The option to enable automatic application of inline credits has always existed within Accounts Payable, but this release we’re making it the default for all new companies and encourage existing users to enable it as well.

Why enable automatic application of inline credits?

• Keep your aging reports and reconciliations accurate.
• Eliminate manual application of credits; save time and avoid human error

About automatic inline credit application

Sometimes you need to create a bill that has both negative and positive line items. When you enable this configuration option, a negative line item will automatically apply to any positive line items until the credit is consumed within the bill. Leftover credits can be applied to bills from same vendor.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for automatically applying inline credits in your organization:

Pay Bills is now the official bill payment experience in Sage Intacct. With release 4, Select to Pay is no longer available in either the classic or the new Action user interface.

About Pay Bills

Sage Intacct flexible, streamlined Pay bills process offers features such as:

• Enhanced filtering of bills, including creating and saving customized filters
• An outbox that acts as a holding area for bills you selected but aren’t quite ready to pay
• Easy, more intuitive credit application, and much more

Switch to Action UI

Switching to Action UI is simple. At the top of any page, just click Switch to Action UI. They’ve made switching to Action an individual option so that no one else in your company is impacted. We recommend switching your entire Accounts Payable workflow (creating bills, approving bills, etc.) over to Action UI now before Sage Intacct flips the switch and make it the only UI in a future release. 

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using Pay Bills in your organization:

With Sage Intacct Release 4, you now have the ability to assign an Account group purpose for each account group, which can later be used for filtering. This option gives you enhanced filtering power, making it faster and easier to limit the list of account groups when creating reports and managing your company. By creating and selecting an Account group purpose for your account groups, you can limit the list of account groups shown in a list, making understanding faster and easier, especially when building reports.

About Account Groups Purpose

You create the Account group purpose directly from the Account Group Information page, a menu item, or by importing it from a template. Account group purposes can be assigned to multiple account groups.

After creation, the Account group purpose appears as an optional filter on the Financial Report Writer rows and columns that require Account Group selection, as well as performance cards and other areas that use account groups.

Example

Let’s say that you have an account group purpose for Direct Cash Flow – Operating (DCF-O). When you create a report, on the Rows tab you select the account groups to add to the report. If you select DCF-O in the Account group purpose, only those account groups tagged with the DCF-O purpose appear in the list.

Continuing the previous example, let’s use the account group purpose Direct Cash Flow – Operating (DCF-O) in dashboards. If you select DCF-O in the Account group purpose, only those account groups tagged with the DCF-O purpose appear in the list of account groups to select for the performance card.

On dashboard performance cards, click the Account Group drop-down and then click Find at the top of the drop-down to quickly narrow the selection using the account group purpose.

In multi-entity companies, this option is available at both the top and entity level.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using this new feature in your organization:

Are you still using the Quick Invoice Entry page?? If so, it is time to put it behind you. In Release 4, Sage Intacct introduced the Invoice page to create new invoices in the Action UI. And if you want to create multiple invoices, use a handy CSV file to import transactions. The catch is you need to switch to Action UI.

Switching to Action UI is simple. At the top of any page, just click Switch to Action UI. Switching to Action  UI is an individual option so that no one else in your company is affected.

About Invoices:

The invoice management process offers features such as:

• Creating multiple invoices at once, by importing transactions with a CSV file
• Using one or more dimension values when running reports on invoices
• Tracking the state of a given invoice, such as Paid, Partially Paid, Reversed, Draft, and so on

You can use only the Invoices page to create an invoice in the Sage Intacct Action user interface. If you have Summaries permissions, you automatically have the permissions required to create multiple invoices at once with a CSV file. To access the Invoices page, go to Accounts Receivable > All > Invoices.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for managing invoices in your organization:

Sage Intacct keeps making the user experience simpler. In Release 4, Sage Intacct introduced a new transaction allocation enhancement. Transaction allocation definitions provide a way to save standard allocation combinations that are used routinely. As a result, user can more easily and quickly split transaction amounts across dimensions.

About the transaction allocation method:

With this addition, Fixed amount with over/under logic, transaction allocations now have three methods to choose from:

• Percentage
• Exact amount
• Fixed amount with over/under logic

Fixed amount with over/under logic distributes fixed amounts first, in the order they are entered in the transaction allocation definition. After all fixed amounts are distributed, any remaining amounts are applied to the transaction using the percentage allocation. Percentage lines must always total to 100%.

