Get a Handle on Business Spend Management with Sage Intacct

Sage Intacct is built to anticipate the needs of its users and organizations. Intacct applies a series of modular controls delivering a busines spend management solution that enables users to be proactive in understanding costs, applying automation policies, and digging deeper into reporting elements that can create opportunities for new spend management activities.

System Controls

The first step in managing business spend in Intacct is first determining which modules are used in the process –   Purchase Orders, Accounts Payable, or General Ledger. Not all companies require to use all three functions – applying spend management controls can be applied modularly depending on your structure.

Intacct’s budgeting capabilities automatically validate the budget versus actuals, providing real-time information. Using real-time information is more effective than periodic reports that do little to change spending behaviors and enforce your spending policies. Intacct uses dimensions to segment your information and assists in identifying areas of concern.

Spend can be automatically compared against budgets that are time-based (annual, monthly) or project-based. The system can monitor according to preferences set and enforce control policies where specified. The ability to view budget impacts, availability and commitments via contracts or outstanding purchase orders can provide critical information for the drivers behind purchasing issues.

Intacct possesses functionality that provides perspective into overages and underages at certain points of time with specific transactions, thus preserving the budgetary impacts of transaction categories.

Think Beyond the Business Spend Management System

Intacct allows you to use the data you already have to understand the spend patterns and performance based on dimensions such as clients, suppliers, goods, etc. Intacct is the systematic piece in enabling more extensive insights through its spend management controls.

Given the business spend management insights provided by Intacct, your organization is now equipped with information to perform (external to the system):

• Spend capability analysis
• Creating capability development plans
• Spend analysis
• Procurement strategy development
• Commodity prioritization
• Opportunity Analysis

The business results yielded from leveraging this module include:

• Reduction of supply risks
• Cost reductions
• Improvement of supplier performance
• Improvement of contract compliance
• Reduction of maverick spend
• Focus on suppliers with the best value
• Improved management of the contract lifecycle
• Improved contract negotiations
• Understanding historical procurement patterns
• Increase accuracy of demand information through adjustment of budgets according to need

Withum’s Management Consulting Services team can help guide your organization into structuring processes that support an entire spend management function so that it can leverage Intacct to its fullest potential.
Author: Kim Gordon, MAcc | kgordon@withum.com