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Tips for Using Sage Intacct While Working Remotely: Reporting and Automation

March 24, 2020

To help you with the COVID-19 situation, we have put together a few tips on how to use your Sage Intacct solution to significantly reduce the effort it takes to do your job. As a global society, we are all coping with this pandemic. One of the adjustments many of us are struggling with is suddenly adapting to working from home.

This article will cover three main areas in which your existing Sage Intacct software can make a difference:

  • Creating dashboards, reports, and charts and graphs
  • Scheduling automatic report delivery
  • Automating approval workflows

Creating Dashboards, Reports, and Charts and Graphs

In this time of great upheaval, it's critical that you have the information you need to quickly react to market shifts and emerging trends, so that you can make changes to your business processes and product/service offerings. In the coming months, your ability to expediently react will be crucial to the continued success of your organization.

One way you can utilize Sage Intacct to meet this need is to ensure you are using its robust, built-in reporting tools. Leveraging the Dimensional Chart of Accounts, Account Groups, and the easy-to-use Financial Report Writer and Graph Creator will allow you to create reports, charts and graphs that display information in a way you may not have thought of previously, providing you with a new perspective to help you think out-of-the-box during these extraordinary times.

Once you've created the reports, charts and graphs, you can easily create new dashboards or augment existing ones. Through security, it's simple to push these dashboards out to individual users or groups of users, while limiting the view to only those that require the information.

By leveraging Performance Cards (KPIs) with easy-to-configure, conditional formatting on the dashboards, you can focus users' attention immediately to where it needs to be to react efficiently and timely.

Scheduling Automatic Report Delivery

Another way to improve your performance and automate some processes is to schedule reports to be delivered automatically. Report delivery can be set up to filter by Department or Department Group, and/or Location or Location Group. The schedule can even determine the As of Date the report is run under.

Scheduling options include inputting a Start Date, and the Ending On choices are flexible, with values of Never, Number of Occurrences, and a specific End Date. If Number of Occurrences is chosen, options are Days, Weeks, Months or Years.

Delivery options are equally as flexible, offering Email, which allows you to dictate the To, Subject, Message, and Report Type – Printable (PDF), HTML (Live), CSV or Excel. You can also choose the Store in Intacct option, which stores the report in the My Stored Reports list. This section allows you to provide a Report Description and the Report Type, as described previously.

Finally, you can choose the Store in Cloud option. This is especially exciting as it allows you to push your reports to an HTTP, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box, Amazon S3, or OneDrive location. Formats, as with the Email and Store in Intacct options previously described, are Printable (PDF), HTML (Live), CSV and Excel.

Automating Approval Workflows

In terms of leveraging Sage Intacct for automation, there are few things more powerful than automating approval workflows. This is especially important during this critical time of working remotely, as the approvals are entirely electronic, requiring no paper and no physical contact.

Sage Intacct has a variety of approval workflows available, some of which depend on ancillary modules. Here is a list of approval workflows segmented by module.

  • Core Subscription
    • General Ledger
      • Journal Entry Approval
    • Accounts Payable
      • AP Bill Approval
      • AP Payment Approval
    • Purchasing
      • Purchase Requisition Approval
      • Purchase Order Approval
      • Vendor Invoice Approval
  • Ancillary Modules
    • Time and Expenses
      • Expense Report Approval
      • Expense Reimbursement Approval

Especially useful is the ability to approve on a mobile device. You can use any device that has access to the internet and a modern browser, such as Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Safari.

While the coming weeks and months are uncertain, one thing you can count on is the ability of your Sage Intacct accounting software to help you be more efficient, timely and decisive, all while working remotely.

Visit our COVID-19 Resource Center for more information on how to keep your business running during disruption.

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