Sage Intacct Release 1 Highlights

Sage Intacct Release 1 Highlights

Article credit: Sage 

Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of hours, are spent annually by Accounts Payables teams on tasks such as vendor and bill creation, approvals, and payments, through to reconciliation and reporting. You would think that companies would be racing to automate and get ahead of the pack. However, countless businesses are still entering bills and processing payments manually. In addition, while bouncing between different systems and solutions, employees are often trapped in tedious, error-prone processes. With our 2022 Release 1, Sage has taken major steps to help your organization embrace digital transformation and focus your time on higher-value work, thriving and breaking barriers for your customers.

Sage Intacct AP automation is an opportunity for finance leaders to thrive

Part of the responsibility of CFOs and other finance leaders is to provide the best possible Accounting and Financial Management solution for their teams to get ahead of the curve. Nonetheless, according to a recent study, 56% of businesses don’t have complete procure-to-pay automation in place. With Release 1, Sage Intacct allows leaders to use one solution for all their AP needs. Sage Intacct connects users with banks, vendors, and payment processing via the Sage Business Cloud and applies the power of AI and automation to AP processing, enabling them to streamline processing from vendor and bill creation through to reconciliation and reporting for one or multiple business entities within Sage Intacct.

Because you’re doing your AP in Sage Intacct:

  • You can take advantage of the automation we have in our reconciliations such as the auto-match and auto-create functionality to speed reconciliations.
  • You have full visibility in your payments from within Sage Intacct, allowing you to keep tabs on your cash outflows

So now you’re probably wondering… How does Sage Intacct AP Automation work?

AP automation begins with bill entry

The moment you receive a bill, your accounting software should begin working for you. With Sage Intacct, we do that by providing an intelligent, AI-powered digital assistant. The assistant automatically digitizes bills, matches them to the right vendor, and pre-populates draft bills in Sage Intacct, reducing the time you spend on data entry and accelerating the bill-to-pay cycle. Rather than spending countless hours on data entry, you focus on exception handling. And all bills from all your entities can be processed in one system, with one logon, in Sage Intacct.

AP automation

Electronic filing and paperless routing eliminate your approval headaches

Store bills electronically and access them from within your accounting solution for paperless filing and routing of bills for approvals. Instead of walking around the office hunting for approvals or digging through file cabinets and desks for bills, you can access everything from your Sage Intacct account.

Payments should be simple and cost-effective

Businesses often list payment creation and processing as one of their top pain points, including entering vendor details into the bank system and preparing and executing the payment run. Release 1 allows users to connect seamlessly with banks, vendors, and payment processors via Sage Business Cloud to automate electronic and check payments with Sage Intacct Vendor Payments powered by CSI. Gone are the days of check printing, envelope stuffing, and going to the post office. Now, our users can reconcile in minutes each day with automated bank downloads and auto-matching between payments and bank statements. And with our native payment solution, there are no setup or subscription fees, making payment automation affordable for companies big or small.

Vendor Payments

 

Streamline your workflows and save time with extended Outlier Detection for General Ledger

Outlier Detection for General Ledger is our machine learning solution that helps ensure the accuracy of your approval process. It reviews journal entries and flags anomalies to help you proactively catch errors and identify issues and risks prior to your approval. With Release 1, you’re now able to increase the accuracy of your journal entries by identifying and fixing errors at the source.

GL Outlier Assistant can now be configured to assist the user entering the Journal Entry by altering the approval routing to send outliers back to the submitter. The submitter can then review and make any adjustments as needed before resubmitting. On resubmission, the journal entry will be routed to the next approver if additional approvals have been set up or posted if the submitter is the only approval step. This means that most outliers are checked and fixed before they make it to the approver. Now, GL Outlier Detection is usable by all organizations, including in organizations where the GL Outlier Assistant is the only approval step.

General Ledger

Subscription businesses get forward-looking insights

We’re providing more powerful insight and visibility into subscription revenue with contract renewal forecasting. We’re continuing to make it easier for finance teams to evolve and shift from descriptive to prescriptive, with deeper insights into their renewals. You can now forecast contract renewal data in addition to your billing, revenue, and payment data. Decision-makers can now see what is booked, as well as what is expected to be booked. Use the Interactive Custom Report Writer or Interactive Visual Explorer to build visual reports that show booked and forecast values. Or use the Custom Report Writer to output the data for use with your preferred planning tool.

