Empowering Healthcare Organizations with Sage Intacct

So, we're going to get into a good discussion today around one of my favorite subjects, which is a bit of a nerdy accountant's piece for me, which is Sage Intacct. It's a piece of software that I came in touch with, probably 2008, 2009. So it's been a while. It was still in its early phases. It wasn't Sage Intacct at the time, it was just Intacct. And the firm I was at that time, we were early adopters of the product as we were all trying to find alternatives to some of the other accounting softwares that were out in the market at that time, most particularly QuickBooks. And I think that we'll get into that quite a bit today with our two guests.

But I've had quite a bit of experience with Sage Intacct over the years and have watched it become really what I think is one of the premier accounting softwares that is available, particularly in the healthcare market and particularly with private practices. So we'll get into that a little bit today. So that's sort of my way to kick off this conversation. I'm going to have Emily Madere and Karen Penhallegon to talk to us a little bit about that. And so Emily, I'm going to have you start off and give us a quick intro.

Emily Madere:

Yeah, well thanks Tony for having us on the podcast. I know Karen and I are very excited to be in here and to be speaking to your audience. I 100% agreed with what you had to say. I think Sage Intacct holds a special place and I know my heart, I'm assuming Karen's as well. So really excited to have a platform. We're able to talk about Sage Intacct, especially how it relates to the healthcare industry.

Karen Penhallegon:

Yeah, absolutely agree. Healthcare is one of the best spaces for Sage and I've working with Sage Intacct almost 10 years now, and I think it's a great product. Love to talk about it.

Tony Davis:

And just quickly on both your roles, you work through the conversion process in a lot of ways or the implementation process. Maybe just speak on that just quickly through your role within EisnerAmper and where you fit in and how it plays into clients that might be looking at this product. Emily?

Emily Madere:

Yeah. So, EisnerAmper is a Sage Intacct VAR and VAR stands for Value Added Reseller. And all that means is that we are licensed to help evaluate, implement, and then provide support for Sage Intacct. So, if we have someone in, let's use QuickBooks. Someone who's currently using QuickBooks and they're like, I'm ready to make the move from QuickBooks. I'm tired of having to switch in and out of books for my multiple entities. I'm tired of my lack of reporting and the lack of integrations available to me. Then we bring them in, we help them evaluate Intacct, and we have a pretty robust evaluation process. Then we move on to implementation, which Karen leads our sales and implementation team at EisnerAmper.

So, her team has the implementation and that is typically anywhere from a three to six-month implementation, and then all under the same roof, we're able to provide customer success. So, clients who come to us needing Sage Intacct, they're never leaving EisnerAmper for support. So we always know them and they always know us.

Tony Davis:

Karen, some thoughts on that?

Karen Penhallegon:

Yeah, I think one of the key things I like to point out about using a VAR like EisnerAmper is you really get that personal relationship. So a lot of people kind of under the misconception that it's best to go to the vendor to purchase your software directly, but that may not always be the best case for everyone. And our example, we are not only technology people, but we're also accounting and finance professionals. And so we're able to answer both sides of that for our clients. We understand accounting concepts, we understand best practices, and we can really bring that to the table with our implementations

Tony Davis:

And to the list is out there that as sitting in the finance seat or maybe an administrator within a healthcare practice, I can relate to my experience running a dermatology practice in the Minneapolis-St. Paul market. I inherited QuickBooks and being that I had a CPA background, certainly knew the ins and outs of that software, but also found it very frustrating for some reasons we're going to talk about here shortly as to its limitations. This is not a Bash QuickBooks podcast or anything like that. It certainly has a value and a lot of our clients use it still. But I think what we'd like to get through today is helping clients identify when they might be looking or when's a good time to think about Sage and should do a little bit of a, what's the benefits of the Sage Intacct software over some of the other programs that are out there?

And maybe that's a good segue into some of the features and functions pieces. So what makes it a great solution? I mean if there's three or four things that you could think right off the bat would be a differentiator for a healthcare organization that might be using a different piece of software. Karen, I'll let you go first this time.

Karen Penhallegon:

I definitely have a couple I can think of off the top of my head. Reporting, probably number one, that's the number one complaint we often hear from clients. They're not able to get reporting, so they're using Excel to do their financial reporting. Intacct has fantastic financial reporting. I've worked with a lot of financial report writers in my career, theirs is definitely top-notch. I kind of describe it's simple enough that anyone can learn to create reports, but it's powerful enough that you can create really complex reports in the solution. And so it's really the best of both worlds.