Example:

The following entries table is an example of a transaction allocation definition using Fixed amount with over/under logic.

If you apply the transaction allocation definition to a transaction of 95, then you only get 95 applied to Dept 1 in Entity AA-101 for Project 3. Since the full amount is consumed by the first line of the allocation, no further lines are used in the entry.

However, if you apply the transaction allocation definition to a transaction of 350, then you get the following:

• 100 to Dept 1 in Entity AA-101 for Project 3
• 200 to Dept 1 in Entity AA-101 for Project 4
• 25 to Dept 2 in Entity ZZ-999
• 25 to Dept 2 in Entity ZZ-999

First, the amount lines are consumed, then the remainder is split according to the percentages defined in the transaction allocation.

Flexible dimension assignment

During transaction entry, you can now select dimensions on the fly that were not included in your transaction allocation definition and enter them on the transaction line. The single value is applied across all allocated lines.

For example, you define a transaction allocation with the Department and Location dimensions included.

Later, you record a bill in which you add a Project dimension for a transaction line.

The recorded entry for the bill includes both the dimensions defined in your transaction allocation definition, as well as the Project dimension you applied at the line level.

The single value selected in the Project field is applied across the split defined in the transaction allocation definition.

In addition, if a dimension isn’t defined in the transaction allocation, for example, a Vendor is not defined, Intacct defaults the value from the Bill Vendor document selection.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using this new feature in your organization:

Sage Intacct keeps making the user experience simpler. In Release 1 2020, Sage Intacct changed the default logic for how credits and payments are applied to invoices with multiple line items. The “waterfall” method, in which amounts are applied fully to line items based on specific criteria, makes it easier and simpler to understand how payments and credits work.

How does it work:

The new waterfall method automatically determines how both partial and full payments are applied to invoices. With this method, a payment or credit is applied to the first line of the invoice and moves to the next line, and the next, until each line is consumed. Partial payments are made in the same way, except that additional payments continue at the next line item with a balance.

This new behavior is enabled by default, with no configuration required on your part.

The waterfall method is also used to apply credit to invoices.

Credit application choices – multi-entity companies:

Credit application in multi-entity companies has been simplified:

• For multi-entity companies, the waterfall logic reduces the number of inter-entity transactions by distributing payments and credits throughout the invoice in a particular order. You wind up with fewer inter-entity transactions, because payments are applied in line item order within the entity before any remainder is applied elsewhere.
• If your multi-entity company is set up to limit credits to the owning entity only, then Sage Intacct automatically applies credits within the entity only, reducing inter-entity transactions to zero. If there is a credit amount remaining, that amount is reserved for future use within the owning entity?

Note:

If your company uses any Smart Events or Smart Rules in Accounts Receivable, which are created using Customization Services or Platform Services, then the waterfall method isn’t enabled for you in this release. Rather, the waterfall method will be enabled for you within the quarter following this release.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using the waterfall method for invoices in your organization:

You spoke and Sage Intacct listened! Based on your feedback Sage Intacct is rolling out a bundle of enhancements for cash management. Starting with reopening a reconciliation. Previously, if you needed to correct an error within a past reconciliation period, you’d have to reopen that reconciliation using the former process in the prior user interface. Now, you can reopen multiple reconciliations with just a couple of clicks, saving you time.

How does it work:

Reopen a reconciliation on the Reconciliation Histories page. When you reopen a reconciliation, your transactions are still matched. If your original reconciliation mode was by import, make sure you have that import file on hand to guarantee a smoother reconciliation.

Permissions:

Bank reconciliation supports separation of duties, which means that you can grant the new Cash Management permission Reopen to only the users you want. This permission controls the ability to reopen a reconciliation in the new bank reconciliation process from the Reconciliation Histories page.

Best Practice:

Before you reopen a reconciliation, or multiple reconciliations:

• download associated Reconciliation Reports on the Reconciliation Histories page so you have a record of which transactions were matched and cleared.
• gather any import files you used to reconcile.

Note:

When you reopen a prior reconciliation (and not the most recent one), the system automatically reopens any reconciliations that you performed after the one you’re opening. For example, say it’s February. You need to reopen the reconciliation for December. The system automatically reopens the reconciliation for January. You would then manually reconcile December and January.

