Authored by Eric Charrette, CPA, MBA | Sage Intacct Manager, Accounting Solutions
Does your financial management system keep up with our changing financial world? Can it handle the demands of multiple locations and multiple entities? Can you easily run a report that shows profitability by service line?
Most likely, if you are still using Excel or legacy accounting software, it is not providing the type of multi-dimensional reporting your business needs to make informed, strategic decisions with the click of a button.
Decision-makers are under constant pressure to guide their businesses in the right direction. Multi-dimensional reporting has the potential to provide them with accurate and complete information about their company’s performance. This type of reporting organizes data and transactions into dimensions that allow you to slice and dice your data while enabling a more complete financial performance analysis.
Challenges With Traditional Reporting
Excel spreadsheets and legacy accounting systems are rife with manual reporting tasks, which take time and increase the possibility of human errors. Typically, there are 10 steps to producing a report that includes everything from exporting data, data filtering, and data tagging to repairing Excel formulas and addressing discrepancies. On average, this process takes five days, two meetings with cross-functional teams, and about 10 hours—making a “simple” ad hoc financial report not so simple. Sticking with traditional financial reporting usually means:
- Distorted data because of recurring instances of the same report
- Excessive time spent manually massaging spreadsheets
- Frustrations for analysts doing the work and executives waiting for it to get done
- Errors and discrepancies in data that require sending out multiple reports to correct them
- Delays in important strategic decision-making
Why put everyone through this when you don’t have to? There is a solution to get the insights you need to make impactful, strategic decisions without involving your finance team—building multi-dimensional reports in Sage Intacct.
Multi-dimensional Reporting with Sage Intacct
Unlike a conventional chart of accounts (COA), a modern, cloud-based, multi-dimensional COA and reporting structure enables leadership teams to analyze organizational performance and improve margins and profitability in real-time. This includes full visibility into your financial, managerial, and operational data.
Sage Intacct gives you:
- Self-service reports
- A single source of truth
- Real-time, accurate data
- Click-and-drag report creation
- Data security
Tag Financial Data When Entered
At the core of the powerful reporting that Intacct provides is dimensionalized data, which enables you to use tags that make sense for your business, like departments, employees, projects, services, or products. Your organization can also define its own dimensions based on what’s most critical to your business and create as many codes as needed to customize Sage Intacct for your business. Dimensional information will provide clarity on individual transactions and allow the system to filter the data in reports and dashboards based on defined tagging. This means you gain:
- Profit and loss statements for each dimension, department, and/or location
- Granular drill-down capabilities
- Information that is always up to date
- A lean COA
- Quick decisions at board meetings
- Easy cross-dimension comparisons
- Easy audit traceability
This type of dimensional filtering can be applied to many areas of the system, from financial reports and general ledger account groups to various dashboards. Dimensions are captured any time a transaction is recorded in your financial system, so you don’t have to tag specific transactions to build your reports.
Leverage Non-financial Data
With Intacct, you can take your reporting beyond financial data and integrate it with non-financial data that affects your business. This enables you to see trends in the performance of both financial and operational activities. You can also tag any of this data with any dimension value and slice and dice your data by any business driver you want instead of creating calculated fields in Excel.
Powerful Report Generation and Organization
You don’t have to start from scratch with Intacct. It comes with pre-configured dimensions called entities, which you can use to represent divisions, franchises, branches, partnerships, locations, or self-balancing funds. It also comes with out-of-the-box reports you can use as templates to build your own, and you can even star templates for easy access. Once you have tweaked your reports, you can send them out to a designated delivery list on a schedule, so reports are always in the hands of stakeholders when they need them.
Learn How to Streamline Your Reporting with Sage Intacct
Your accounting software should help you grow, not slow you down. With Sage Intacct, you can ditch manual spreadsheets and outdated accounting practices. Using Intacct, you can easily create reports and search and filter those reports by service line, product, customer, project, location, or any other criteria, all from an easy-to-use dashboard accessible in the cloud.
If you are still using manual processes to create reports and spending days doing it, isn’t it time for a change? Sage Intacct is the solution you are looking for, and SC&H’s Accounting Solutions team is here to help you get started right. We will evaluate your business processes and align them with your technology needs by creating a custom solution that will increase productivity and profitability for your company.
Schedule a Free Demonstration with our Intacct Experts.
