Sage Intacct for Healthcare Organizations

Okay, so what are some healthcare accounting trends that Karen and I are seeing Karen and work with healthcare clients who are changing accounting systems every day? In fact, I know some of those who are joined might've heard us speak in Minneapolis. We were there a couple of weeks ago, so hello again. So what are we seeing? I think across the board, not just in healthcare, we're seeing a shift to cloud-based systems. No longer is our organizations wanting hosted solutions on their own server. They're looking to work with a software company that is in the cloud and that aligns more for work from home perspective. We all know what COVID did to the work environment. So that aligns coming out of COVID. The second thing we're seeing is the need for integration, especially in health and the need for all those systems to tie into one place.

That's one thing organizations are looking for. The next one is security and compliance. So HIPAA comes to mind when I'm speaking with healthcare organizations. So just making sure that whatever system they choose is the most secure I. The next one is real time financial visibility. This is not new to the healthcare organizations and not new to any other industry that Karen and I work with. The need for real time data is prevalent across the board and leveraging a system to be able to get you that real time data is essential. The next one is automation. Automation. I think in this box we have here is to address the labor shortages but also to boost efficiency. Just automation in general. I think there's a lot of work, repetitive work that folks do in healthcare that can be automated to let them be able to do more high value work. And of course the labor shortage issue. I know less and less people are graduating with accounting degrees every year, so I think we're going to start seeing more and more job postings for accounting. And then the rise of ai. AI is a buzzword right now when I'm talking to a lot of my clients, so it only makes sense. It fits in this list. How can AI help me run reports, pull out discrepancies, whatever it may be. We're going to talk a little bit about AI today.

So why SAGE Intacct is a fit for healthcare organizations. Before we go into this, I pulled up the attendance report and everyone who kind of joined this webinar got a chance to put in what accounting software they're using. So there is some folks who are using Sage Intacct, so I think this is going to be good, but there are a lot of folks who were using QuickBooks and then some old SAGE products. I think this is going to be more relevant to you because those old Sage products or QuickBooks online or desktop don't give you a lot of the things that we're talking about today.

So Sage Intacct is the only financial management solution that is endorsed by the A-I-C-P-A and as accreditation Sage Intacct got years and years and years ago. That's important to us as an accounting firm, but a lot more to our clients. The next three light bulbs you see here are for trust radius and G two and these systems are what Karen and I like to call the Amazon review of software and that's where end users can go out and they can put reviews on software. Now those reviews can be good or bad. Sage Intact is ranked number one in customer satisfaction and buyer's choice amongst these two sites. So if you're looking at software, I definitely recommend taking a look at these sites. The next slide bulb you see here has four on it because Sage Intacct releases four main feature function releases a year. So they're automatically pushing out these new feature functions to people who already subscribed to the system. And then the next two light bulbs just really talk to Sage as an organization. SAGE really does try to maintain their customers for life and they do have a buy with confidence guarantee that Karen and I go in detail about during our proposals when we're speaking with clients.

Okay, so 99% of the time when I'm working with healthcare organizations it comes up a hipaa. Is Sage Intacct HIPAA? Can it be HIPAA compliant? And the answer to that is yes, it can't be HIPAA compliant. So Sage Intacct goes into agreement with you. It was formally short and sealed, it has since changed, but they'll sign a BAA with you to maintain that HIPAA compliance. And then our team as we're implementing Sage Intacct are very heavily aware of all your HIPAA needs when we're implementing. Another really cool feature, and this is somewhat new, it's a two-ish year and a half years old, is Sage and tax EMR Connect and that's Sage and tax ability to connect into your various EMRs. All we need is a flat file from your EMR and we can connect to it and we can pull financial and statistical data and it could be multiple EMRs. It doesn't have to to be one. And the question I get when I start talking about EMR Connect is well does this one work? Does this one work? Does this specific EMR work? It just depends as long as we're able to get out that flat file, we can normally make EMR connect work.

So a little bit more about Sage Intacct. I think this slide really sums it up is what exactly is Sage Intacct? And I like to say that Sage Intacct is a cloud-based best in class solution. So Sage Intacct is cloud-based. Karen will show us some of that functionality today. It lives in the cloud, but then that second portion is where I think Sage Intacct shines for healthcare organizations. So Sage and Check chooses to excel in accounting and ERP planning, analytics, payroll and hr, but where it necessarily doesn't want to spend its r and d dollars in is able to have those integrations into those systems. So in the left hand corner you see some of the systems that Intacct integrates in there are much, much more than this, but I can't fit all of those on the slide. So some common ones that we see are a DP, expensify ramp, build.com, and then the various EMRs. And the way that it's able to get that information in is via data feeds. So import, export or open APIs and APIs is just the way that the systems talk to one another. So information can be automatically shared back and forth.

