Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of hours are spent annually by Accounts Payables teams on tasks such as vendor and bill creation, approvals, and payments, through to reconciliation and reporting. You would think that companies would be racing to automate and get ahead of the pack. However, countless businesses are still entering bills and processing payments manually. In addition, while bouncing between different systems and solutions, employees are often trapped in tedious, error-prone processes. With our 2022 Release 1, we’ve taken major steps to help your organisation embrace digital transformation and focus your time on higher-value work, thriving and breaking barriers for your customers.

 

Sage Intacct AP automation is an opportunity for finance leaders to thrive

Part of the responsibility for CFOs and other finance leaders is to provide the best possible Accounting and Financial Management solution for their teams to get ahead of the curve. Nonetheless, according to a recent study done by Ardent Partners in 2021, 56% of businesses don’t have complete procure-to-pay automation in place. With Release 1, Sage Intacct allows leaders to use one solution for all their AP needs. Sage Intacct connects users with banks, vendors, and payment processing via the Sage Business Cloud and applies the power of AI and automation to AP processing, enabling them to streamline processing from vendor and bill creation through to reconciliation and reporting for one or multiple business entities within Sage Intacct.

 

Because you’re doing your AP in Sage Intacct:

• You can take advantage of the automation we have in our reconciliations such as the auto-match and auto-create functionality to speed reconciliations.
• You have full visibility in your payments from within Sage Intacct, allowing you to keep tabs on your cash outflows

 

So now you’re probably wondering… How does Sage Intacct AP Automation work?…

 

AP automation begins with bill entry

The moment you receive a bill, your accounting software should begin working for you. With Sage Intacct, we do that by providing an intelligent, AI-powered digital assistant. The assistant automatically digitises bills, matches them to the right vendor, and pre-populates draft bills in Sage Intacct, reducing the time you spend on data entry and accelerating the bill-to-pay cycle. Rather than spending countless hours on data entry, you focus on exception handling. And all bills from all your entities can be processed in one system, with one logon, in Sage Intacct.

 

 

Electronic filing and paperless routing eliminate your approval headaches

Store bills electronically and access them from within your accounting solution for paperless filing and routing of bills for approvals. Instead of walking around the office hunting for approvals or digging through file cabinets and desks for bills, you can access everything from your Sage Intacct account.

 

Payments should be simple and cost-effective

Businesses often list payment creation and processing as one of their top pain points, including entering vendor details into the bank system and preparing and executing the payment run. Release 1 allows users to connect seamlessly with banks, vendors, and payment processors via Sage Business Cloud to automate electronic and check payments with Sage Intacct Vendor Payments powered by CSI. Gone are the days of check printing, envelope stuffing, and going to the post office. Now, our users can reconcile in minutes each day with automated bank downloads and auto-matching between payments and bank statements. And with our native payment solution, there are no setup or subscription fees, making payment automation affordable for companies big or small.

 

 

Streamline your workflows and save time with extended Outlier Detection for General Ledger

Outlier Detection for General Ledger is our machine learning solution that helps ensure the accuracy of your approval process. It reviews journal entries and flags anomalies to help you proactively catch errors and identify issues and risks prior to your approval. With Release 1, you’re now able to increase accuracy of your journal entries by identifying and fixing errors at the source.

GL Outlier Assistant can now be configured to assist the user entering the Journal Entry by altering the approval routing to send outliers back to the submitter. The submitter can then review and make any adjustments as needed before resubmitting. On resubmission, the journal entry will be routed to the next approver if additional approvals have been setup or posted if the submitter is the only approval step. This means that most outliers are checked and fixed before they make it to the approver. Now, GL Outlier Detection is usable by all organisations, including in organisations where the GL Outlier Assistant is the only approval step.

 

 

Subscription businesses get forward-looking insights

We’re providing more powerful insight and visibility into subscription revenue with contract renewal forecasting. We’re continuing to make it easier for finance teams to evolve and shift from descriptive to prescriptive, with deeper insights into their renewals. You can now forecast contract renewal data in addition to your billing, revenue, and payment data. Decision makers can now see what is booked, as well as what is expected to be booked. Use the Interactive Custom Report Writer or Interactive Visual Explorer to build visual reports that show booked and forecast value. Or use the Custom Report Writer to output the data for use with your preferred planning tool.

 

 

We’re breaking barriers to help you reach new heights

• We are now providing the only end-to-end, native AP automation from bill to reconciliation. Everything takes place within Sage Intacct with full visibility at every step. No jumping between applications for payment status or to run reports. Our AP Automation can handle multiple business entities and bank accounts out of the box, and reconciliations are easier with Sage Intacct’s auto-matched payment transactions. You’ll save time while decreasing errors.
• We’ve improved and expanded our already differentiated Outlier Detection for General Ledger to reach new audiences and now have configurable routing. The GL Outlier Assistant is now usable by all organisations, including in organisations where the GL Outlier Assistant is the only approval step. This grants outlier insight even to smaller organizations whose users that self-approve journal entries. There are additional routing improvements, too, that provide more flexibility to our users. And this isn’t just AI for the sake of AI. This is AI in action—it really speeds time to accurate journal entries.
• We’ve further expanded industry functionality. Release 1 has various improvements that continue to deepen our industry functionality in NFP, Inventory, Construction, and more. We’re further strengthening our ability to improve your insights and constantly aiming to support your industry more deeply.

 

The bottom line

These highlights are only a few of the many new features and enhancements that have come to Sage Intacct in the new release. Our newest features deliver time savings, increase confidence, and provide new insights for your organisation, allowing you to focus on making a higher-value impact. If you are a current Sage Intacct customer and want to learn more, check out the Release 1 highlights in the Sage Intacct Release Notes.

 

The Akuna Solutions Team