Sage Intacct For Construction Accounting

Emily Madere: Okay, let's go ahead and get started. So, today, we really wanted to start this webinar off with some main construction accounting pain points that Karen and I typically hear. So, Sage Intacct works for a number of different industries. I think maybe Karen and I's top industries are construction, healthcare and professional services.

So, construction really holds... It is really near and dear to our hearts and these are kind of what construction companies are asking for. They're asking for connectivity because a lot of the times the folks out in the field, in accounting, their systems don't really talk to one another. Another issue that we hear pop up is multi-entity workflows. So, a lot of times construction companies are a multi-entity. And what ends up happening is, especially if they're using QuickBooks, then there's a lot of logging in and out of different QuickBooks files.

The third one is project visibility. So, a lot of the time what's happening in the field doesn't necessarily translate to what's happening in accounting. So, a lot of construction, CFOs and controllers come to us to fill that gap. The fourth one being reporting. So, reporting I think is a huge deal in every industry we work with, but especially with construction, with RIP reporting, everything that comes along with the construction specialty. And the last one is just being able to job cost.

So, I understand a lot of our clients are switching from QuickBooks or maybe Sage 300 and those systems don't necessarily do the best job costing, so a lot of our construction clients will come to us to look for a system that's able to assist with that. Before we move on any further, please feel free to put your questions in the Q&A box. I'm monitoring those and I'll stop Karen or if I'm talking, we'll answer your questions. We won't be waiting until the end. And if you are wanting to see something specific because we are going to be going inside of Sage Intacct today, please let us know in the chat.

Okay, so our first topic, we really wanted to talk through is connectivity. So, this first workflow is what we typically see when our clients come to us. There are a lot of different systems in their environment like banking, payroll, payables and specific with construction, those pre-construction and management tools, all trying to integrate or work with the DO.

And what ends up happening is there's a lot of manual work in between these steps. Maybe from the general ledger to payroll, there's a couple people in between those processes pushing paper or pushing stuff into Excel, and then putting that into your payroll system. At the end of the day, what our clients end up wanting is they want the general ledger to be the hub of their business to where banking, payroll, payables and those pre-construction and management tools all sync and they all talk to one another.

So, the guys out in the field can put their time in the pre-construction tools, it syncs the general ledger and get paid out as an example. Of course, we're all here today to listen and talk through how the construction industry benefits from using Sage Intacct. But what exactly is Sage Intacct? Sage Intacct is a cloud-based best in class accounting solution.

So, really breaking that down, Sage Intacct is cloud-based, so it lives in the cloud, you'll be able to access it from any browser. Karen will show us that functionality today. But the second portion of that I think is Sage Intacct's strong suit and why it's so great for the construction industry and that's that best in class. So, at its heart, Sage Intacct is great at things like accounting and ERP, pre-construction, analytics project management, and it really puts its R&D dollars into these aspects, but where it necessarily doesn't want to put R&D dollars in, it's able to connect out to those solutions.

So, here are just some solutions that Sage Intacct connects with like Miter, bill.com, Expensify, Procore, and there's over 350 more of these solutions that they connect into, and it connects with these solutions through OpenAPIs and data feeds. So, really Sage Intacct is at the hub of your business and is able to flow information to and from.

So, Karen can talk more to this. But Sage Intacct in general has been in the construction industry for a very long time with Sage 300 and that's where they're building this functionality off of. But I think Intacct has done a really great job of having solutions that they've required, and then having them integrate into Intacct.

So, one of those solutions is Sage Construction Management, SCM. This was a solution called Corecon before Sage Intacct acquired it. And this is an integrated solution built for the pre-construction aspect of your business. So, it's easy to manage. It integrates into Intacct, and I think the most important part of this is it can be bundled in with Sage Intacct pricing.

The next aspect is Sage Field Operations. We call it SFO. This is a really great solution for your folks who need to be out in the field doing field service work. It's well suited for those in HVAC electrical refrigeration, any of those guys are on a truck in the field who need to have an iPad functionality to be able to click into jobs, that sort of functionality.

