Sage Intacct 2022 release 4 highlights: AP bill automation, enabling compliance, and automating workflows

The finance landscape is constantly evolving, and it can be a daunting task to keep your business ahead of these changes. With new accounting standards to follow, a decentralized workforce operating in difficult macroeconomic conditions, and a need to tie disparate data sources to overarching business objectives, it’s more important than ever that you have the right tools to keep your business healthy and strong.

Sage Intacct 2022 Release 4 provides exciting new capabilities that further automate Accounts Payable, enable compliance with the latest accounting standards, and streamline manual workflows to elevate the work of finance and operations teams to help their businesses thrive. Let’s learn a bit more!

What will you do with all the time you save? 

Per IDC, 81% of small to medium businesses (SMBs) manually enter vendor bills with an average of 9 to 24 minutes spent to process each invoice with roughly 30% of that time on data entry. That adds up to roughly 2 to 5 days per month for the average SMB. What if you could save up to 50% of that time? The great news is that Sage Intacct is beginning a phased rollout of AP Bill Automation to help you do just that. 

With AP Bill Automation, you set up one or more email addresses to receive bills for each business entity. You can also manually upload bills. From there AI-powered automation populates draft bills, matches them to the vendor, and identifies duplicate bills and exceptions. The AI gets smarter with every bill you process, saving more time. Customers, such as Johnny Seeds and Andy B’s, have cut their processing time in half. Best of all, the automation is built into Sage Intacct core financials and when coupled with Vendor Payments powered by CSI, you streamline your AP process from bill through to payment, reconciliation, and reporting.

Knocking down barriers to help your business flow

At Sage Intacct, we understand the complexity of the accounting industry better than anyone. That’s why we’re constantly investing in building out the most complete solution in the market through new product enhancements and expanded partnerships with other industry-leading financial vendors. 

Sage Intacct Payroll powered by ADP

To that end, we’re excited to announce that Sage Intacct and ADP have come together to bring you the best-in-class payroll and HR solutions that seamlessly connect to Sage Intacct. Sage Intacct Payroll empowers businesses to grow by leveraging payroll and people data within Sage Intacct Accounting and streamlining processes through the entire employee lifecycle, including payroll, time keeping, benefits administration, enhanced HR, and more.

With Sage Intacct Payroll powered by ADP, you can:

• Easily combine payroll, people, and accounting data for better business insights
• Reduce risk by eliminating inefficient systems that don’t work together
• Get access to the right payroll and HR solutions at the right time – only paying for what you need, when you need it
• Efficiently and accurately pay your employees every time while leveraging powerful automation and employee self-service features

Statistical account data and grid entry in Sage Intacct Planning

With this release, we’re also pleased to announce the release of grid entry and support for statistical accounts for our Sage Intacct Planning application.  Sage Intacct Planning provides a collaborative environment for preparing and managing budgets, and these new features offer our customers greater flexibility and control over how they plan.

• Customers experience the look and feel of a spreadsheet in the grid entry view, entering data faster and seeing more of it at once with greater ease of use. By focusing on intuitive, human-centered design, we make it easier for finance and operations teams to collaborate effectively and efficiently within the same system.

• Customers gain deeper insight into their business using statistical data from Sage Intacct with statistical models in Sage Intacct Planning. With Sage Intacct statistical accounts fully integrated with Sage Intacct Planning, customers can easily create driver-based budgets, giving them the speed and flexibility to quickly adjust assumptions, conduct what-if analyses, and do monthly forecasting.

Every minute counts: make sure you’re reimbursed accordingly! 

As Sage Intacct continues to build out the most complete solution in the market, we remain deeply committed to solving the industry-specific needs of our customers. We understand that finance solutions aren’t a one-size-fits-all, which is why we work closely with our customers to address their needs down to the micro-vertical level. 

That is why we’ve expanded the functionality of our AI-powered Sage Intelligent Time application so that it now works with grant tracking to further support the needs of nonprofit organizations.

Many nonprofit organizations are required to submit time records and often reimburse time back to grants. Now with this release, our nonprofit customers that subscribe to grant tracking in billing can automatically track and assign staff time. 

This integrated functionality is exclusive to Sage Intacct and is highly differentiating in the nonprofit industry. Best of all, it’s available to Sage Intelligent Time customers at no additional cost.

By automating reimbursable time with down-to-the-minute precision, you can better manage grant and project financial position with more accurate capturing of revenue and cost. In addition, you’ll be able to keep your program staff focused on project delivery instead of capturing time.

Compliance keeping you up at night? Let us help!

Sage Intacct Lease Accounting

ASC-842 is the new lease accounting standard issued by the FASB stating that all leases longer than 12 months need to be recorded on the balance sheet. This new standard has brought about a substantial change in lease accounting processes. Companies with a handful or more leases may find themselves uncertain, behind, or overwhelmed with adopting the new standard.

Sage Intacct Lease Accounting (currently in the Early Adopter phase, with General Availability slated for early 2023) solves for this. Lease Accounting helps lessees transition to the new standard while automating much of the manual work that takes countless hours out of the month. Lease Accounting brings about several key benefits: 

• Leverage your Sage Intacct general ledger and chart of accounts
• Access all your financial data from within Sage Intacct for reporting and analysis
• Automate lease accounting processes, including the creation of AP bills to the lessor when payments are due, drafting period end GL journal entries when required, and more

1099 E-filing powered by TaxBandits

Tax law compliance also got a bit more complicated this year with the newly adjusted 1099 e-filing requirements. Not to worry – we have you covered here as well. Sage Intacct 1099 E-filing powered by TaxBandits (currently in Limited Release) fully automates your 1099 e-filing, providing confidence that filings are accurate and compliant with the latest tax laws. 

In addition, 1099 E-filing with TaxBandits reduces processing time, freeing teams from tedious, error-prone filing to focus on higher-value activities.

• Submit error-free filings to avoid penalties, corrections, and multiple filing fees with automated validation that catches common filing errors.
• Enable a one-stop-shop and complete solution for e-filing, distributing recipient copies, and tracking the filing status of forms all from one secure location.

Centralized compliance documentation

Sage Intacct is designed with compliance in mind. To make it as easy as possible for our customers to navigate the ever-evolving world of accounting regulatory compliance, we have also added a new section to the Sage Intacct Help Center that centralizes information on compliance best practices and controls. By leveraging the experience of global audit experts, we outline key compliance areas and provide guidance to make it easier to demonstrate internal controls when undergoing audit. Whether you must adhere to compliance requirements under SOX, IFRS, Single Audit or other guidance, we can help.

But wait… there’s more!

These are only a few of the many new features and product enhancements included in Sage Intacct 2022 Release 4. Our newest features deliver time savings, increase trust in your numbers and compliance, and provide new insights for your organization, allowing you to focus on delivering higher-value impact.

If you are a current Sage Intacct customer and want to learn more, check out the Release 4 highlights in the Sage Intacct Release Notes in the system.

If you’re in the market or curious about exploring a new financial management software solution, attend one of our daily coffee break demos to learn more.