational day-to-day details of our work, and it’s easy to forget that we do things that have a real impact on the business. For instance, we help the business understand and drive profitability. And we can accelerate the collection of cash. This new Release helps you do both of those things. And as a bonus, it helps you get more productivity out of your day so you can spend time on those more impactful aspects of your job. Here are some of the highlights:

Dynamic Allocations Enhancements

Allocating indirect costs and revenues helps you understand the true profitability of your products and services. But it’s often a complicated process to perform allocations, requiring multiple steps that must be done in specific order. Additionally, for some purposes you want to look only at direct costs and revenues, while for others you want to view allocations included. Until now, accounting solutions required complex account setups or reversals to retain those before and after views.

Sage Intacct 2019 Release 1 introduces new capabilities to address these allocations issues, saving you time so you can focus on what drives performance in your organization.

Group Allocations – Let’s say you want to allocate square footage costs before facility costs and then allocate shared services costs across operating departments. With group allocations:

  • You get the convenience of pushing a button to run all your allocations at once.
  • You have control over the sequence to ensure allocations are run in the right order every time to ensure accuracy.
  • You control how errors are handled—keep going if there are no dependencies between allocations or stop the process if there are.
  • You get an email notification once the group has finished processing, so you don’t have to remember to check on the results.
  • There’s no limit on the number of allocations you can group together.

Allocation Book Stacking – Do you sometimes need to see only direct costs and revenue and at other times see the total? With our unique allocation books, you can simply check a box on your reports to include allocations or not and compare the results side by side. No additional manipulation is needed. It’s the simplest and cleanest way to be able to report with or without allocations on the market today.

Additionally, you can take your analysis a step further, easily comparing different allocation drivers for the same period, expenses, and revenues by setting up separate allocation books with different calculation bases.

Automatic Billing on Allocated Costs – Couple with Project Billing to bill for allocated costs with markup.

Project Billing: Transaction Rules

Cost-plus agreements, often found in government contracts, require service organizations to bill for a project’s labor, including burdened and overhead costs, plus an agreed upon fee or percentage over their labor costs. It’s a great way to reduce the risks of unprofitable projects, assuming all those costs are tracked and billed with the appropriate markup.

In Release 1, transaction rules allow you to automate project-based calculations for posting to the general ledger and flag timesheet transactions for automatic invoicing.

You can:

  • Understand project profitability and demonstrate whole project costs to clients with allocation of overhead costs plus markup to projects. This goes above and beyond most project solutions which only apply labor burden and markup.
  • Save time with labor billing based on employee groups. Set up an employee group once and change rates at the group level when a project is billed differently than your standard pricing.
  • Increase the accuracy of your hours tracking with the ability to reallocate hours using statistical accounts.
  • Automate general ledger transactions, apply markups, and generate an invoice for inter-entity transfer costs.
  • With straightforward, automated cost-plus billing, you can better understand and improve project profitability, save time, and generate more accurate billing.  

Contracts: Bill on Percent Complete

For businesses that have long projects or large budgets, billing at the end of the project can delay needed cash flow to fund the operations of your business. Billing as the project progresses can bring cash into the business up to 50% sooner. Most mid-market cloud financials solutions don’t offer this capability.

Inventory: Estimated Landed Costs

To avoid large cost of goods sold (COGS) valuation adjustments, you don’t want to wait until all the actual landed costs are received to cost your inventory. With estimated landed costs, you can estimate the cost and then reverse that estimate when the actual cost is received.

If the period is already closed when you get the actual, you can auto-generate adjustments in the current period. So, you can more accurately reflect the full cost of your inventory and avoid any swings in COGS.

Action UI

Action is a powerful new user interface that focuses on saving time, modeling the way you work, and accessing new innovations to drive productivity across your organization.

Streamlined navigation helps you get where you’re going quickly and consistently.

  • Favorite your frequently accessed menus to find them faster.
  • Eliminate menu clutter with your own personalized navigation.
  • Streamline day-to-day activities with a consistent experience across applications
  • Personalization allows you to model the way you work.
  • Know which entity you’re in at a glance and avoid entry errors with personalized entity colors.
  • Increase readability with report density preferences, higher contrast fonts, and a modern look and feel.
  • Compare reports more easily with tabbed reports.
  • Access redesigned experiences available only in Action.
  • Save time on Bank Reconciliations with multi-file import and faster filtering, sorting, and performance.
  • Gain more flexibility and control in applying payments and credits with the Pay Bills Workbench.
  • Simplify Global Consolidations with a consistent look and feel, duplication of books, and a graphical view and navigation.
  • Speed report creation provide a better user experience, and handle complex needs with the new Interactive Custom Report Writer.

To Learn More:

Sage Intacct 2019 Release 1 is currently available now, and current Sage Intacct customers can check out the Release Notes or talk with their Customer Account Manager for more details.

If you are not currently a Sage Intacct user, they you may want to consider attend one of their coffee break demo sessions to learn more about how Sage Intacct can help you drive improved business performance throughout your own organization.

Insightful Accountant would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Sage Intacct and their media representatives in providing 'the extras' to supplement this feature for our readers. Additional content including featured art (graphic product illustrations) are courtesy of Sage Intacct.