And there's also Sage Intacct real estate, and this is really for the lease administration capabilities that Sage offers. But all of these solutions, they really work together and they're all integrated with Sage Intacct to provide that full-service suite, if you will of services. And I think what we'll see from here is Sage acquiring more and more companies to add to this suite, but for our clients right now, I think these solutions and the way they integrate with Intacct are really benefiting their business.

Karen Penhallegon: Emily, and if I can add just a few comments here, I think what you'll also see, I know we probably have a broad range of people on this call, but this is really allowing Sage to target a lot of different types of construction industry clients. So, if maybe you're a developer or you're a general contractor or a specialty subcontractor, that's what the intention of these different solution is, we can really tailor that solution to specifically which pieces you need.

So, if you're not maybe a developer, you don't manage real estate, that's fine. We don't have to use the SIRE or even the SFO product. But if you are a baby specialty subcontractor who has employees out there that you're needing to dispatch to jobs and track time and purchasing and all of that, that can be a great fit for you. So, it's really a place that we can fit a lot of different companies and with these different solutions.

So, Emily, there's actually a question I'll address really quickly that I just saw pop up in here. So, the question is what are the differences between Sage 100 Contractor and Sage Intacct for Construction? This is a very common question because Sage has a lot of products. And so, we often get the questions of what are all these different products?

Sage 100 Contractor is an on-premise solution. I'll admit fully that I've never actually used it, so I'm not familiar with its functionality, but I do know it's actually installed on the server whether you're hosting that server yourself or someone else is hosting it for you. I don't know specifically what the what-to-what differences are. We're going to show you a little bit about Sage Intacct for Construction today.

I do know like Emily mentioned a lot of what is in Sage Intacct's Construction module is based on what used to be called Timberline and that's the Sage 300 product today. I believe Sage 100 Contractor is similar product just designed for slightly smaller businesses. So, I think you'll see a lot of the same functionality that you might expect. But if there's anything specific that you're curious about, definitely drop it into the Q&A. And if we don't have time today, we can follow up with you later and get you some more details.

Okay, so I think I'm going to go ahead and take over and talk for a bit for you guys. So, I'm going to cover this concept of multi-entity, and this is really important for a lot of our clients that are out there because multi-entity is something that has been built into Sage Intacct from day one, but it's really not in a lot of other solutions out there.

So, if you're working in QuickBooks or Sage 100 or Sage 300, you're probably working in different individual companies that don't see each other and talk to each other. On the other hand, I like to say what Intacct has is multi-everything architecture. And so, it's got the ability to do a lot of different functionality all built into a single architecture in a single company. And so, that can include multi-entity, so things that companies that have multiple entities that need to interact. The biggest thing here that it can do for you is actually create your auto-balancing entries.

So, if you have companies that are interacting with each other, whether it's through due to and due from entries, maybe you're paying bills on behalf of your other companies or your receiving payments on behalf of the other companies, it can auto-create those transactions for you. It can also automatically do billback for you.

So, if you have one company doing work on behalf of the other company, it can create the corresponding AP bill when you enter an AR invoice. Just a couple of examples of the balancing. It also will do consolidated reporting. So, whether you need just very simple consolidated reporting or something more complex like multi-currency reporting, all of that is going to be built into the system for you. So, you'll see all of your entities and you can actually report on all of them are groups of them together and see your consolidations.

And then, last but not least, a very important one that we hear a lot, especially from QuickBooks users is what about security? Because maybe not everyone should see everything, right? We'll talk a little bit more about security when we get into the actual demo. But from an entity standpoint, we can actually limit users to only see certain entities.

So, if you have employees that only need to work in one or two of your entities, that's not a problem. We can limit them to those entities. They can do the work that they need to, but then someone that is an administrator or who can see all of the entities will be able to see what they're actually doing in the companies.