 

We’re breaking barriers to help you reach new heights

  • We are now providing the only end-to-end, native AP automation from bill to reconciliation. Everything takes place within Sage Intacct with full visibility at every step. No jumping between applications for payment status or to run reports. Our AP Automation can handle multiple business entities and bank accounts out of the box, and reconciliations are easier with Sage Intacct’s auto-matched payment transactions. You’ll save time while decreasing errors.
  • We’ve improved and expanded our already differentiated Outlier Detection for General Ledger to reach new audiences and now have configurable routing. The GL Outlier Assistant is now usable by all organizations, including in organizations where the GL Outlier Assistant is the only approval step. This grants outlier insight even to smaller organizations whose users self-approve journal entries. There are additional routing improvements, too, that provide more flexibility to our users. And this isn’t just AI for the sake of AI. This is AI in action—it really speeds time to accurate journal entries.
  • We’ve further expanded industry functionality. Release 1 has various improvements that continue to deepen our industry functionality in NFP, Inventory, Construction, and more. We’re further strengthening our ability to improve your insights and constantly aiming to support your industry more deeply.

The bottom line

These highlights are only a few of the many new features and enhancements that have come to Sage Intacct in the new release. Our newest features deliver time savings, increase confidence, and provide new insights for your organization, allowing you to focus on making a higher-value impact. If you are a current Sage Intacct customer and want to learn more, feel free to get in touch.

If you’re in the market or curious about exploring a new financial management software solution, contact us today and we will gladly assist!

About Us
Kiteview Technologies (Pty) Ltd was founded in May 2010 to provide the Sage Evolution Business Management solution to the SME market. The management team of Kiteview have combined +30 years of experience in the delivery of small to mid-market Financial & Business Management solutions. This experience, combined with a sound project implementation methodology has helped in Kiteview’s growth, becoming a Platinum status partner for SAGE Pastel within just 1 year.

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7 steps to create a business plan that will wow investors

7 steps to create a business plan that will wow investors

Article credit: Sage 

Have you got a burning desire to start your own business? If so, you’re in good company.

Recent research says 28% of people worldwide have started a business at some point in their lives, while 30% have seriously considered it.

In other words, nearly a third of all people worldwide have considered going it alone.

If you’re serious about starting a business, you’ll need many things – but perhaps the first two you’ll need from day one are accounting software and a business plan.

The former lets you start on the very best footing without having to worry about an admin overload.

The latter is a way of transcribing your ideas and aspirations into cold, hard facts that investors can use.

For most people, creating a business plan is one of the hardest tasks they will undertake in the early days of their business.

Meet our business owner, Olivia

There are lots of business plan examples and templates. Using templates helps you answer questions that are typically asked if you hope to attract interest in your business – and therefore get investment.

Here, we look at creating a business plan via the hypothetical example of Olivia, who would like to create a plant-based chocolate retailer called Chocoholics Anonymous.

We’ll aim to create an ideal business plan by examining what she writes and how she approaches the task.

Olivia has already tested the water by running a part-time business from her kitchen for some months, with help from a few friends. Sales have boomed.

Now, she’d like to expand into a storefront and full online operation.

If she’s applying for a bank loan, she might be asking for most if not all of the funding. But if she’s hoping for angel investment, she may need to match the anticipated input with her own.

This might be her own cash, but it can also be her collateral in the business, and it’s for this reason that people often approach investors once their operation is an ongoing concern, rather than beforehand.

How to create a business plan

Olivia downloads our business plan template and sets aside an afternoon to make a start, realising it could take several days or perhaps even weeks to complete and perfect.

She realises this is one of the most important things she will do – more important, even, than the secret recipe for her fudge brigadeiros!

When answering the questions, she tries to remember who the business plan is for: investors, such as banks that she might be approaching for loans, or entrepreneurs.

For this reason, her plan contains as many data points as possible because it has to make a genuine case for her company’s existence.

But it also has to be positive and inspiring, to show the promise her business offers.