The other one we probably hear the most, especially when it comes to QuickBooks or similar solutions is multi-entity or multi-location. So like you mentioned, private practices or maybe groups often have a lot of locations. We've been speaking with a dental practice that has over 200. So, imagine if you're having to keep each entity in a separate QuickBooks file, that's a major pain. But Intacct from day one has been designed for multi-entity. So it gives you the ability to transact from all of your entities in a single place. You don't have to log in and out of systems. It has native consolidations, so it's going to roll all of your companies up together automatically.

And you can even automate your inner entity transactions. So, all those due to do forms that you're maybe making entries in multiple files, those now become all in the background. You don't have to do anything. The system's going to handle it for you. That's the two off the top of my head that just jump out. Emily might have some more that she can think of.

Emily Madere:

Yeah. No, I do. So, one thing that sticks out to me as I'm working with healthcare organization is the need for integration and that is where Sage Intacct is going to shine along with the reporting and multi-entity that Karen shared. I find that when I'm working with healthcare organizations, they're finding workarounds for integrations because they either they didn't integrate their two systems, whether it be their accounting solution and their EMR, they're manually putting data through different systems and that causes a lot of errors or it can cause a lot of errors. So, I think where you're going to find for healthcare organizations that Sage Intacct shines is the ability to integrate all of their systems into Intacct and Intacct then becomes the hub for information.

Tony Davis:

Yeah, tremendous differentiators I think with other the softwares in the marketplace. I want to touch on one, a couple of things that both of you said and bring it back to an experience I had with my practice was we held multiple revenue streams within our organization, just one umbrella. But through Intacct, I was able to produce, say, income statements for certain departments quite simply, just a lot of it's just in the way you set up the accounting, the chart of accounts, how you run revenue, how you can do some journal entries or some allocations preset on things like staffing and rent and things that are key in our overhead calculation within the healthcare space.

And one of the beautiful things is you can really group expenses in the categories that marry up to the benchmarking data available in the market. So if it's an MGMA or in my case with dermatology was the Adam organization that has these national benchmarks, we could now use those benchmarks by formulating and creating reports inside a Sage that were apples to apples comparisons. So it was very helpful from a managerial tool. Now, I had financial statements that made sense to me and I could do something with them versus just having a sort of an alphabetized A through Z or Zed, where I come from and it made no sense. It was useless and it wasn't very helpful to us.

And then, I think the other thing with integration is, and this touches on a little bit of compliance and security that I want you guys to talk about a little bit as well, but just to touch on it, with the Sage Intacct product, it's really now evolving into being able to draw information out of the practice management systems that can help build benchmarks inside of Intacct. So you aren't necessarily having to push everything out into Excel. That's still a function obviously, and you can get a lot more creative in Excel than you can with any accounting software, but I think this software really does a nice job of being able to connect through with the practice management systems to be able to do some good KPI work within your accounting system itself.

But Emily, you touched on working with your EMR and that sort of thing. So, how does Sage Intacct work within the compliance and security world? We are very paranoid about that within healthcare, obviously with cyberattacks and private protective health information kind of things. Do you want to touch on that first for a little bit?

Emily Madere:

Yeah, so as Karen and I are working with healthcare organizations, it is one of the first things that we bring up. It's very first of mind to a lot of our clients and that's one thing that's first of mind to Sage Intacct as well. So there isn't a module available that Sage Intacct offers. It offers HIPAA compliancy to any healthcare organization that signs up for that module and Sage Intacct will sign a BAA with the organization ensuring that HIPAA compliancy. So that's how Sage Intacct is secure from a medical record standpoint, but there are also numerous ways Sage Intacct is stepping up their game when it comes to just other security as well.

Karen Penhallegon:

Yeah, I want to add a little bit on that side. So of course, HIPAA compliance is critical. My understanding is Sage is the only provider in the marketplace who has that built-in HIPAA compliance. It's not a third-party solution that they have to add on and the only one that will sign the BAA. But on top of that, just the built-in native security of Intacct dual authentication is required. So, users have to have a phone or a backup method to be able to log in. The security is extremely granular. So, QuickBooks, you really can't get down to who can see what in the solution. And Intacct, you can go down to an individual task level and determine who can view that, who can edit it, who can add new records. And that's true for every single task in the system. So it's very, very detailed as to who can access what.