Karen Penhallegon: Alright, so I'm going to actually talk a little bit about Sage Intacct and what makes it really unique in the architecture of the system and then we're going to jump in and actually show you the system itself. So I'd like to start out with Intacct architecture and really what I call the multi everything architecture. And this is really critical because the system things that are not built into a lot of the systems you guys are working in today, the first being that Intacct is inherently actually one of the reasons that Intacct was first created, it was created as the brainchild of finance leaders and they had seen out in the environment, this was in the late nineties, that there were no systems that really handled companies that were multi-entity and so they came up with the concept of creating their own system and Intacct was born.

So Intacct from day one is multi-entity. It has the ability for all the entities to share a single chart of accounts, a single vendor list, a customer list. You can share all your dimensions that we'll talk about in a second across your entities. On top of that, that gives you very easy consolidative reporting. So out of the box, consolidated reporting, auto balancing entries, so all your due to and due from entries can be automated and you can control user security by these entities as well. So the ability to limit what users can see, which entities is built into the system.

The next one here is multi-book. So of course every accounting solution has a book. It's usually an accrual book, but Intacct out of the box gives you four books that you can turn on with just the click of a button, accrual, cash gap and tax. And you can also create an unlimited number of user defined books. If you have other reasons or the other things you're tracking in Excel or other ways that you want to report on your data, different ways you want it to look, then we can use user defined books. And there's just so many use cases for this that we see, but we can get very creative on the use of these books and it gives you just so much flexibility whenever you're doing your reporting.

And then last, what I really think of as intact superpower is the multidi dimension functionality. So dimensions, we'll see some examples here in a minute. Dimensions are really just tags that you apply to a transaction. So it's different information that's related to that transaction, whether it's a location that it happened in a department that it happened in, a provider that was responsible for that transaction, whatever it may be. We'll see some examples in a minute and using that then we can further build those dimensions since they are so built into the system, into both hierarchies and groups. So hierarchy a parent child relationship can be created. We'll see this seminar demo as well where we can actually automatically roll up the children's data into the parent so you can see your information at the detail level or at the parent level. And then groups are really useful for reporting as well.

So if there's different ways that you need to group your data, maybe it's by region, maybe it's by different groups of specialties, whatever it may be, we can use that information and group it together for reporting. So what are some examples of dimensions? So let's just look at some of the ones that you would normally use in Intacct and I really group these into three different sort of categories. The first is the where of a transaction. So where does this transaction happen, what entity is it in, what location is it in and what department did it happen for? The second group is what I generally call the what of a transaction. So it could be what project it was for. If you're using projects in the solution, what item? So if you're tracking things like purchasing that you're wanting to buy things for example, or then class, which is sort of a wild card, we'll use class for all sorts of different things, but some of our clients have track things like equipment here you could track your different service codes here, whatever it may be.

We can use class flexibly to track the transactions. And then the last one is the who of a transaction. And so this is another very common one that we see really across all of our different clients, but specifically in healthcare, the employee dimension can be used for example to track providers or physicians, however you track those. We often see whether it's revenue and cost allocations, if it's bonus calculations, whatever it may be. Having that detailed information by provider can be really, really beneficial in your system. Also it will automatically track your purchases or AP by vendor. So if you need to understand what your spend is with different vendors across multiple entities, that's all going to be in a single place for you so you're easily able to see your spend across all of your organization.

Alright, so what are just some examples of how do you get from where you are today potentially with an older chart of accounts to a dimensionalized chart of accounts? It's a very common question we get and so I usually bring up a chart of accounts. That's something that I might have worked with when I first started working in ERP systems. I cut my teeth on Sage 100 and it used a segmented chart of accounts. That's what you're seeing on this example today. This could also be a QuickBook style chart of accounts where you have a main account and sub accounts as well as classes or any sort of those flavors that you might have with different solutions. But in this example here we have a four segment account. So we're trying to track the account number itself and then three different dimensions of that. So whether it's location, department and my example project, it could be anything that you're tracking here.

