Since its acquisition by Sage in 2017, Intacct (now Sage Intacct) has experienced a growth spurt driven by the resources afforded it by Sage. This year’s Sage Intacct Advantage conference is a case in point, with its largest attendance ever, and 50 percent more exhibitors than last year. But Sage Intacct has also been growing its technology capabilities, harnessing the newest tech like artificial intelligence; as well as expanding its geographic presence worldwide.
Sage Intacct’s cloud accounting platform serves midmarket companies and has an established presence in the U.S. market which it has built over two decades, making it an attractive buy for Sage, a U.K.-born company, which has historically struggled to find a foothold in the U.S. midmarket space. Now, Sage Intacct lends Sage its strong midmarket customer base, while Sage’s investment has helped Sage Intacct launch in Australia this August, and the United Kingdom and Ireland this coming November.
Aaron Harris, who formerly served as chief technology officer of Intacct and now serves in the same role for Sage, loves the combination of resources because it’s made growing Intacct’s capabilities so much easier.
“The fact that I have a history with Intacct means I can really help the teams work together,” he said. “Overnight, suddenly there are a couple of teams at Sage doing tasks targeted for Intacct. The best example where this is benefiting us is international launches. For instance, in Australia, we knew we’d have to work with Australian banks, and different tax implications and regulatory filing requirements. Intacct didn’t have to develop any of that — it was developed by Sage’s service fabric already in place.”
Sage Intacct’s additional resources have also enabled it to expand its technology capabilities faster, drawing from Sage’s portfolio of developed tech. For instance, Sage Intacct announced a new integration between Sage Intacct and Sage People — Sage’s human resource management platform — during Advantage. The integration is meant to deliver business management capabilities through a unified system for financials, budgeting and planning, HR and people management.
“The merger is helping the intelligent general ledger at core of Sage Intacct become the center of an intelligent organization,” said Dan Miller, vice president pf product management at Sage Intacct. “It helps us continue to be best of breed but also bring together capabilities. We’re rolling our Sage Intacct/Sage People integration over the next year to make sure that core data stays in sync and to make sure work processes never get blocked. [We'll] have employee master information accessible in one pace with the larger financial platform remedies problems that occur when data is out of sync.”
Kathy Lord, senior vice president of Sage People, said at Advantage that the integration brings together Sage’s native cloud solutions for the midmarket, delivering a unified system of intelligence, ensuring real time accuracy of employee related data in reporting and analytics. Global workforce information will now be available to finance teams, which hopes to enable consistent reporting structures and approval hierarchies, while improving financial controls.
During his keynote presentation at Advantage, Aaron Harris also showcased artificial intelligence use cases within Sage Intacct’s software, highlighting how AI has helped accelerate time to revenue with intelligent time capture, improved anomaly detection to speed up the financial close process, and improved insights to predict customer renewal and churn rates.
While not every accounting software product on the market today is using AI, larger core platforms such as Sage Intacct are harnessing the technology as much as possible to increase and improve automation. While efficiencies are the obvious benefit, AI also lends itself to increased compliance, as it can handle larger sets of data faster and more accurately than humans can.
Last year, Sage Intacct introduced Sage Intacct Budgeting, a cloud-based financial budgeting and planning solution. This year, Dan Miller discussed several new enhancements that bring the budget creation process down to fewer clicks, and more flexibility in the budget hierarchy to better match the user’s organization.
New features include:
- An enhanced budget wizard that features a drag-and-drop capability for adding dimensions from Sage Intacct into the budget structure;
- Expanded collaboration capabilities designed to make it easy to work together with business and department leaders to gather data and context around planned revenue and expenses; and
- Drill down from Sage Intacct dashboards and reports to the drivers of the budget in Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning to see how the budget or forecast was created, designed to help users see what they are working on in the context of the source of the information.
Key rollout dates
The new solutions and enhancements outlined here will be available from Sage Intacct and its network of channel partners along the following timeframe:
· Available this year: New pre-built reports for Sage Intacct Interactive Custom Report Writer, Sage Intacct and Sage People integration, and certain enhancements to Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning.
· Available in 2020: Sage Intacct Interactive Visual Explorer and certain enhancements to Sage Intacct Budgeting and Planning.
· Available in 2020 and beyond: Embedded AI capabilities within Sage Intacct.
Accountants in the U.K. can look forward to Sage Intacct’s launch in early November 2019.
