Sage Intacct Automation: Get More From Your ERP

Many financial management tasks are repetitive, time-consuming, and boring. From data collection to document processing and approvals, these tasks are ideal for automation. Automating these tasks will free up employees to work on more valuable projects. 

I’m the executive director of a non-profit retailer. We use Sage Intacct to manage our operations, and I’m interested in automating finance processes to reduce costs and improve services to our clients. However, I’m also curious about which other processes can be automated within Intacct and what kind of investment we may need to make to automate these processes.

I chose Intacct because of its industry-specific process automation solutions, particularly in the non-profit sector, so I started by looking at the benefits of automating our unique processes. As we explored automation solutions, we were surprised to learn that Intacct was a far more flexible and powerful automation solution than we first thought. The secret was in how Intacct is designed to integrate with third-party solutions.

Read on to see what we learned.

Benefits of Sage Intacct process automation

In Ep. 26 of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, Ryan Myers, CFO at America’s Thrift Stores, discusses the challenges of building and optimizing financial systems in non-profits. One of Ryan’s conclusions was the importance of starting with good data before anything else. I can attest to this – we need to closely manage hundreds of donors, suppliers, customers, and employees. Automating our core finance functions within Intacct lets us access key data and make informed decisions. Here are the main reasons we chose Intacct to automate our finance processes:

Fast access to accurate data

Automation eliminates manual data entry and lets Sage Intacct customers quickly retrieve business data from various ERP modules and third-party integrations. Accessing this precise and up-to-date information saves time and enables us to better prepare for changes and strategize for growth.

Scalability for growth

Intacct automation scales up easily, which helps us take on a growing number of tasks and process larger amounts of data. This has made it easier for us to handle growth without taking on higher costs.

Stay compliant and consistent with our mission

By automating Intacct processes, we can comply with data governance and regulatory standards and maintain a complete audit trail. It also helps us fulfill our mission by ensuring revenue and donor funding are allocated to the correct areas. 

For example, one of our funders has asked that their donation be used to reduce the cost of products for new mothers. Intacct automation helps us ensure their funds are allocated correctly and that we have a complete record of the results of their funding.

Improved employee engagement and productivity

Doing the same monotonous and repetitive tasks every day is no fun for anyone. With Intacct automation, our employees and volunteers can now devote their time and energy to activities more closely aligned with our mission. By automating these tasks, our team can be happier and more engaged.

Better customer services

Automation enhances our responsiveness by expediting our customer-facing business processes. This lets us provide a higher level of service to our customers. For example, many customers are from disadvantaged communities and have complex needs. By streamlining our backend processes, we can focus on helping them navigate our services rather than spending time filling out paperwork.

Optimized business processes

By automating our end-to-end Intacct workflows and processes and using process intelligence tools, we can save time and money by eliminating manual processes. These tools can help identify the processes that would benefit the most from automation. They also help us pinpoint areas where we can enhance our customer service through automation.

The benefits of automating our business processes were compelling. Fortunately, Intacct offered us plenty of options for automation.

Use cases for Intacct automation

We can use Intacct to automate almost any of our manual, rule-based core finance processes. Here are a few areas we looked at:

Core finance and accounting

Intacct’s finance modules simplify financial processes, offer financial data, and allow for real-time financial insights and reporting. By using Sage Intacct, we can automate various finance and accounting tasks, including:

Accounts receivable (AR)

Intacct helps us automate manual steps in our accounts receivable processes like order placement, order fulfillment and delivery, order entry, and order information recording. For example, we can use tools such as self-service ordering to make it easier for customers with mobility concerns to order our products and services from home.

Accounts payable (AP)

Intacct’s Accounts Payable solution can potentially streamline our Accounts Payable processes, Their solution and added features automate workflows like document capture, data entry and coding, invoice verification, PO matching, approvals, vendor management, expense management, and payments. 

For example, Intacct uses optical character recognition and AI to automate scanning and data entry from paper invoices and purchase orders to speed up our invoice verification and approval workflows. Payment automation lets us combine ACH, paper checks, and other payment methods onto a single platform.

Account reconciliation

Intacct simplifies the task of matching our general ledger entries with bank statement transactions. This not only minimizes the chances of human error but also helps us detect and prevent fraud.

Human resources and payroll

Automation can streamline many of our HR processes, particularly recruiting and payroll. We can get instant visibility into employee or volunteer data, streamline recruiting and onboarding, manage performance, and track employee and volunteer hours.

Supply chain management

Our supply chain can benefit from Intacct automation to simplify procurement, master data, and logistics processes. This includes automating tasks such as maintaining vendor records and documents, managing and tracking contracts and material donations, preparing shipment schedules, tracking shipments, managing inventory, and generating reports.

Nonprofit-specific automation

Intacct also provides industry-leading automation features specifically designed for non-profits. For example, Intacct helps us track and report performance metrics like lives impacted, program efficiency, and revenue per donor. With this detailed information, we can provide donors and prospective donors with clear evidence of how their donations will be used and the impact they will have. 