But this results in often at a really large and cumbersome chart of accounts because we have to have multiple combinations of every account for all the different iterations that you might have. What we do, we bring that into Intacct, is we separate it all out. So we're going to break out just the natural accounts, your individual locations or departments, providers, classes, whatever it may be that we're separating out into separate individual fields. So it's beneficial in a few different ways. First, whenever somebody is entering the data, it's much easier to enter data because we're not now needing to remember this long account string or remember what I'm selecting in a long list of GL accounts. Now I have a very simple selection for four different fields. Secondly, it makes it much easier for reporting as well. So on the reporting side, what I like to compare this to is really turning your GL into a giant pivot table. So most of us probably are very familiar with Excel and pivot tables. We all love Excel, but the idea here is that instead of having everything grouped into one field that I have to somehow break out now it's all there separately automatically for me and we can do things with it very easily in reporting and intact.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about what you're going to be talking about over the next few minutes. So what I'm going to do is do a little demo of some high level reporting and multi-entity functionality in the solution. We're going to come back for a couple of slides then in the slide deck and then we will jump in and talk about some specific transactions and automation features with AP bill automation and cash management. So this is the plan, but what I also like to do is sort of have this fifth box out here audience choice. So if anyone has anything specific that they might have questions on or would like to see in the system, go ahead and put things in the q and a and if we have time we'll do a little bonus demo and show you some different things in the system that you would like to see. All right, so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to get my screen shared. So everyone, give me just a second here to make sure I have everything set up where I need I and Emily, can you confirm Maria I start sharing?

Emily Madere: Yeah,

Karen Penhallegon: Fantastic. Yes. Alright, so what I've got here set up today is just a demo company of Sage Intacct. It's called Good Way Health. So we're going to be using this example company here and I always like to start out when we're looking at Intacct with just a super high level overview of how do we get to Intacct. So Emily mentioned this is a true cloud solution. So what that means is that Sage Intacct is accessed through your browser. So it's not something that's installed on your computer, all you need to get to it is a browser and an internet connection. So truly anywhere, anytime access, as long as you have the internet. So today I'm going to be using Google Chrome. That's just my personal preference. It works with all of the major browsers. As long as you're using an up-to-date browser, you're going to be able to use Sage Intacct.

A couple other things just about navigation and the way that the solution works. So here at the top you're going to see this is my company that I'm currently in. I can see that I'm sitting at what's called the top level. So the top level of Intacct is not a actual entity, but it's a place where I can enter transactions and view any of my entities. So in my company today I've got an example of having three different entities and here at top level I can really access and enter information for all of them. So that's the recommended place to really operate is at the top level and we can limit users' access to those various entities underneath, but everyone can see what they need to see from the top level today. You'll see as we're navigating through some reports and some different examples, you'll be able to see the differences between the top level and then we actually filter down to an entity level.

The next thing I'll kind of cover on this white bar across the top here is my user. So I'm currently signed in here as Emma. So you can see over here to the right Emma is the CFO of my organization here. So she's going to have full access to everything. We'll see a little bit more about that in a few minutes, but what I want you to keep in mind is the security in Sage Intacct is very granular. So unlike some simpler systems like maybe a QuickBooks where giving someone access means giving them a lot of things that they can see, and Intacct we can get very specific. So if you have users who really just need to view only users and only see certain reports or dashboards, we can do that. We can also down to the task level, say hey, for vendors, can someone view vendors? Can they add them? Can they edit them? So we've got very detailed security that we can layer on top of the system.

All right, as we're navigating today, we'll navigate a few different ways. You'll see here this application's dropdown is how you would generally get to any task within the system, but it can be a lot, right? So Emma has access to a lot of things. You're going to see here only those tasks you have access to, but in Emma's case it is hundreds of different things that the system can do. So this can be quite confusing. So rather than using this method of navigating, you could use favorites or bookmarks, favorites of these little stars here that you'll see. These actually adjust our favorites menu over here that we can then filter or click through, excuse me. My preferred method though is actually to use bookmarks which work just like bookmarks on your homepage or on your browser itself. So when I bookmark a page, the reason I like to use bookmarks personally is I can rename them to whatever I'd like to call them and I can also move them around. So if I want to move these around, for example, this makes it much easier to navigate than going through the huge list of things. There's five or six things that I do the most often. I can easily bookmark those things and just navigate straight to them. Now I have a couple of examples of dimensions set up in the system today that we're going to look at for reporting. So lemme just show you some examples and that way we can tie it back to our dashboard when we come back in a moment.

Alright, so this is my entities and locations which are really all called locations in Intacct. And so I can see here I had three entities, if you remember from my top level here. So I've got my three entities, but then underneath entity 100, here's my example for a hierarchy here. So I've got three different layers or levels under this Atlanta, Dallas, and Jacksonville. These could go deeper. So if I had multiple offices within a city or maybe a state, I could continue to sort of layer those hierarchies and Intacct is going to automatically roll those up for me. So if I look at entity 100, I will see all of the locations that are underneath that or I could look at the individual locations when I filter. We'll see that in just a second on our dashboard.