Requirements:

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for reopening a bank reconciliation in your organization:

Now is your chance to familiarize yourself with Sage Intacct’s new bank reconciliation in Action, their new user interface. Sage Intacct’s previous bank reconciliation process is set to retire in 2020 R2. This means that everyone will be using the bank reconciliation experience in Action UI, and the previous bank reconciliation won’t be available from navigation menus. Get ahead of the game, and try it out now.

How does it work:

Designed to handle large volumes of transactions, Sage Intacct’s new Bank Reconciliation makes your month-end close process easier. With a clean design and intuitive filtering, sorting, and pagination, bank reconciliation has never been easier.

Additionally, you can save even more time on your reconciliations and enable bank feeds, a feature only available in the new bank rec experience in Action.

Navigation to the old bank reconciliation process:

In an effort to promote the switch to the new bank reconciliation, the previous bank reconciliation menu item is no longer available from the Cash Management menu in Action UI.

Instead, go to Cash Management > All > Reconciliation > Bank – New! in Action UI to check out the new and improved bank reconciliation process.

Switch to Action UI:

Switching to Action UI is simple. At the top of any page, just click Switch to Action UI. Until Sage Intacct makes Action their only UI in the near future, they made switching to Action an individual option so that no one else in your company is impacted.

Requirements:

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using the new bank reconciliation process in your organization

How does it work:

This idea came from you!

Gain more insight into your multiple-element arrangements with the new Contract MEA Allocation Details reporting object. You can now use the Custom Report Writer to build reports that show the allocation of transaction prices for performance obligations across contracts, increase your understanding of how your discounts impact allocated revenue, analyze accounting treatments such as carve-in/carve-out values, and more.

And to make your life even easier, Sage Intacct added a pre-built MEA allocation details report that you can use as a starting point for your own custom reports. Install the report package, duplicate the report, and then customize it to your company’s specific needs.

Look for the Contract MEA Allocation Details report object to be available for the Interactive Custom Report Writer in a future release.

Requirements:

Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning is an add-on application that offers a collaborative environment for creating and managing budgets. Tightly integrated with Sage Intacct, it uses the same structures, including the chart of accounts and dimensions, to seamlessly manage actuals, budgets, and plans, delivering both flexibility and control.
 

In Release 1, Sage Intacct introduced a few new features and improvements! Check them out:

• You can now populate your entire budget faster with data from Sage Intacct when you populate your root budget line or budget groups. See View and populate your budget with past actuals and budget data for more information.
• Update your dimensions mapping table in Budgeting and Planning when you import dimensions from MS Excel.

Requirements:

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using this new feature in your organization:

Sage Intacct keeps making the user experience easier. In Release 1 2020, Sage Intacct added another way to manage attachments to journal entries. You can add or access attachments directly from a journal’s View Transactions list without having to open journal entries one at a time.
Of course, you can still open the actual journal entry to access and add attachments as needed.

About Journal Entry Attachments:

When you view transactions for a journal, if a transaction has one or more attachments, you see an attachment icon () at the end of the row, to the right of the Print and Excel links. You can know at a glance which entries have supporting documents.

You can add one or more attachments to a single journal entry or add the same attachment to multiple journal entries. When you add one attachment at a time, each attachment has a unique ID, even if the attachment is used by other entries. However, when you add one attachment to multiple entries simultaneously, the attachment shares the same ID across those entries. Any changes you make to the attachment with a shared ID appear in all the places the attachment is used.

How it works:

• Add an attachment to a single journal entry: Go to General Ledger > Journal Entries list, and select View transactions for the specific GL journal. Select the journal entry to which you want to add the attachment. Then click the Attach button to open the Attachments list, where you can find the desired attachment and attach it to a selected entry.

• Add to multiple journal entries: To add the same attachment to several different journal entries, go to the list of journal entries (General Ledger > Journal Entries > select View transactions). Select all of the journal entries to which you want to add the attachment. Then click the Attach button to open the Attachments list, where you can find the desired attachment and attach it to selected entries. If auto-ID is enabled, each attachment will get a unique attachment ID, otherwise the attachment ID is shared across the journal entries.

