Last month was the eleventh Sage Intacct Advantage conference, held for the first time in Music City, Nashville, Tennessee. As is now tradition at the conference, one of the highlights was Dan Miller, VP of Product Management, and Aaron Harris, CTO and VP of Engineering, unveiling the new features and modules that are coming in the next couple of releases.

In the first half of 2019 we’re looking forward to integration of the Sage Banking Cloud to enable direct bank transaction feeds into Sage Intacct. (This can currently be done using solutions from Tallie, Anyware, and others.) Also on the 2019 roadmap: AI-assisted bank reconciliations!

Aaron Harris, CTO and VP of Engineering, discussing new updates for Sage Intacct.

This Friday, November 16, the fourth-quarter release from Sage Intacct is rolling out to every subscriber and, holy Pacioli, does this quarter have a lot going on!

For one thing, there are FOUR (4!) new modules about to come online:

Not-for-Profit Revenue Recognition
General Ledger Dynamic Allocations
Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning
And the highly anticipated Interactive Custom Report Writer

We’ll go into deeper discussion of those last two in separate posts next month. But let’s talk about the first couple for just a second because they could have a big impact on some accountants’ day-to-day:

Not-for-Profit Revenue Recognition

If you think that not-for-profit (NFP) organizations don’t have to think about revenue recognition changes, you’d be mistaken but you wouldn’t be alone. Many people (including some who work in NFP accounting) don’t think the new accounting standards will matter to an NFP organization. But two updated accounting standards (ASU 2014-09 and ASU 2018-08) going into effect in the next fiscal year will impact certain NFPs, including those who charge annual program fees and those who get funding from conditional grants. For those organizations, Sage Intacct has expanded the capabilities of its Revenue Management module to automate the tracking and recognition of that revenue. The Revenue Management module works with Sage Intacct Order Entry and optionally Project Costing and Billing modules to completely automate the invoicing and the revenue recognition processes.

General Ledger Dynamic Allocations

In General Ledger (GL), Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable, Sage Intacct has included the capability of Allocations for a while now, giving us the ability to split an expense over multiple dimensions with a single option in the transaction line. We’ve been able to define that allocation by percentages or by fixed dollar amounts.

Now, with Dynamic Allocations, we’re able to choose a Source (i.e., the account where the dollars are we want to allocate), a Basis (which could be another account balance or period activity), and a Target for the entry that this dynamic system generates. At the current time, these Dynamic Allocations will go to a User-defined Book in Sage Intacct. This means that we’ll have the option to run our financial reports with or without the impact of these allocation entries.

These are just a couple of the many new functions and features we’ll be working with when our Intacct companies get seamlessly upgraded on Friday. A couple more that we’re looking forward to:

Bill Projects Faster: Automate billing General Ledger transactions when we generate invoices from the Project Billing module. That means that GL expense transactions can be marked as billable to a customer project and will automatically be included in the invoice preview when we run Generate Invoice. What does that mean? It means it just got faster to run project invoices and get paid for expenses.
Better Inventory Costing: Landed costs for easier, more comprehensive valuation. Now you can add additional expenses, such as freight or insurance charges, back to the cost of purchased items and ensure that your inventory valuation reflects the appropriate cost of good sold (COGS).

Basically, this release is like early Chrismahanukwanzakah for accountants. And this isn’t by any means a complete list of all the good stuff coming in the Q4 release. It’s not even a very thorough partial list.

It’s all part of the larger Sage Intacct vision of Financial Leadership 3.0, where CFOs are not focused on backward-looking reports or even on the technology itself but on the future of each of our organizations.

Aaron Harris presenting on Q4 updates at Sage Intacct Advantage

In our next installment (after Thanksgiving), we’ll take a closer look at the new Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning.

Sage Intacct Q4 Release and More

Not-for-Profit Revenue Recognition

General Ledger Dynamic Allocations