And then there's one additional one that adds an even higher level of security for things like cyberattacks and things like that that our users are concerned about and that's the ability to restrict IP addresses. So some of our clients are leveraging that where it's a cloud solution. So you can log in from anywhere theoretically, but if you want to prevent those logins, you can actually explicitly say which IP addresses your users can log in from.

Tony Davis:

So, Karen and Emily maybe share with the audience a case study example that you've got maybe in the healthcare space that sort of maybe emphasizes some of these features that we've been talking about with Sage Intacct.

Karen Penhallegon:

Yeah, I can absolutely do that. So we've got a fantastic client. They're focused on the dental space, mostly orthodontic but also pediatric and some other areas. And they have come a long way since we first started working with them, maybe give you a little background. When we first met this group, they had a lot of technology systems in place. We did an analysis, they had 11 different systems that were somehow touching accounting. These were all on-premise systems. The reason they brought us and originally their main accounting system was Epicor was a very old, maybe a thirty-year-old software that was installed and they were just very concerned about all the things we've talked about, security, losing access to it, becoming unsupported.

On top of that, there were a lot of other processes even outside these systems because even the 11 systems couldn't handle everything that they were doing. They also were developing a lot of things in-house because they had a very heavy IT team. And so there were quite a lot of internal IT support. We came in, we implemented Intacct for them. We actually implemented Intacct hand-in-hand with bill.com, which is now called BILL. So, for their AP, it's all handled through BILL. Intacct handles everything else for them. And they went from 11 systems to two and they're both in the cloud.

Karen Penhallegon:

We did a little bit of analysis on it. They were going to save over $60,000 in software costs in their first five years. They also were able to significantly reduce IT support needs. So that was another huge one. Their reporting would take them hours to days. Now, they give it in minutes. So I know we've shortened their monthly close by at least five days.

Karen Penhallegon:

They love Intacct now. It's been incredible for them.

Tony Davis:

Yeah. Well and I think it touched on a little bit of integration that even Emily touched on earlier, and Emily, if you want to chime in on this a little as well. With credit card downloads or bank transaction downloads, those of us that live in the accounting world within healthcare know how nitty-gritty you can get into the weeds on trying to code some of that stuff, that Sage does a nice job of being very integrated with those outside vendors, right? Emily, just some thoughts on that.

Emily Madere:

Yes, Sage does an excellent job of integrating with a lot of banks. So, I think Sage Intacct does a great job with bank reconciliation. So, it can connect out to banks to automatically pull entries in to just easily free up that end of the month activities. So we definitely cut down some time from there. But also, like you said, the integrations that exist are phenomenal. If you look in this Sage Intacct marketplace, there are over 350 integrations that exist today and that number is only growing.

Tony Davis:

Yeah, excellent. Karen, just to finish the case study, you talked about the time savings and maybe some of the cost savings as well. I mean without obviously getting into the specifics on this podcast, but I do find, and at least I found from my organization that the cost of itself Intacct itself wasn't necessarily that much more than what we were paying for similar type of softwares out in the marketplace. I think it prices very well. I mean maybe a few thoughts on that.

Karen Penhallegon:

Yes, absolutely. So, Sage Intacct is what we would call a mid-market solution. So it's not necessarily designed for those small businesses. That's where QuickBooks is a great fit. So you mentioned earlier this is not a Bash QuickBooks podcast. QuickBooks is fantastic for small businesses. It is a great starter solution. The jump from QuickBooks to Intacct can feel like a lot, just like the jump from an Intacct to a very large enterprise system is a big jump. But I think the value is really, really there. And if you are paying for a mid-market system already like Epicor or maybe you're using a Sage 100 or a Sage 300 or one of these other solutions, the older solutions, it's not that big of a difference in price. And often you can drop other solutions that you may be doing and really come out apples to apples on your cost for a much better solution.

Tony Davis:

Yeah, I agree. And I think for those listening, if you're just interested in that and want to get a baseline sort of apples-to-apples comparison, talk to Emily and the information is in the notes to this podcast and they're available certainly at EisnerAmper. I think I would suggest when you look at it, not just from the cost of the software but also the people time within your organization and to Emily's point around integration with other vendors, and then I think Karen, the example you gave of having 10 or 11 different pieces to the equation, really bringing it down to a couple, I think it's worthwhile making that call to just find out more information. Emily, just some thoughts on that.

Emily Madere:

No, I agree. I tell people all the time, if you are doing manual work, if you're needing integrations and your team is spending what you think to be too much time on difficult tasks, just reach out. Just give us a call.