After you add the attachments to one or more journal entries, the attachment icon appears in the row for each journal entry that you included. By clicking that icon you can open or download the attachment.

Managing attachments this way doesn’t change how they’re handled. You can still use Document Sequencing to automatically generate unique IDs for your attachments, and the actions are still included in the Audit Trail.

Requirements:

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using these new features in your organization:

Heads up! A new best practice for the way Balance Sheet accounts are budgeted

Currently when you set up your General Ledger through the UI or with a CSV file the default value for Budget balance sheet accounts by uses End of period.

The best practice is to set this to For period.

Why? Because budgets typically control the activity for a specified period and are stated in terms of how much activity should occur within each period. End of period uses a cumulative balance that’s applied since the beginning balance date.  This option isn’t the best method for planning purposes.

Budgets typically expire rather than roll period-over-period, so a For Period style of working with budget figures is more useful to an organization that’s planning to control costs.

What will change:

If you enter budget figures in the UI or via a CSV upload for balance sheet accounts (such as an asset) you enter the amount budgeted for each period instead of an end of period balance.

For example, suppose you’re planning to acquire new equipment for the year. You input the budget the amount of planned purchases using the For period setting rather than inputting the Ending Balance for the Equipment asset account like End of period would use.

In an upcoming release, the default (and only) selection will be For period. We’re making this change to better support budgeting for things like:

• works in progress
• capital expenditures
• equipment purchases
• facilities projects

Make the change now: 

This is a best practice, so you should make the change now. Why?

• to ensure that you’re using the optimal selection
• to be ready when the selection applies automatically

How to change settings:

To implement the best practice now in preparation for upcoming changes:

1. Open the General Ledger Setup.
2. Scroll to Reports & Budgets.
3. Under Budgets, use the drop-down list to select For period.

Requirements: 

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements:

Sage Intacct introduced enhancements for improving insight into your Pay Bills filter results and, for companies with less bills to pay, the option to load all ready-to-pay bills automatically.

Visibility into filter results:

Get insight into how many bills fit your applied filter criteria, and how many of those bills appear on the Pay Bills page.

For example, say you apply a filter for vendors A-L. The system displays the maximum amount of 1,000 bills with a message stating that there are an additional 500 bills to load. Process 500 payments, then re-apply the filter to load the rest of the bills. In other words, for each bill you process, you make room for a new bill to load.

Display all bills:

Does your company only have a small amount of bills to pay? Now, you can configure Accounts Payable to load all ready-to-pay bills on the Pay Bills page automatically, without having to apply a filter.

You can find the option automatically display all ready-to-pay bills on the Pay Bills page on the Configure Accounts Payable page. This option is turned off by default.

Best practice:

This option works best with small companies without many bills to load on the Pay Bills page. For companies with a large amount of bills to pay, check out our Help topic on how to create filters that can shorten the load time for large numbers of bills.

Are you tired of looking at irrelevant bank transactions? In Release 2 2020 Sage Intacct introduced a feature that will ignore irrelevant bank transactions. When transactions arrive from a bank feed, they’re automatically matched to existing transactions. Some downloaded transactions really aren’t relevant to your reconciliation and merely act as visual noise and clutter on the page. Previously, you had to live with this irrelevant data crowding up your view. Now you can store these transactions out of the way by simply ignoring them.

Examples of transactions you might want to ignore:

• Zero-dollar transactions: These can occur for any number of reasons, such as the bank provided a certified check for free. As a bank service, you weren’t charged, but the bank has to record the transaction.
• Duplicate transactions: For example, a transaction hits the bank with no check number. The bank gets the number, updates, then feeds it into your company again.
• Bank feed delay: You manually download and reconcile the account. Then the bank feed downloads the same information.

Details on ignoring transactions:

Only unmatched transactions are candidates for being ignored. Matched, partially matched, or cleared transactions can’t be ignored.The process of ignoring transactions is simple. You can do it from two locations in your company:

• Bank Transactions page: Go to Cash Management > Transactions > Bank transactions. From the Bank Transactions page, you can select single or multiple transactions and, with the click of a button, ignore them.
• During reconciliation: If you are already in the process of reconciling and don’t want to leave the Reconcile Bank Account page, you can ignore transactions on the fly, on a line-by-line basis. Click the Action link on the appropriate line and select Ignore.