Another great example is the use of departments. So commonly we use this for things potentially like specialties, if it's a multi-specialty practice or maybe you're using it more from an administrative factor and looking at things like how has my GNA broken down, I have another simple example here of just sort of three main revenue generating departments if you will, and then administration which is broken down into some separate smaller departments. So same thing here, we can see that these will automatically roll up to that top level administration department and we'll see this throughout the system as we're navigating through some of the different screens and reporting. We will see these departments as well. So just to check, I don't have the questions window open since I'm sharing my screen. Are there any questions so far? No, not

Emily Madere: Yet.

Karen Penhallegon: Okay, great. Feel free to put them in there if you have any or if you have any thoughts on what you want to see in the system. Alright, so now I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about reporting options in Intacct. So what I've got here is a dashboard. You can have as many different dashboards as you want with Sage Intacct. It comes with I think seven or eight standard dashboards out of the box, but you can create as many as you want. And so this is the dashboard that I've created here. I just sort of call it an executive dashboard. It's a great overview of all the different sorts of things that we can do with Sage Intacct. And so I always start talking about just sort of top to bottom here. My very first thing is performance cards. And so that's what you're seeing across the top here.

So performance cards are quick pieces of information, there are KPI or calculation or something that I'm wanting to track. And so I've got a few different examples here just to give you the flavor of what you can do with these type of things. So just for example, I have revenue is one of my performance cards. You can track non-financial data as well. So if your EMR is tracking things, just depending on the type organization you are, number of treatments, number of visits, number of beds, depending on the type of organization you are, number of patients, all sorts of different ways that you can use the statistical or non-financial data in the system and we can track all of that for you. Then we can combine that information together. So for example, if I had another number of treatments, I know the amount of revenue that I earned, I can calculate things like revenue per treatment or per visit per that sort of thing.

So you can see the different calculations that I have here as well as examples. Now the other thing about performance cards that's great is that we've got a lot of flexibility in how they're set up. So we can determine the time period they cover, whether it's calendar or fiscal year, it's a month, it's a day, a week, however you analyze your data, we can set the performance cards up on those time periods and then we have an option on doing comparisons with them. So we can compare them either to a budget. So you can see here my revenue is looking at budget or I could compare them to a prior period. So we've got some of these compared to pre periods versus budget. And then what it's doing then is based on that comparison, it's giving me an indicator of how am I doing? So it's taking information that you probably could get today, but you might have to dig a little bit, right? You might need to go run multiple reports, do some calculations, do some comparisons. Now it's given me very quickly one visual indicator of exactly how things are going. So my revenue right now is under budget for the year.

Alright, so that's one example. The next type of thing that we can put on dashboards that is probably my favorite part of Intacct is financial reports. So Intacct comes with about 40 or 50 out of the box financial reports. There are all sorts of different ones, whether you're doing reporting by department, reporting by employer provider, reporting by location, these are all things that we can do. I have a couple of different examples in here of things that we've done previously for various clients. A very common one is departmental budgeting. Probably one of the most common things that we hear. So what you're seeing here, this first report is a great example of department budgeting. So I can see here my four departments are listed across the top. So each of my columns here and then down my rows I have sort of a summarized p and l profit and loss.

So I got my revenue, my cost, and my operating expenses and easily INTA out of the box. This is actually out of the box report will break this out for me into actual budget. And then I have this set up to percentage variance, but you could also do dollar variance if you prefer. So this is really very, very easy to produce. But not only that, it's also we can put again, more of those indicators on here. So I've got some conditional formatting creative for this report and in this case the hover, it might be a little bit small so I apologize, but if I hover, it tells me the rule that it is looking at. So if I am over budget, it's going to be a yellow color. If I'm over more than 5%, it's going to be a red color. So again, it's more about we want to take the data and give you an action on it so you can quickly be drawn to what are the things that I need to be concerned about here versus just having a lot of data kind of thrown on a screen that you have to somehow figure out how to interpret.

Similarly, I have another example down here of profit and loss by location. This one happens to be filtered down to my entity 100 locations in this example. But not only am I giving the information for the annual profit and loss for each of my locations, but I've included a spark line. And so this is another great tool. It's a trending tool, right? So yes, point in time data is great, but understanding the trend can be even more important. And so this is a built-in type of column we can add to any financial report where we can track the trend of that information. So revenue is growing over time or it's decreasing over time, or if you have seasonality, you can tell the seasonality from them. Alright, I've got a couple other examples on here. You can see here just a standard propofol SP apartment and they'll talk about this in ation report in a bit.