The next one that I will talk a little bit about is multi-book. So, this is something I think is pretty unique to Intacct. All accounting systems really have a book, right? Usually, it's an accrual book that you're posting transactions to, but what Intacct allows you to do is actually have as many different books as you might want. So, your standard book would usually be your accrual book, but out of the box we can also turn on GAAP and tax books. And we can create as many user-defined books as you might want.

So, whether you need to have books that are specific or specific entries for a board that you're reporting to or for ownership or a bank or other lending institution, we can actually take entries that maybe today you're doing things in Excel and moving things around in Excel to get those reports looking like that those other people might want them. Instead, we can actually create a user-defined book in Intacct to allow you to post those entries, and then just report on them through the separate books.

And then, last but definitely not the least, what I kind of call Intacct's superpower is dimensions. So, Intacct does multi-dimension. Well, what does that mean? So, what a dimension actually is, is a tag or a field that is on a transaction. And so, every transaction in Intacct has the ability to tag not only GL accounts but also a number of dimensions. We'll see in just a few minutes an example of these dimensions that you can have within the system.

And so, that takes us away from having to have a chart of accounts that maybe has a whole bunch of subaccounts in it. You might have... I've seen clients with eight, nine, 10,000 GL accounts because they're trying to account for things in their chart of accounts like locations and apartments and projects. Well, instead, we're going to break those out into individual fields and we'll see some examples in just a minute, and that gives us the ability to not only make data entry easier, it also makes reporting easier and better.

All right. So, speaking of reporting, that's where we're going to actually go next. So, we're going to go ahead and talk a little bit about what we've been hearing from various CFOs.

Emily Madere: So, the first thing we've been hearing from construction CFOs and accounting teams is, it would be great if we had real-time reporting. So, what Karen and I are typically seeing is reporting happening very late in the game and it's typically a combination of a couple of different reports they pull from their accounting system, and then starting Excel to do on the slide.

The third, I mean, the second thing we hear is it seems like everything is a manual process and this is definitely the construction industry, but it's across the board. There's a lot of paper happening when we're speaking to construction accounting teams, they kind of reference people just throwing paper on their desk and them having to key it in. So, that happens a lot.

And then, the third is data is not in an easy to view format. So, one thing I've seen when my construction clients are pulling up their data is sometimes it looks like it was produced in the early '90s. Some of the formats are definitely not easy to see. The fonts are really small, and it's not easy to present that to anybody.

Karen Penhallegon: I'll chat a few more that I keep hearing. Reporting on fragmented data, this is a big one because a lot of times this kind of goes back to that connectivity we talked about earlier. The data you're trying to get at may be in several different places. And so, it's very difficult for you to get that data into a single place for reporting. And second of all, back to the real time reporting, it's also difficult to know when is it all going to be in there.

So, you may be waiting weeks or even months for some of our clients to actually get reports. And by that point, it's really too late for you to make decisions based on that information because those are things that happen months ago, and now you're trying to go back and make decisions based on that. This next one is one of my favorites, so much paper. I cannot even begin to tell you how many people have told me how much paper they have to deal with on a daily basis.

I've come away from clients with stacks of paper of things that they're doing, so if this is you, if you are dealing with paper time sheets or field tickets or paper POs, this is something we can definitely help with. Everything from being able just to at least scan in your documents and attach them into the system to actually shifting to approval workflows and allowing people to get their reports on a screen instead of on paper. Those are all things that we can help with.

So, we'll be showing you some of those things in the demo in just a few minutes. And then, finally, like I mentioned earlier, just delays in reporting. So, if you're not able to get reports the next day or even the next week, if you're waiting weeks or months, that's really too late. You are now making decisions based on data that may not even be accurate anymore.

And so, we really are striving through the use of all those connected systems so that when something happens in the field, you're able to know that very quickly, right? So, you're not having to wait for months to understand how what is going on every day is impacting your bottom line.

