Sage Intacct

Article Dean Dorton

A fictional account of very real circumstances…

Elsa Markos, co-owner of the Arendelle Ice, an American Hockey League franchise, settled into seat 4A for her flight back home.  Elsa is on her way to secure a new sponsor for her team.  The sponsor is a large public company and could be a huge boost to the team – and the organization’s bottom line – so Elsa herself is making the trip along with a team of top executives. 

Once the plane reaches a safe altitude, passengers can use electronic devices, so Elsa pulls out her iPad.  In addition to reviewing the presentation they are going to give, Elsa wants to review the latest financials for the team and for the other entities, such as the arena the Ice play in.  The potential sponsor has been very interested in knowing how profitable the organization is to ensure their investment in the Ice is not wasted on a team that will disappear due to financial distress.

Fortunately for Elsa, the Arendelle Ice made a change recently to a cloud-based accounting software system called Intacct.  Not only does Intacct fit their needs for a high-powered, flexible accounting system, but also the cloud delivery method allows her anywhere and anytime access.  Elsa and her executive team are no longer tied to their desks in order to get financials.  Nor do they have to call and have reports emailed to them as they did with their previous on-premise accounting software.

Even before Elsa stays at a Holiday Inn Express, Intacct gives her the power to stay up-to-date with real time financials.  In addition, Elsa and the Ice executives are able to use the unconventional General Ledger structure that Intacct provides to produce a myriad of financial reports sliced and diced in the exact manners that they want them.  Her Intacct implementers even thought of ways that Elsa’s team could report that she had not.

Intacct gives the Ice the ability to report revenue by event type, music genre, hockey division, basketball opponent and much, much more.  It has truly reduced the burden of producing financials as well as shortening the month end close cycle and providing access to reports from a plane at 35,000 feet! 

But, how could she get such data in her financials?  How can they break down the arena events by type?  How does the accounting system know what division the hockey opponent is in?  How in the world can she get all these reports with a few clicks of the mouse? 

Stay tuned…

Article Dean Dorton

Will I Be Able to Track Funds and Monitor Budgets?

Whether you are funded by public grants, private grants, or donations – tracking the status and use of your funds is crucial. If you are tracking funds and budgets via spreadsheets, you know how cumbersome and time-consuming the creation of those are—not to mention maintaining them.

Accurate, easily accessible, and up-to-the-minute budgets are critical not just to accounting but to every program manager and organization executive.

Intacct software for nonprofits makes it easy to review budgeted amounts, dollars spent, committed funds, and available budget. Quickly produce comparative statements for your management staff and board of directors showing the budget-to-actual position for your programs, grants, departments, and other cost centers. Easily estimate future periods and calculate forecasted financial positions, including “what-if” scenarios for better decision making.

The above Q&A is question number 4 from our whitepaper titled “13 Questions Nonprofit Organizations Need To Ask When Buying A New Accounting Solution.”  To get answers to all 13 questions, download the full whitepaper.

Article Dean Dorton

Going Beyond Sales Results, New Program Recognizes Top Performing Partners Across Broad Set of Success Criteria

SAN JOSE, Calif. – August 07, 2014 – Intacct, a leader in cloud financial management and accounting software, today announced the launch of a new Premier Partner Program. This new program was built to recognize a network of Intacct partners that deliver comprehensive, high quality services, support, and software to help companies get maximum value from their Intacct investment. The initial members of the Intacct Premier Partner Program are: AcctTwo, Armanino, Brittenford Systems, BTerrell Group, CliftonLarsonAllen, JMT Consulting, LBMC Technologies, and Massey Consulting.
The Intacct Premier Partner Program reflects the ongoing evolution of the company’s thriving channel program. Intacct’s partners continue to show strong sales growth, delivering an increasing proportion of new customer deals for the company. However, ultimately partner success is reflected not merely in sales figures. These top performing partners are evaluated along a broader set of criteria than just acquiring new Intacct customers and are encouraged to build sustainable excellence.

…read more

Article Dean Dorton

How Much Sales Tax Risk Do You Carry?

Sales tax. It is one of those tasks that can drive your accounting department or bookkeeper crazy. It is also one of those unavoidable statutory requirements. Undoubtedly you have developed a process that works, but do you know how that process will hold up in an audit? Most companies cannot afford to screw up sales tax. The average audit penalty of $34,000 means the consequences of making mistakes are dire.

In a time where states are short on revenue and looking at uncollected sales tax to help make up that gap, sales tax practices are increasingly under the microscope. Now is as good a time as any to examine your sales tax process and determine just how much risk you carry. Here are a few things to consider:

Are you manually managing sales tax in Microsoft Dynamics or Intacct?

Perhaps you look up sales tax rates by ZIP code or download rate tables to implement into your ERP. This can be time consuming and error prone. ZIP codes were created for the postal service and do not always line up with taxing jurisdictions. Relying on ZIP codes to determine tax rates can mean over or undercharging your clients.

Does the taxability of your products vary by jurisdiction?