Additionally, this is one situation where she knows not to stop herself from including personality in the application. She knows investors are putting their money into her, as much as they are in the potential of the business.

In her business plan, she includes diagrams, charts, visuals and anything else that helps her share her vision.

And that makes the plan easier to consume – after all, investors are busy people, so she’s wise to make the job as easy as possible for them.

Step 1: Description of the business and its objectives

Coyness isn’t required here, and Olivia doesn’t hold back:

“Chocoholics Anonymous will be the most profitable plant-based chocolatier in the country and within three years will become the dominant plant-based chocolate brand.”

She explains how her business will be different from the rest. It will target three price points: budget, medium and high end.

 

business summary

Highlight how you developed your business idea and what you want to achieve

Most chocolatiers, she explains with examples from actual businesses, target only the medium and high-end. She wants to create a low-price revolution.

Similarly, describing her objective is unrestrained in its ambition.

She writes that she wants virtually all vegan chocolate consumers in the country to have heard about her business, and to have a one in 10 conversion rate among this audience – which is to say, 10% will have actively placed an order with her in the space of any year.

She bases these figures on the reach of major plant-based food manufacturers, thanks to taking a look at their annual reports, and creates a graph showing the sales increases she anticipates over the first, second and third years.

 

business goals and objectives

Use your business plan to highlight your goals and objectives

She lets her imagination run wild, and talks about wanting to scale the business to multiple retail outlets, and using a dedicated manufacturing base.

Investors need to see ambition because they’re investing in that future as well as the here and now.

Step 2: Products and pricing

Olivia starts by breaking down her ingredient costs vs her profit margin, providing the figures in tables for ease of reading.

Then she explains her strategy for both creating and selling chocolate, and another unique selling point: she intends to offer discounts for bulk buying, so people will be encouraged to purchase more than one item each and every time.

She includes her product listing and provides examples of what she anticipates typical consumer purchases will look like, and how they will scale in this way.

 

products and services

Use this section of your business plan to go through what you’ll be selling

She also explains how she intends to operate both on and offline (or bricks and mortar, as it’s often called), and intends to run a loyalty-card scheme for her retail outlet.

Step 3: Customers

Olivia has done her research, which is the fundamentals upon which any business plan should be based.

People love statistics.

Olivia found statistics describing the growth in plant-based eating in the past decade, as well as the growth of flexitarian dietary choices.

Additionally, from those yearly reports from other plant-based food manufacturers and retailers, she’s able to take profiles of typical customers (personas), as well as discussions of their wants and needs.

And, of course, she finds their sales figures in their annual reports, so she can quote these as examples for her own potential reach, with a geographical breakdown for online sales.

Step 4: Competitors

Although her initial instinct was to pretend that she had no competitors, Olivia doesn’t flinch in examining the competitive landscape.

She realises her investors will not be stupid and, thanks to Google, can do their own research in seconds.

Before handing over cash, any investor will do their own due diligence in any event to confirm what Olivia claims.

So, she provides details of online retailers worldwide, as well as bricks-and-mortar retailers local to her.

She includes any business that might compete in future, such as non-vegan retailers, or even restaurants and cafes who might sniff her success and provide products (although she also mentions how she hopes to supply these retailers).

 

competitor comparison

Use this section of your business plan to highlight your competitor research

She highlights her own unique selling points by expressing them as weaknesses in her competitors.

This level of insight Olivia provides is good for several reasons.

Gaps in the market

It genuinely shows where there might be gaps in the market. For example, Olivia realises during her research that nobody is making products for baby showers with vegan chocolate. She spots a gap in the market for diabetic-friendly plant-based confectionery.

Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis is also good practice when she begins to run her business, because this kind of research will need to be ongoing.

She’ll always need to spot gaps in the market and aim to keep a step ahead of competitors.

Some competitors may simply clone what she’s doing, but because she started her work before them, she can exploit this competitive edge to keep innovating and remain one step ahead.

Being realistic

But mostly, by being so pragmatic Olivia is showing by her competitor analysis that she’s realistic about her prospects. This is something investors will respect.

Step 5: Your people

Olivia starts by detailing her own qualifications and experience in retail, and her success up until that point operating the business from her kitchen.

