RSMUS.comIt’s no secret—allocations are time-consuming, error-prone, and yet, incredibly important for understanding financial performance. It’s vital for both businesses and organizations to have clear visibility into where indirect revenues and costs are coming from. For those who don’t enjoy wasting countless hours making this happen manually in Excel, an allocation tool is key. Luckily, there are plenty of solutions on the market to help you automatically handle these allocation calculations.
Here’s a detailed breakdown of the three allocation tools currently supported by Sage Intacct to help you choose the best one for your business.
Sage Intacct Dynamic Allocations
About a year ago, I was running a Sage Intacct demo with a new customer. I had just finished showing her how Sage Intacct handles allocating a bill when she stopped me. She was ready to move forward, confident that this tool would save her countless hours and headaches. Just thirty minutes into that two-hour demo, my customer had reached a decision—Sage Intacct was perfect for her business. Since then, with the release of Sage Intacct 2018 Release 4, the company has made their allocation capabilities even more impressive.
Sage Intacct Dynamic Allocations empowers organizations to streamline their close processes with confidence and gain a more accurate representation of financial performance through allocation of indirect revenue and costs. Business owners love the tool because of the time they save using it rather than relying on bulky spreadsheets. After the initial definition of allocation calculations, Intacct Dynamic Allocations will take a business or organization’s source balances and properly allocate them across multiple different defined dimensions—all with a single click of a button.
With Sage Intacct Dynamic Allocations, there’s no need to define allocation calculations every time you want to run the allocation. Using allocation definition templates, you can save time by setting up sophisticated allocations once and then dynamically generating future allocations as needed. The tool provides a number of different options to use as a basis for how you allocate your source amounts across dimensions. You have the ability to allocate based on account groups or even groups of account groups, as long as the accounts are income statement accounts. You also have the flexibility to choose from a number of pre-defined time periods to pull your source pool and basis information from.
Sage Intacct Dynamic Allocations solution not only dynamically allocates source amounts, but also works hand-in-hand with Intacct’s multi-book architecture. You can create a separate journal specifically for recording allocations, giving you the flexibility to decide whether you’d like to report with or without the effects of the allocation. It also keeps your allocation postings separate from all of the other postings to your main ledger, so you can view your allocation postings to ensure they are calculating accurately. Once accuracy is confirmed, you can decide if you’d like to continue to post your allocations to a separate journal, or you can utilize the Duplicate and Reverse functions to quickly recreate the allocations in your main ledger and undo the original allocations in your separate journal. To simplify the process of managing your allocations, Sage Intacct’s Dynamic Allocation solution also includes an Account allocation log so that you can easily view a list of your most recent allocations. Through this view, you can click into the allocation to drill-down to the journal entry that the allocation was created from.
Sage Intacct Marketplace Partner 1: Period-End Allocations for Sage Intacct
Focused on simplifying period-end processes for nonprofits, an alternative partner’s solution offers many of the capabilities that are standard to add-on allocation solutions. Some of those features include allocations across a number of different filterable dimensions, allocation of groups of accounts all done in one allocation, as well as the ability to allocate to separate books to perform analysis with or without the impact of the allocation.
They build upon their ease of use by allowing you to perform sequenced allocations at once, wrapping multiple allocations into one. Your series of period-end allocations can run all at once, using the outcome of each allocation to run the subsequent allocations within the sequence. Wrapping your period-ending allocations into one, sequenced allocation diminishes the need for any sort of manual processing as well as the time needed to perform your period-ending processes.
Sage Intacct Marketplace Partner 2: Allocation solution
Another alternate partner’s allocation solution provides an easy-to-use method of performing sophisticated allocations across dimensions with an increased focus on analytics. Built for government contractors, this program allows you to define your allocations in different ways with full multi-level allocation functionality, whether that be through the use of actual rates, rates that are specific to some dimensions but not others, hard-coded rates and amounts, or a mixture of all of the above.
Their allocation solution also supports the ability to run several different rate structures at a time, allowing you to evaluate and analyze different what-if scenarios to see what rate structure is best for your business. Within the built-in dashboard, you have the ability to view graphical representations of the allocation at a summary level (e.g. a pie chart that shows the allocation pool using one rate structure vs. another rate structure). If you decide you would like to view the details of that allocation, this solution provides drill-down capability that will take you directly into the General Ledger detail of the calculation. To round things out, once the allocation is completed, it allows you to quickly invoice and bill for the costs that you have just allocated directly within the solution, all with just a few clicks.
Still wondering which allocation tool would work best for your business? Let’s hop on a quick call to discuss your options! Schedule some time with the RSM team.