Products that are taxable in one state may not be in another. For example, some Indiana localities have adopted a local food and beverage tax when a food or beverage is sold, served or prepared for consumption. In neighboring Ohio, most food items are non-taxable unless they are consumed on the premises where they are purchased.

Are you doing business in multiple states?

Instead of thinking of sales and use tax obligations in terms of where your business is located, think about where you do business and the activities you engage in within those states. Why? Rules vary from state to state when it comes to what creates sales tax nexus. For example, certain trade show activities can trigger sales tax liability in Illinois, Texas, Nevada, Florida and California.

Reduce your risk:

Sales tax can be tricky, especially when manually keeping up with rate, rule and boundary changes in multiple jurisdictions. Reduce your risk of a negative audit by taking time to examine your sales tax process and develop a consistent, defined work flow. Then, look for ways to increase sales tax calculation accuracy. Automating the sales tax calculation and decision process can save time, money and effort. Avalara sales tax automation solutions integrate with Microsoft Dynamics and Intacct, along with most e-Commerce shopping carts and POS systems to help you achieve compliance and accuracy for all your transactional tax needs.

For more information on how to reduce your risk, join us for an upcoming webinar:

The Hidden Dangers in Your Rate Tables
1PM ET, Wednesday, April 23, 2014
Register Here

Article Dean Dorton

The third part of this series covered summarizing, grouping, and charting your report. This week we will finish up by looking at different run time changes you can edit for your report.

The “Run Report” step has settings you can change regarding the reporting period and dates for your report. You have the ability to use a financial reporting period such as current month or current year along with an As Of date, as well entering a specific start and end date to capture a specific range. If your report is of the “Summary” type, you can select to show or hide the details on the report. Hiding the details means that you will only see subtotal and total calculation, but not the detail lines. The “Report Title 1” and “Report Title 2” let you enter text for the first and second lines of your custom report’s title, and the “Footer Text” lets you put in information to show along the bottom of your report’s pages.

Next up are Runtime Parameter fields. These are similar to the filters that were set earlier, but instead allow the user who is running the report to choose the criteria when running the report. For example, you might select “Customer ID” as a runtime parameter, which will let the person using the report specify a specific customer to filter the data by. You can specify up to six of these parameters to use.

If you decided to use runtime parameters, the next options will be for Runtime Parameter Sequence. This lets you change the order and grouping of runtime parameters, and whether the user will be prompted for the filter when running the custom report. Fields that have the same Field Group name will be placed together; by organizing related fields into a group, you can save time for the user running your report. As before, you can change the order of the fields by selecting the radio button on the relevant line and using the up/down and top/bottom arrows to move the field.

In our very last step, we will give our new custom report a name and description, decide where the report should be accessible from, and whether it should be used by other users in your Intacct system. The name and description of the report go into their respective fields – make sure to be descriptive in case someone else will need to use the report later. If you want the report to appear in the module you selected, check the box for “Deploy”. If this box is not selected, the report will only be available through Custom Reporting. By default, reports are marked as being active. If you want to disable a report without deleting it, then uncheck the “Active” box.

Now save your new custom report and you’re done! You can now run your new report and see what it looks like. Remember, you can always go back through and change settings to tailor the design to suit your needs. If you need to make a similar report to one you’ve already made, you can duplicate any of the custom reports in the system to avoid redoing the basic parts. There is also the ability to export the custom report definition to a file.

Article Dean Dorton

In the previous part of this tutorial, we looked at how you can perform calculations, sort data, and filter data to suit the needs of your custom report. Now we will look at the different options for summarizing, grouping, charting, and running your new custom report.

After you’ve completed any filters, you can choose to show summaries for a columns data. Options include count, sum, average, standard deviation, largest, and smallest. To show these summary columns, you only need to find the object that you want to summarize and check the box under the appropriate summary type. As you will see, non-numeric fields can only be summarized by count; all summary types can be used if the field is a numeric one.

If you chose the “Summary” format at the start of the custom reports wizard, then the next option will be to choose group-by columns. To do this, drill down through the data types to find the location that contains the information that you want to group by and select it from the drop-down list. You may select up to three columns in total to group by. When multiple columns are selected, there will be multiple subgroups inside of your report.

Next we can choose the sequence of columns displayed in the custom report. The title heading of the column can also be modified here by editing the name in the text box. As before, the rows can be moved by clicking and dragging each one to fit the order you want them to appear in.

After changing the column sequence, the next option to look at is changing the summary and group by sequences. Note: summary sequence changes will only be available if you selected a summary column. For both of these steps, select the radio button next to the column whose sequence you want to change and click on the up/down or top/bottom arrows to move its position.

When running your report, you can optionally run it in a chart format. The next step will let you customize what kind of chart is generated when running the custom report as a chart. First you can choose from a number of chart types such as line, column, bar, and pie charts. After choosing a chart type, you can configure different display and labeling options for that chart. There are quite a number of different setups, so you can always come back and change them later if you don’t like how the chart looks.

Check back next week for the fourth and final part of this series on custom reports where we will cover the final steps for running your report.