These benefits made Intacct the ideal choice for our organization, especially because Intacct offered so many features tailored to nonprofits like ours. However, we soon learned that Intacct offered something different that few other ERP solution providers offered: their open API solution.

Sage Open API: A game changer for automation

When we started looking at using Intacct to automate our business processes, we did a top-down assessment of our existing workflows to identify the best candidates for automation and which tools we should use. During this assessment, we took into consideration the direct and indirect costs, benefits, and strategic value of automating each target workflow. With this information, we were able to estimate the ROI of automating each function. For example, accounts payable automation software has many direct benefits, such as reduced processing time and costs, but it also has indirect strategic benefits, such as better pricing, increased data visibility, and improved supplier relationships.

While Intacct was our top choice because of its specific non-profit automation solutions, we soon discovered that their Open API was a game-changer for us. Intacct was built from the ground up to integrate with other industry-leading business solutions. 

Open API makes integration and data sharing between Intacct modules and third-party integrations simple and seamless. Without going too deep into the technical details, I can tell you this made a big difference to our ability to automate because it opened the door to a portfolio of tailored and flexible automation platforms we could use. And we knew the solutions would work for us.

For example, we found that although it was powerful, Intacct’s Accounts Payable solution wasn’t ideal for our needs. We were able to check out several SaaS AP automation solutions in the Sage Intacct Marketplace, and we found a solution that worked for us. More on that later. Here’s the power of Open API – we were able to make a fair comparison between Sage’s AP solution and third-party applications:

Intacct’s solution met many of our needs, but we needed some extended functionality beyond invoice automation, particularly to be able to pay invoices in multiple currencies. We also had a complicated approval process because our stores handle their own inventory and deal with local suppliers along with our national suppliers. Finally, we wanted our vendors to take on a larger role in our supply chain, so we needed a solution that provided a vendor portal and document management capabilities.

We found a solution that met our needs. Several cloud-based AP solutions in the Marketplace had the functionality we were looking for, but Stampli was the only one that didn’t require changes to our Intacct environment or existing AP processes. 

As a Sage Recommended Solution, Stampli was also designed to seamlessly integrate with Intacct and accounting software. We also loved that Stampli had a payment-agnostic solution for vendor payment processing because it gave us the flexibility to pay our vendors how we wanted. Since many of our vendors are local farmers, we often pay them in cash at the loading dock. Stampli made it easy for us to track and manage these payments.

With Stampli, we were able to shorten our DPOs and get our vendors paid on time. We were also able to reduce our keying errors, which sped up our verification and approval process. Stampli also centralized our AP communications and transaction data and auto-synced them with Intacct, so everyone in our organization had access to the same information.

Stampli also automatically and accurately coded our invoices, which made it a lot easier to track the costs by product, SKU, location, or project. This was a great advantage for us. For example, if a donor wanted to support a specific project, such as baby formula, we could simply create a project and associate it with our baby-food GL codes, and Stampli would track expenditures on baby food.

Stampli – Empower Accounts Payable automation for Intacct 

Stampli is an ideal solution for Accounts Payable teams who are looking to streamline their processes through automation without the need to modify their existing ERP or AP workflows. With support for over 70 ERPs, including popular ones like Sage Intacct, Microsoft, SAP S/4HANA, Oracle, and QuickBooks, Stampli can be set up in just a few days, making it a perfect choice for quick implementation.

Stampli consolidates all your AP-related communication, documentation, and workflows in one place, offering complete visibility and control. It’s user-friendly and easy to learn, with Billy the Bot™ handling most of the manual tasks such as capture, coding, routing, and fraud detection. 

Additionally, Stampli offers a range of complementary products, such as Direct Pay, Credit Cards, Advanced Vendor Management, and more, for even greater automation and efficiency.

Stampli provides complete visibility and control over your entire AP program. It reduces the risk of errors, fraud, and compliance issues while improving vendor relationships and making your AP processes much more efficient.

How Stampli makes you successful

Get efficiency, visibility, and control from the only AP automation solution purpose-built for Accounts Payable. 

• Invoice processing: Use AI and machine learning to automate invoice capture, data entry, three-way matching, invoice approvals, and more to make AP more efficient.
• Extended business-hours customer support: Our team of AP & ERP experts is available 24/7, with < 60-second response times, to support you when you need it.
• Billy the Bot™ AI: Billy adapts to your AP processes and business structure to automate manual tasks and sync data with Intacct.
• Vendor management: Manage vendor onboarding, documents, payment information, and communications to strengthen supplier relationships.
• Multi-subsidiary support:  Process and pay invoices across companies, offices, departments, currencies, or locations from a single dashboard.
• Insights: Gain instant visibility into transactions, productivity, and AP workflows with powerful analytics and forecasting tools.

Empower Intacct accounts payable processing today. Contact Stampli for a free demo.