Emily Madere: Yes, we do have a question. Someone is asking how many reports and dashboards can they have and if they can share information across their organization?

Karen Penhallegon: Great question. The answer is as many as you can imagine. There is no limit on the number of reports and dashboards. You could have thousands if you want and you can selectively share them across your organization. So users of course if you want someone to see it, they do need to have access into Intacct if you want them to see the reports in Intacct, but there is a view only user license that you can get that lets them have access to any report you want to give 'em. There is security around that. So from a reporting standpoint, you can determine who sees what reports specifically. So you don't have to give everyone access to everything. Very common example is actually this department budget. We more often than not, we'll create department manager dashboards if you will, and that will have just their department information on it and they can see their own budget, their own transactions, information they're concerned about right there live in the system real time.

If you don't want to grant someone access to the solution, that's okay too. So we can share this information out as well. So I'll show you a second. We'll drill into one of these reports. You're able to actually share it directly from the report itself and you can send it out as a PDF, as Excel, or you can, excuse me, you can schedule those to be shared as well. So if you want them to go out every Monday in an email, you can schedule that, it can produce a PDF or an Excel once a week and send it out for you. Really great question. Thanks Emily. Is there anything else?

Emily Madere: Nope, not this time.

Karen Penhallegon: Alright, great. Okay, one last thing I'll point out before we jump into a multi-entity example here, and that is just a chart or graph. So just like financial reports, Intacct comes with about 25 or 30 financial graphs as well. You can create graphs both on financial and on statistical data. And so this is a simple example of something created on statistical data where I happen to be comparing new patient visits versus existing patient visits, right? So determining what my mixture is of new versus existing and then it's totaling it up as well for me here so I can see the trend over time. This is a trend report as well as the comparison within each of the periods process time. The nice thing about charts here in Intacct, you can see I can hover and the data will show for me so I could hover over and see.

I could also just click show data and it'll give me the table that's behind that information. So I just quickly wanted to see that. And they're also drill down capable. That's truly of all sorts of information that you're seeing on your screen. Anything that is blue of course is drillable. We'll do some of those in just a second. Charts and graphs can be drilled down into and so can performance cards. I wanted to see a revenue breakdown. I can just click on revenue. It's going to give me a breakdown of the GL accounts that make this number up. In this case, since it's a GL account, I will see that I've got four different revenue GL accounts and I could even just continue drilling down into any of these to see an actual general ledger report. And I don't know if that's popping up actually, let me pause and see because I shared just one window. Let me pause just for a second guys am going to reshare the whole screen.

Apologies for that. It might take just a second here. Are y'all seeing my screen again? Yeah, I can see your screen. Sorry about that guys. So when I click into the revenue here, I'll go through that again. I can see that all of my breakout of my revenue is here. So I've broken it out into different types of payers and then a special type of revenue. I can drill further into that and actually get the general ledger report so I can see all of the information. This was all imported from an EMR in my example here, but I can see all my information broken out by my different dimensions if I'd like. And I can see some looking at location and department and I can even drill down from here into the originating transaction, which we'll do that some more in just a second.

Now from a report standpoint, one of the things that I like to be able to do is to open up the reports to a full screen. So for example, if I click the little magnifying glass here, it's actually going to open up that report for me into a full screen. So it's opened a new tab in the window for me. And here I can actually go into the detail and drill in to the different levels. This is a summarized profit and loss and these are account groups or groups of accounts. I can now open these up though and see what's behind them. For example, maybe I want to see what's in general and administrative expenses. I can open that up and I'll see the various accounts and groups that come with that. And then I can even drill into this further. So again, I can drill in from here and actually see what is in my office expenses and if I want to see the bill, let's open up one of these bills here.

Here's the actual AP bill that is behind that information. So I can go all the way down to the originating transaction. I can see things like the attached PDF of the bill. So there's an attachment of the bill itself. I can see how it was coded. So I can see down here it was coded to office supplies, the administration department and I can see that it has an allocation as well. So I can open up my details here to actually see my allocation, which in this case I'm tracking payer as my customer. So I can see that I allocated this out across all my different payers. That's an automated calculation that you can set up in the system for that.

Emily Madere: Karen?

Karen Penhallegon: Yes,

Emily Madere: Somebody in the chat is asking about bill.com or ramp. If an integration exists between bill.com and ramp, how does a bill transfer over?

