Sage Intacct 2020 R4 highlights: outlier detection, updated AR interface, and more

In a time filled with uncertainty, you can still count on Sage Intacct’s quarterly releases to add features and functions to help manage your workflow.

Here are five highlights from the 2020 Release 4:

1. Help to find unusual transactions: Intacct’s General Ledger (GL) Outlier Detection uses your organization’s historic transaction patterns to make evaluations during the approval cycle and catch transactions that don’t match.
   With the help of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), GL Outlier Detection can identify transactions that seem unusual and send alerts about them to approvers, who can then decide what action to take. This new control measure evolves over time, as it’s exposed to more data, and can help improve overall accuracy for your company. GL Outlier Detection is available now for early adopters.
2. Updated interface in accounts receivable: In the receive payments experience introduced in 2020 Release 4, you can locate invoices more easily with the new advanced filtering method, which allows a set of criteria to be created and saved to use again. The enhanced user experience also includes a new possibility for how payments and credits are applied to invoices. Previously, payments could only be applied at the invoice level, but now, you can select which line items to apply payments to within an invoice.
3. A time-saver in accounts payable: A change in accounts payable can shave time off your company’s approval process. Previously, after a bill was posted by a staff accountant, it would go on to be approved by a manager. However, if there was a mistake in the bill, the approver had to decline it, essentially restarting the approval process. Now, when an approver gets an invoice that includes an error, they can make a change immediately, without having to send it back for corrections.
4. A dimension status to reduce errors: A new dimension status in 2020 Release 4 can help you get the reports you need, without accidentally posting data to the wrong place. For example, you can use dimensions in Intacct to create a parent-child relationship between a company and its different departments. Previously, to avoid accidentally posting transactions to the parent company, you had to create a smart rule to block those posts. Creating smart rules in every place they were needed, however, was very time consuming and left room for errors.
   With the 2020 Release 4 update, you can now assign an “Active non-posting” status to a dimension member, like a parent company, so that standard transaction entries can’t be posted to it. You can then run reports for the individual child dimensions or roll them all up into the parent.
5. An option for inter-entity reporting: For organizations with multiple entities, 2020 R4 introduced another dataset option in Intacct’s Custom Report Writer. You can now run reports for inter-entity transactions (IET) using this new pre-configured report option, which was developed by user request. With the expanded IET report, you can add source journal entry dimensions, like department, class or vendor, and IET entry columns representing accounts, amount, base currencies, entry dates, locations and more. It should be noted, however, that these reports will only work for new IET entries posted as of May 15, 2020.

How can the updates in Sage Intacct 2020 Release 4 help your business? Find out by scheduling a call with one of the experts at RSM today.

Sam Yabes