She writes about her brother-in-law, who she intends to hire to man the store while she creates her masterpieces in the back. She details his qualifications and experience too.

 

people in your business plan

Detail who will be working for you and the skills they’ll be developing

She highlights her expansion plans to take on new staff as the business goes on, and their roles – how she intends to use an online marketing manager when the business grows, for example, to expand her online reach.

Step 6: How to make the business a success

This is one question in the business plan where Olivia has a chance to be truly expansive while answering – although she knows to keep what she writes detailed and pragmatic.

She again discusses her plan to sell her products both online and offline.

Olivia mentions how she intends to exploit social networking to encourage online sales, and how she intends to run competitions with her products as prizes in order to build a mailing list.

She talks about her own experience of being vegan and how she’s firmly entrenched within the vegan community – both online and offline– and how she intends to use this to further the business aims, as well as how it gives her insight into sensitivities, and therefore marketing potential, among her community.

Olivia again does vital research and is able to show how her local area has a high proportion of people interested in plant-based eating, and who could become her bricks-and-mortar customers.

In short, anything and everything that could make her business a success is mentioned – and, in nearly every case, is backed up by data points.

Step 7: Profit and loss for the first three years

This is the toughest part of all.

Olivia has to work out all her costs moving forward – from day one of her business, all the way through to 36 months into the future when the business will hopefully look very different.

Having done her research, she knows her fixed costs – those that don’t change no matter how much she sells.

From speaking to estate agents, for example, she knows what a storefront rent is going to be.

From speaking to other business owners with stores via her local commerce association, she finds out what her bills are likely to be (water, electricity, internet etc).

She decides on salaries for herself and her brother-in-law.

Variable costs are harder for her to predict, because raw ingredient prices can be volatile. All she can do is list them at their current price, and adding a note about volatility.

Speaking to her potential suppliers, she asks the salesperson to give her a spread of recent prices so she can also show what the variation is likely to be. She factors in taking on casual staff as the business grows.

She projects how many units she will sell, and how this will grow.

About Us
Kiteview Technologies (Pty) Ltd was founded in May 2010 to provide the Sage Evolution Business Management solution to the SME market. The management team of Kiteview have combined +30 years of experience in the delivery of small to mid-market Financial & Business Management solutions. This experience, combined with a sound project implementation methodology has helped in Kiteview’s growth, becoming a Platinum status partner for SAGE Pastel within just 1 year.

Contact Us

For An Obligation Free Quote

Sage Evolution Payroll

Sage Evolution Payroll

Are you in need of Sage Evolution Payroll Services?

Kiteview Technologies offers Sage Evolution HR and Sage Evolution Payroll Services which include:

– New and Additional Payroll Software
– Full Payroll Administration
– General Payroll Support
– SARS Annual, Bi-Annual Submissions & Statutory Reporting
– Monthly Filing Of PAYE, SDL, UIF etc
– HR Consulting & Auditing
– Employment Contracts & Policy Drafting


For further information please contact Angela Piper by emailing payroll@kiteview.co.za or click the button below.

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Sage Evolution Business Partners

Sage Evolution Business Partners

Are you looking for Sage Evolution Business Partners to assist you in finding the perfect ERP business solution for your business?  Do you have a small or medium sized business in or around Johannesburg? and are you looking for a cost-effective solution to handle a variety of business activities? Sage Evolution is the perfect option for anyone seeking business solutions, especially when it comes to accounting. Some of the features of Sage Evolution include:

  • Cashbook
  • Accounts receivable and accounts payable
  • Invoicing
  • Sales and Purchase Order
  • Inventory Control…and much more.

Companies that use Sage Evolution are using a solution that changes the way they do business for the better. This ERP brings all aspects of an operating environment together, which gives your staff the ability to control all financial situations and improve the relationships you have with your suppliers and customers. Imagine streamlining all of the financial functions that your business does in an easy and cost-effective manner; this is exactly what you will get when choosing Sage Evolution.

In Johannesburg, Kiteview Technologies is pleased to provide Sage Evolution to its customers and works closely with each client to ensure they get the most out of the software. If you are the owner or manager of a small or medium business in the Johannesburg area, contact Kiteview Technologies sage evolution business partners today to see how Sage Evolution can change the way you do business.

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