Karen Penhallegon:

Yeah, I'd add one other thought if you don't mind really quick, Tony. The other thing to consider that this is the case for this company, but others as well, if you're looking to grow, that's another place that you're actually going to find savings. Because what we found, and this is a great example, this company has not had to hire additional staff, but they've significantly grown. And so it's also about allowing your staff to be more efficient, putting more automation in place so that you can grow as a business without having to double your head count.

Tony Davis:

For sure. And I'll put a quick plug into our EAA accounting outsourcing team as well who are very, very, very knowledgeable in the Sage Intacct space and QuickBooks and others as well. But they can also be a great resource to clients to have this be sitting a little bit a jump to or an extension of your organization by using the outsource services that we offer as well in this space. So let's wrap up with just maybe a little bit of a glance to the future. Clearly, we've talked a little bit already about Intacct innovation and commitment to its security and compliance needs. Anything else that you guys can see in the short term here that you feel like from upcoming features or updates that are in the pipeline that maybe the audience might be interested in as we finish up today?

Karen Penhallegon:

I have a couple of things that I'm excited about at least. So, actually, Sage had a healthcare specific webinar a few days ago that I sat in on, so it was quite exciting. One of the things that I really love is Intacct has a product called EMR Connect. So we're speaking about integrations. It's a product that allows you to connect out to most any EMR in the marketplace. They're really putting some development behind that to just improve it. So, more EMR connections, better connections, more options within that product. That's one thing that I'm really excited about. The other item would be an automation item.

So, AP Bill automation is a feature that's available in Sage Intacct, but at the time it's not HIPAA-compliant, but they are in the process of working to have a HIPAA-compliant version. And so that's very exciting. Accounts payable is often a big area for improvement, and so being able to automate the gather of that data and still be HIPAA-compliant is fantastic.

Tony Davis:

Thank you. Emily, you got a couple of things there?

Emily Madere:

Yeah, I'm going to throw in a buzzword and I'm going to say AI.

Tony Davis:

There you go. Let's talk about that for a second.

Emily Madere:

Yeah, yeah, I think it's everywhere and I think we'd be doing your listeners a disservice without talking about it

Tony Davis:

For sure.

Emily Madere:

So, Sage is making significant investments in AI for Intacct, and they recently released Sage Copilot, which is, I would, this is just me, no word from Sage, but I would say it's ChatGPT for Sage Intacct. It's a place where end users can go and ask questions of this bot and it's going to actually pull your accounting data to answer these questions and it's going to notify you if something is amiss, if you need to put a second pair of eyes on a report or in whatever it may be. And I think that is currently in beta. So, we have some Sage Intacct users currently using Sage Copilot.

Tony Davis:

Oh, fantastic, fantastic. Well, I think that's a good place to finish. One of the things I wanted to mention to the audience is getting from you, Emily and Karen, some other places they could go from additional information on Sage Intacct. I'm going to plug one, which is, Emily has a podcast that is called the Unofficial Sage Intacct Podcast. Describes it beautifully. I would suggest anyone interested in more information, check out. She's, her podcast is on all the various channels. And if you want to get more into the weeds with Sage Intacct, that would be a great resource. Other resources, Karen, that people could go to that you could share with them?

Karen Penhallegon:

I'd definitely say start on our website. So, if you come to EisnerAmper website, we have an entire subset of the site that is devoted to Sage Intacct. We have some demos out there, white papers, articles, lots of great content, especially a lot devoted to healthcare specifically. It's one of our major verticals. So that's where I would start. But of course, reach out to us. We're always happy to talk about Intacct. We love it.

Tony Davis:

Yes.

Karen Penhallegon:

It's our passion and something we're always glad to spread the word on.

Tony Davis:

Yeah, well, having sat in the seat of a lot of the listeners of this podcast, I couldn't recommend it more highly. I don't get paid a cent to say that. It just is for the independent practice, dental, medical, I really feel like it fits the need and gives you the best outcomes and best outputs and the best reporting to help you manage your practices with the best information in front of you. So, Emily and Karen, I want to thank you very much for your time today. It's been a joy.

Karen Penhallegon:

Thanks for having us.

Emily Madere:

Yeah, thank you.

Tony Davis:

And we will be back soon with another EisnerAmper Health Care podcast. And again, don't forget to like us on all the various channels and check us out on YouTube. So, thanks everyone. Have a great day.

Transcribed by Rev.com