What’s New From Sage Intacct? R3 Overview and Elevate Invite

As one of the leading resellers and partners in the Sage Intacct channel, we know that keeping current customers updated is as important if not more important than closing new business. It’s why we have continued to grow and can boast an impressive renewal rate—our focus on continued support and your ongoing success.

In this, we understand that some of the new features or processes created by an update may be a bit confusing, and to address this have introduced our quarterly series—Elevate Your Sage Intacct—to introduce end users and executives to these features and processes. Today, we would like to look at some of the most important new features and invite you to listen to our recording of the September 27 Elevate Your Sage Intacct Q3 Event.

New Features, Improved Functionality: New in R3 2018

There are dozens of improvements both large and small in the most recent quarterly release. With some of the biggest enhancements coming in the form of contract management, global consolidations, and reporting, with the following video explaining the biggest changes:

Contracts

The biggest change that came in the release pertained to contracts. With contract management a top focus for organizations in the past few years, Sage Intacct has spent this time refining its contract management abilities in each release, and the current release adds support for more use cases in multi-element arrangements, adds more billing options, renewal options, and billing schedule behavior. Specifically, they have made the following changes:

• Billing Frequency Updates: For subscription-based companies, R3 features a new annual billing frequency option in addition to monthly and quarterly options to simplify annual billing setup. For example, say you have a three-year contract and you charge $4,000.00 per year. In this scenario, set the contract Billing frequency to "Annually" and set the contract line Flat/Fixed amount frequency to "Include with every invoice".
• Renewal Billing Templates: When the contract renewal term is shorter in duration than the source contract term, you can now specify a billing template that covers a shorter term than the source contract line's term for use with the child contract line.
• MEA Enhancements: Sage Intacct made various user-focused enhancements regarding MEA allocations including interface changes, added support for predefined percentages recognition method, date validation changes, and MEA date validation changes.
• GL Posting Date Configuration: Following the R2 introduction of the GL Posting Date Field, allowing users to separate the contract line's booking date from the operational start date, the R3 release includes a configuration that lets users choose the billing schedule behavior when the GL posting date is earlier than the internal billing schedule start date.

Global Consolidations

Consolidations have long been the job of corporate headquarters, who runs them for the whole company. Giving access to the regions to run their own consolidations would mean giving access to the whole company—something most companies don’t want to do. The R3 update now allows headquarters to grant access to designated users to independently run their own consolidations whenever needed. For instance, your EMEA team no longer needs to wait on headquarters to get their reports. This means they get their reporting when they need it for decisions.

Nonprofit Reporting and Compliance

With the FASB 958 Standard set to change the way nonprofits report taking place as soon as the end of 2018, Sage Intacct has added new account categories, reports, and dashboards to support your NFP organization during this transition. Among the necessary additions in R3:

• New Account Categories: The R3 release has included four new nonprofit revenue account categories to help you comply with the new FASB requirements while providing users deeper understanding into revenue sources. These categories include federated campaigns, contributions in kind, contributions event related and contributions related organization.
• New Compliance and Disclosure Dashboards: The R3 update has added two new dashboards for nonprofits—the compliance dashboard and the disclosures dashboard—designed to assist with the transition.
  • The compliance dashboard offers a centralized view of required financial statements formatted under the new guidelines, including the Statement of Financial Position, Statement of Activities, Statements of Cash Flow (both direct and indirect), and the Statement of Functional Expenses.
  • The disclosures dashboard provides a centralized place to keep quantitative information with room to include qualitative discussions that help nonprofit organizations convey their financial story. This dashboard can be especially helpful as the new FASB guidelines shift to push organizations to provide more meaning to their finances through their disclosures. 

If you have specific questions on Intacct or how your organization can benefit from these upgrades, please let us know.