Karen Penhallegon: Okay, that's a good question. It does depend on the solution you use. So there are tons of AP automation solutions out there. We're going to discuss in text AP automation in just a moment with two of the most common ones we see are bill.com and ramp for bill. The way that it works, the data does integrate over, so you'll get your bill and payments, we'll come over into Intacct, but the actual PDF does not. It puts a little link right here that says view this bill and bill.com. And so it creates a link out to bill.com for you for ramp. I believe it actually brings over the PDF itself, but that's something that's important if you are or you already have or you're looking at another solution that's going to integrate into the system, ask those questions. So you just speak with that vendor to say what exactly is going to come over. You might have users that use only Intacct and need to see information that comes over or do you need to understand that those users also need access to the other solution to get that detail?

Another good question, keep 'em coming. Okay, I got about 15 minutes before I want to leave some time for questions. So let's hop back and talk about one more quick little multi-entity thing before we talk about AP and cash management. So this inter entity reconciliation is a great report that I use to just illustrate how you can use intax due to and due from functionality to automate these processes. And so I've got a real simple example here. My three entities are here across the top on my columns and then I have individual GL accounts set up for those due to and due from transactions. So I'm kind of reading this here, I've got entity 200 due from 100 is this 1151 and then I've got a corresponding 100 due to 200 here. So the idea is that those should match. I can also drill into that information as well and I can actually see the transaction that originated that due to and due from.

So I can see just as a quick example, so this is a payment. So I can see here that it was on accounts payable payment here. So I paid a bill and the checking account that paid it belonged to entity 200, but it paid a bill that belonged to entity 100. So this transaction here at the top then is unbalanced, which is not okay, right? You can't be out of balance button for an entity and Intacct. But based on the settings we have set up, it knows what the due to and due from relationship is with these entities. And so it's going to automatically balance it for me. So it's going to create a credit for entity one hundred's books for the Jacksonville location and it's going to create a debit for entity two hundred's books. So you'll automatically see that transaction generated. This bottom section here is generated automatically for you.

Alright, so let me flip back for just a moment to our slides and talk through a couple of other examples and if we have time we can look at those as well in the actual solution. So these last two boxes, bill automation and cash management are two areas that we often will see automated. So starting out with AP automation. So Intacct recently actually has some new updates for this process, but it's one of my favorite things that Intacct has been doing and really is an example of AI and machine learning right directly in the solution. So Intacct has really been at the forefront of AI for quite a while. Machine learning has been built into the solution for about five years now I believe. And AP automation was one of the first things that they brought into the fold there. So how does it actually work?

And so I've got it sort of separated into four different categories and those are the dotted lines or things that can happen within the system or outside and the ones that are in the solid lines or things that you would actually do. So starting out with first you have to get a bill. So if vendors are emailing, you can have an email address that they'll go straight into Intacct and automatically come into the system for you. Or if you're getting them in the mail or they email directly to someone, they can be uploaded into Intacct with a drag and drop functionality. So once those bills come in, then they're going to go through the AI engine. And so what it's going to do first is read that bill, it's going to identify, try to identify the vendor coding for it, the dates, the dollar amounts as much as it can and it's going to populate that into a draft bill.

It's going to do things like identify duplicates. If you have purchasing, it'll match purchase orders for you. And all that's going to go into a draft then though for a human to look at. So we need a human to confirm that the AI got it right, so the human is going to look at it and make sure that everything is correct and if not, it's going to make adjustments. Now the nice thing you'll see there's a feedback loop here. So each time that you're looking at a bill, the system is learning. So it's learning, hey, when this vendor bill comes in, it usually has these terms on it or it's usually coded to this GL account and these dimensions. So it's going to consistently learn and improve that initial bill. So over time it's going to get to the point where you really don't have to do anything other than just look at it and make sure it got it correct and quickly approve it.

You can still have further approval processes in the system if you'd like after you review that bill and then you can move on to payment. And this is the new feature that Sage has just released there. Partnering with Mineral Tree to allow you to do outsource payments right from within Intacct. So you can pay with an Intacct by check or a CH, you have those options still, but if you don't want to take that on anymore and like somebody else to do your AP payments for you, right within Intacct you can choose to pay with MineralTree and that payment will go off. MineralTree will work with a vendor, they'll either cut them a check, pay them by a CH or pay them by virtual card. So it really truly is end to end AP automation with Sage Intacct.

So we'll see this in just a moment. Before we go there, I'm going to do one more slide so I can show you guys both of those at once and then we'll do a quick little review of this. So one other place that we often see automation coming into play is with automated bank feeds. So this is really critical if you're doing a lot of cash reconciliations, if you have a lot of accounts. The way that this works, again, it's a combination of feeds and or file imports. So if your bank allows it, we can connect up to that bank and have it automatically download a feed of transactions that is dependent on the bank. Unfortunately, some banks just don't allow us to do connections. If they don't, we can still fall back and do an import, but it's much better if our transactions can automatically download because then when the transactions come in, we can have rules set up for what happens to those transactions in your bank.