And, if you make a mistake and ignore a transaction that shouldn’t be ignored, it isn’t gone forever. You can filter for ignored transactions in the Bank Transactions page and unignore it there. In fact, you can even create a custom view for ignored transactions and save it.

Ignoring transactions works solely with transactions downloaded from a bank feed. It doesn’t work with transactions added manually or imported from a file.

Viewing, acting on, and ignoring deposits

With this release—and at your request—when you reconcile, you can see all matched deposits as well as unmatched. And now you have the ability to ignore unmatched deposits as needed.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using the ignore feature in your company:

In Release 3, 2020 Sage Intacct introduced two new ease-of-use enhancements to make applying credits and paying partially paid bills a simpler process. You are going to love it!

Amount to pay field autopopulates

Speed up your pay bills workflow and reduce data-entry errors when applying credits. On the Pay Bills page, when you apply a credit for a payment, the Amount to pay field is automatically updated, eliminating the need for you to calculate this value manually.

The Amount to pay field automatically populates in two areas:

• On the Pay Bills page when you select a payment and click Apply credits.
• On the Bill Details page after you manually apply credits.

If you need more flexibility, you can clear the Credits to apply and Amount to pay fields with two new buttons located right above the transaction table. Click Clear credits or Clear payment amount, respectively, to clear the fields while maintaining any other payment updates you made for that transaction.

Easily view and pay partially-paid bills

There’s now more flexibility for creating partial payments. Previously, if you created a payment request for one line item, the rest of the bill would be locked for further payment until you completely paid off the selected line item (typically, when you print a check). Then, the rest of the bill would reappear on the Pay Bills page so you could complete the payment.

Now, you don’t have to wait to complete the payment flow on a partial payment in order to pay off the rest of the bill. For example, say you have a bill with two line items—a line item for $100 and a line item for $50. On the Pay Bills page, you select $100 for payment and create a payment request. Even though you haven’t printed a check for this payment or confirmed it to the GL, you can create another payment request for the remaining $50 line item. Pay off either payment request when you’re ready.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using these enhancements in Pay Bills:

With the release of Sage Intacct’s new Credit Card Reconciliation process comes the ability to connect your credit card accounts to bank feeds.

Increase productivity at reconciliation time, eliminate manual file manipulation, and get visibility into transactions when you enable bank feeds for your credit card account. Credit card transactions coming in from your bank automatically match with what exists in Sage Intacct for a seamless reconciliation. You don’t have to manually match transactions to a statement—everything flows through automatically.

**Already using bank feeds? If you’re enabled for bank feeds, you’re automatically enabled for credit card feeds! The next step is to connect each account to receive transactions on the Banking cloud tab on the Credit Card Account page.**

Details

Perform soft reconciliations whenever you pull banking information from the cloud, saving time on reconciling huge amounts of transactions at the end of the month and gaining insight into your credit card balances. Your productivity increases with automatic matching for reconciliations, elimination of manual file manipulation, and enabling AR clerks to pinpoint exactly which transactions require invoice entry.

Download transactions

To download your transactions, go to the credit card record and click Refresh, or go to the Credit Card Reconciliation page (new in this release!). Each time you access this page, transactions are downloaded and automatically matched with what you already have.

View downloaded bank transactions

View all transactions received from all connected accounts on the Bank Transactions page. There, you can create a custom view or filter to see just the transactions you want.

Create additional transactions

On the Bank Transaction page, Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable users can receive a payment or create a credit card transaction to bring your system records up-to-date with what exists in the bank feed.

New with this release, you can now create a credit card transaction at the line level at reconciliation time.

How to get started

To enable bank feeds, first subscribe to Sage Cloud Services. Within the module, click Enable bank feeds, which enables you to receive feeds for both checking accounts and credit card accounts. Then, connect the accounts you want to view individually on the account record page within Sage Intacct.

About connecting

Depending on the bank, it may take some time to get your account connected to credit card feeds. Some banks offer instant connection, and all you have to do is sign in to your online banking account through a portal. Other bank accounts require you to manually fill out a form, granting permission to release banking information. Contact your bank if you have any questions on the connection process.

Requirements

Use the following checklist to review the basic requirements for using bank feeds in your organization: