How to Make a Payment Through Intacct Using AP Automation
The accounts payable payments process can be time-consuming and expensive. Accounting teams often switch between manual payment methods and systems to pay bills. Manual processes for payment workflows — like automated clearing house (ACH) batches — to printing and mailing checks can be slow and error-prone.
Sage Intacct ERP customers can take advantage of accounts payable automation to streamline and optimize payment workflows. With the right AP solution, businesses can leverage Intacct’s financial capabilities to combine payment processing into a single solution that lets them pay vendors faster, access more payment methods, and speed up reconciliations.
Read on to learn more about how your business can benefit from integrating AP automation with your Sage Intacct ERP.
Making Payments Through Sage Intacct
Most businesses follow a similar workflow for processing vendor payments. In general, the steps of the process are as follows:
- Accounts Payable (AP) receives invoices from vendors, adds general ledger codes to line items, and enters the invoices into the accounting software
- Invoices are verified and sent for approval
- After approval, AP forwards the invoices to Finance for payment
- Finance queues payments and routes a payment report to release the payment, ensures there is cash available, and manages cash float opportunities
- Finance pays vendors by check, ACH, wire transfer, credit card, or other payment methods according to the contract terms with the supplier.
In a Sage Intacct environment, there are several possible payment workflows:
Manual Payment Within Intacct
Businesses may choose to use the payment methods built into Intacct to pay their vendors. For example, they can use Intacct to generate an ACH file or print paper checks. The finance team would complete the payment by forwarding the ACH file to the bank or by mailing the paper checks to vendors.
Payment With Intacct Vendor Payment Services
Intacct provides several subscription-based vendor payment services offered by third-party partners. These services provided added functionality for processing checks, ACH payments, wire transfers, credit or virtual cards, and other electronic payment methods. To make a payment with Vendor Payment Services, the business would need to subscribe to the payment service and then select the service when making a payment in Intacct.
Payment with a Third Party
Businesses can also opt to pay bills using a third-party payment solution outside the Intacct environment. The third-party solution can be part of a separate accounts payable solution or a standalone payment platform integrated with Intacct. Payment information is synchronized between the payment platform and Intacct to ensure that updated transaction data is available across the business.
The payment workflow can be slow and inefficient for businesses still relying on manual processes. Because data is often manually entered into Intacct, it can also be prone to errors and vulnerable to fraud.
Accounts payable automation streamlines the payment process and automates data flows with Intacct to make payments faster and more accurate. However, the business case for automation goes beyond cost savings and faster payments – automation also provides several advantages to businesses.
Benefits of Payment Automation in Intacct
Many companies are transitioning to digital payment methods. Digital payment processes are more efficient and less error-prone than manual processes. AP platforms provide more control and flexibility over payments by centralizing payment methods and synchronizing payment data with Intacct. Automation also ensures finance teams have access to up-to-date information on payment terms, bank accounts, vendor payment details, and credits and discounts.
Integrating AP and payment processing with Intacct improves payment efficiency and provides better communications and data transparency across the entire procure-to-pay (P2P) process. Implementing payment automation offers some key benefits to businesses, such as:
Integrated Payment Methods Across the Organization
In a recent Stampli survey of accounts payable departments, 72% of businesses reported their use of electronic payments will increase in 2023, with 27% saying they expected the increase to be significant. Moving to payment automation lets businesses integrate multiple payment methods onto a single platform, making it simple to switch between manual paper checks and electronic payments like ACH or credit cards.
Remove the Need for Manual Payment Entry and Reconciliation
Payment automation lets businesses close their books faster by eliminating the need to export checking account data to spreadsheets and re-import it into Intacct. With automation, businesses can automatically reconcile payments into Sage Intacct by automating invoice entry, GL coding, payment processing, and reconciliations.
Improved Collaboration Across Departments
Payment automation ensures that transaction and payment information is synchronized in Intacct and made available across the business. This ensures full real-time visibility into payment status at every stage, from submitted to paid.
IT Cost Savings
Replacing multiple legacy payment systems with a single, cloud-based, integrated SaaS payment system reduces IT overhead and eliminates the need to invest in new hardware and software.
Pay Suppliers Faster
Faster and more accurate payment processing means businesses can pay suppliers faster, thus avoiding late fees and taking advantage of early payment discounts.
Up-to-Date and Complete Audit Trail
Payment automation helps enforce internal controls and maintain the segregation of duties in the payments workflow. The automation platform also tracks and records documents, transaction data, approvals, and communications and auto-syncs this data with Intacct so auditors can access accurate and timely audit trail information as needed.
Better Risk Mitigation
Automation makes detecting and preventing fraud and errors and controlling risk easier by improving internal controls and security, centralizing communications, and providing transparency to payment processes.
Informed Financial Management
Payment automation ensures that all transaction data is up-to-date in Intacct and available for reporting and forecasting, enabling CFOs and finance leaders to make informed decisions. For example, payment automation lets the CFO monitor cash flow and the status of upcoming payments, making cash management easier.
Scale to Support Business Growth
As the business grows and evolves, payment automation helps future-proof for scale. Automation platforms have the flexibility to handle increasing invoice volumes and complexity, expansion into other countries, and multi-entity and multi-location scenarios.
Integrating AP and payment automation with Intacct has clear benefits for businesses. However, many businesses face a significant obstacle – many of the benefits of integration rely on efficient connectivity and data synchronization between platforms. It’s vital to choose an automation platform that seamlessly integrates with Intacct so AP and finance teams can easily process everything from invoices through reconciliation.
Take Control of Vendor Payments with Stampli Direct Pay
To fully leverage the capabilities of Intacct to optimize vendor payments, businesses need to consider the quality of the integration between their AP and payment platform and their ERP. The best payment platform in the world is of little value if it can’t synchronize payment data and communications with the rest of the business.
When considering a payment automation solution, ensure that the provider can handle the logistics of automating your procure-to-pay workflows and that they have a proven track record of successful integration with ERPs like Intacct.
The best solutions can easily:
- Integrate your processes
- Support multiple payment options and currencies
- Centralize and record communications
- Provide a complete audit trail
- Offer API or other integrations to accurately sync data with Intacct
That’s what Stampli and Stampli Direct Pay provide.
Stampli’s AP automation and payment solutions unlock the full potential of your ERP to optimize every aspect of your P2P workflow. And as the recognized leader in AP automation, with proven success integrating with ERPs, and a strong track record of helping businesses improve AP processing and payment efficiency, Stampli is the ideal partner for optimizing payment processing in Intacct. In this webinar, Stampli’s Sage Intacct experts take a deep dive into the advantages of integrating Stampli with Intacct to optimize accounts payable for businesses.
Payments, Simplified – Stampli Direct Pay & Stampli Card
Stampli’s payment solutions give you total control and transparency over vendor payments and corporate card spending. Purchases made with Stampli Card are automatically synced in Intacct as a payment receipt so that finance departments can monitor and control all card transactions from within a single location. With Stampli Direct Pay, businesses can make payments to suppliers instantly with Stampli Card, or using check or ACH. As a payment-agnostic solution, Stampli Direct Pay lets businesses pay vendors by their preferred payment method.
Contact Stampli today to optimize your payments workflows with Sage Intacct.