You can have rules that create things for you in the system. So maybe you have a transaction that's exactly the same every month that you have to post and it can automatically create that for you. It also more commonly will automatically match. So you determine what rules you need to use for matching. So do you want to use, if you want to say a check number and the dollar amount matches and you want to clear it. So that's the sort of things that you can do. All of this is just to automate your reconciliation as much as possible. And what it comes down to is when you're reconciling, then you're looking at the exceptions rather than just the things that you would automatically match. So the goal here, and what a lot of my clients have gotten to is either weekly or daily bank recs, a lot are actually doing daily bank recs now they just review the transactions that were unmatched each day and then their cash balances are up to date and intact immediately.

Okay, so let's do one more quick screen share here and make sure I share my whole window this time and take a quick look at a couple of these examples. So is it sharing? I think yes. Alright, yes, it let's go. Great, thank you. Quickly at vendor bills, so we saw a drill down bill earlier, but just to show you how the actual bill process, the AP automation process works, it comes into your vendor bills list and it comes in as a draft transaction. So what you can do is actually filter here for draft bills and this would be your working list of bills. So there's two different sources that it might have. These are all uploads. If it comes in through an email, it'll track the email for you as well. Both the recipient and the sender email. Those are things that it's using to learn.

So it learns when things come from certain senders that they are certain vendors. For example, the next thing it's going to do, you see it drafted all these and it also identified some exceptions for some of them. So if I hover over one of these exceptions, it'll tell you why it has an issue. So in this case, for example, it didn't find a matching vendor, so whatever vendor sent this in, either the name on the bill is different than the name you have in your system or some other thing is going on that it cannot find a matching vendor. Maybe it's a new vendor. So it's going to give you a little clue here, but you can also drill into the transaction and actually see what's going on with it. So if we look, let's just look at this one that it says looks good. We'll look at this. A, B, C office supply.

You'll see here it's in a draft status still I can click this little button here, this paperclip to see a little side by side view. And I'm sorry I'm zoomed in a bit for the call here. So it's a bit small, but I'll see the bill over here that was actually came into this transaction that it was generated from. I can see that it automatically pulled in information like the bill number, the date, the dollar amount, all that was auto-populated into here. It recognized the vendor A, B, C office supplies this A, B, C office supply it picked it up automatically. Anything that it couldn't find, it couldn't find the due date, it left blank. So that's information you would need to fill in. It also tried to do a coding for me. So it said, well this is an office supply vendor. I think you'll probably use office supplies, maybe it pulls the location and department that it thinks are best, but this is where you're going to first look to make any updates and go ahead and post this. And that's going to help the system start learning how do we generally code these bills.

So that's a quick example. If I look at one of the ones that had an issue, for example, when I opened that bill up, it's also going to tell me at the top that whatever issues it identified, did it find a duplicate, which this one doesn't have a vendor yet, so it found another bill out there with the same number and then whether or not it found a vendor. And from here you can continue to research figure out do I need to create a vendor? Whatever the case may be. But it's going to help you identify what it found as a problem.

Alright, and then briefly, the other thing we can look at is the bank rec functionality. So within my cash management function here, if I'm looking at a bank rec, let's go ahead and pick an account in here to use. So I already started this reconciliation or in process reconciliation. Generally the bank rec, you'll see across the top here sort of my summary, just like we saw on our other screens of the bank rec, which importantly has my amount to reconcile over here. It also has my transaction total. So I can see, so I've got 13 transactions and Intacct that have not yet cleared. Excuse me, I have two in the bank.

So generally what you're going to work from is going to be the bank. And so I can come into the bank transactions and filter these. So I wanted to see what it already matched. I could change my filters and see what it matched for me automatically. I can see here it matched this one, I can actually look at that match if I want to. So I need to go back and review what did it match. I can come in here and see that this was an auto match that it did for me. How much did it match? What rule did it use to match? So you can even click into and look at the rule that it matched and for some reason it was a mistake. You can unmatch it manually here if you need to, but more likely what you're going to be doing is looking at only unmatched transactions.

And with these you have a few different options. The first thing you're likely going to do is come in here and click match. And then you're going to see, okay, why didn't this match? And so what it's going to give you here rather than the match transactions, it's going to give you all the transactions and Intacct that are still outstanding. And then I can filter this by different things, by dollar amount, by payee, whatever it may be. So I can see this payee was byrum by search for byman here. Okay, well it found the check, there's check number 50, but if I look, I wrote this check for $250 and the bank has it for $350. So whether this was a check washing or if I need to, maybe it's just a misread whenever the bank scanned it in, whatever the case may be, I have an issue here and so it's helping me identify it didn't match for a reason.

I need to go in and fix whatever the reason is. So that's one scenario that might come up. If for whatever reason, maybe it doesn't exist at all in Intacct yet, you need to create a transaction, I can create the transactions right from here. So whether in the case of it's a check here, I could do funds transfer, I can do it as a journal entry, a payment, I can also create deposits from here. I can receive customer payments from the screen. If for some reason this payment wasn't received appropriately, you can actually create the transaction from here. It will pre-populate that information. Just show you an example here. It'll pre-pop that information into the transaction for you. You just fill in the things that are missing and when you finish this, it's going to clear it for you off the list. Alright, so that's two examples of just some of the types of automation that stop sharing here that we can gain within Sage Intacct. Okay, I don't see any suggestions in the q and a, so last call for any suggestions or to things you'd like to demo, but we'll go ahead and move on. We can come back if we need to. We've got about 10 minutes left. I wanted to leave a little bit of time for questions. And Emily, anything you want to wrap up

Emily Madere: With? No, Karen, I thought that was great. Let's move back to this slide. What am I doing? Hold up. Okay. No, Karen, that was great. Thanks you everyone for listening. We will take more questions if you have any. I think probably a common question that no one has asked yet is Karen, let's say someone decides to evaluate Intacct with us. We help them go through the evaluation processes of Intacct, but can you talk more to what implementation might look like and how long it might be?

Karen Penhallegon: Yeah, so implementation generally takes about three to four months on average from kickoff to go live. We definitely have a detailed process. We'll go over on that whenever you want to approach us. But generally we have a phase where we're digging into your requirements, designing the system, how we're going to set that up. Then we have a phase where we're actually building the system out, configuring it, getting your data into that system. We have a testing and training phase and then you go live. That's super high level. I'm happy if anybody has questions on that to chat about that for sure. I do say question. Sorry, go ahead.

Emily Madere: Yes, I was just saying we got one question in the chat. How does AP Automation deal with credit?

Karen Penhallegon: Yes, so that's a great question. I haven't tried pushing through a credit, but generally the way that it works, you can have essentially a negative AP bill will come through as a credit. So it would generate that negative AP bill and then an intact, it automatically senses a negative AP bill as a credit. It's just an automated process. And so whenever you go to actually pay your bills, you can apply that credit to the existing bills for the vendor. But that's a great question. I actually need to put that into my demo so we can see how a credit comes through as well. Thank you for bringing that up.

Emily Madere: A lot of the folks who were listening, Karen, they're on QuickBooks, some of them were on QuickBooks desktop and online. So I think for those folks who are listening in that are on QuickBooks desktop, I think it's important for us to say that QuickBooks Desktop is no longer being supported, so there will be no more bug fixes that will happen in QuickBooks desktop and they're pushing everyone to online.

Karen Penhallegon: Yeah, that's a really great point. So if you're on desktop, you need to be thinking about what you're going to do very quickly. There's no more releases for it, more updates. So if you are looking for, and we can help you with other things as well, even if it in fact is not quite right for you at this point. We have teams that can help you getting into QuickBooks online. We can help you evaluate Intacct if that's the route that you'd like to go. If you think you're too large for QuickBooks, lots of different for you, but please, if you're on desktop, you really need to be moving because you're really at risk. Anytime you're on an outdated unsupported solution, you're at risk.

Emily Madere: The same goes for Great Plains. Great Plains is being phased out sometime between 2026 and 2029. So I don't think anyone on this webinar has great plans. So if you know of somebody, that's definitely an important point to bring up to them. Also, dynamics gp, in case you know it as Dynamics gp. Yes,

And I think it's important to mention too, our evaluation with you to take a look at Sage Intacct is completely free, so we'll walk alongside you. Our process is first we do a very detailed discovery where we learn more about you and your business, and then from that discovery, Karen builds a custom Sage Intacct demo to show you how we envision you working in Intacct. And then we move on to proposal where we share pricing for Intacct as well as implementation services. Any other questions? I know we have five minutes left. I will also be reaching out to everyone after the webinar, so you'll have my email address and my phone number if you want to connect. But please feel free to leave your comments and thoughts in the after survey. I know. So I'll come on and tell you a little bit about that. But that's it for Karen and I, so we want to thank you so much for listening.

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