Okay, we'll talk a little bit more about reporting. So, like I mentioned, I was going to talk a little bit about dimensions. I have some of the examples of dimensions listed here. These are common ones that we would see for our construction clients. There can be more than this, but these are the ones we see most often. Number one being the entity and the location. Those are really important, of course, because entity is going to be your legal entity normally, but you likely have multiple locations or multiple sites that you want to track underneath that.

And so, that's one way that we can handle that entity and location is a dimension that is really related to each other. Another very common one is department. We see this one all the time being used to track whether you call them revenue centers or cost centers or business units, whatever it may be. Another very common one.

Class. So, those of you who are on QuickBooks are probably very familiar with the word class if you use that. But in Intacct, we kind of call this our wild card dimension. So, we're able to use it for a lot of different purposes. One of the most common ones is probably tracking pieces of equipment that we see here, but we've used class for all sorts of different purposes throughout our clients.

The rest of these are really a little bit more prescribed specific purposes. So, of course, your employees. So, if you need to track time for time and materials, billing or do approvals based on employees or track your contractors, the employee dimension is a great place for that. We also have projects, of course, your jobs, what is more important than your jobs. But below those jobs, we can actually have tasks or cost codes.

So, whatever you call those, whether you call them activity codes or cost codes or tasks, that's your breakdown of your actual project. Now, I don't have it on here. There's a further breakdown that if you like to use it's called cost type that is a sub of the task as well. So, you have a project that has multiple tasks and the task may have multiple types of costs like labor or materials or equipment.

Item, of course, is what you're buying or selling. So, if you're tracking inventory, you may have inventory items, but you also will likely have non-inventory items. So, whether it's labor that you're charging for on a time, materials or your fixed fee that you're going to bill for, it's all going to be related to an item. And then, of course, we all are familiar I would think with customers and vendors. Vendor being a generic term, that can also include your subcontractors. So, we're going to see that in the demo in just a moment as well.

Now, what I'd like to explain a little bit is how do we get from this old chart of accounts that we're probably all very familiar with? The first eight to 10 years of my career, I worked with charts of accounts just like this, where we broke things out into different segments. How does that translate into these dimensions that Intacct now uses? And so, I like to use an example like here, we have an account that the account number includes a main account, which in our case is equipment, it includes a location, a department, and a project.

Really, what is happening then whenever we translate this into Intacct is we're going to take that and actually break it out into four separate fields. So, rather than having to duplicate the account number every location, so three additional times and another five times for each department and another five times for each project getting into a hundred accounts. Instead, we're breaking them all apart. And so, we're going to have just one natural account. Your chart of accounts going to have just 1,500 equipment in it. You'll have a separate field for locations that you can code things to for departments, for projects, and all this can be mixed and matched on every transaction.

So, like I said, it's going to make not only the entry and setup easier, but then from a reporting standpoint, what we're doing is actually turning your entire GL into a pivot table. So, instead of having to, if you think of things in Excel terms, break out these individual pieces of information, and then try to report on them, it's already all broken out for us, and Intacct is basically doing the job for us of just pivoting this data and giving to us any way that we want to look at it.

So, just as an example, I've got a few different ways that you can use dimensions in Intacct in kind of our real-life scenario. First one being the hierarchies that are built in. So, we're able to have pretty much an unlimited number of hierarchies. I've never seen anybody go deeper than five or six levels, but it can be done and these natively will roll up to the top levels for your reporting purposes.

So, this example I'm showing you is a department listing. So, I've got some departments like sales and services, and then I have an admin department that actually has some children living below it, things like HR and finance and IT. So, from a reporting standpoint, if I code something to IT, I can run a report, and then IT will be automatically included if I look at the admin department as a whole or I can go down and look at that detailed level if I need to.

So, I've got flexibility to see things at any level of that hierarchy. The next piece that is really great about these dimensions is I can actually create custom fields right on those dimensions and use those fields throughout the system. So, in my case, my example here, I've got this extra field that's going to be for my revenue centers, which ones are revenue producers versus which ones are cost centers. And what I'm going to do is then be able to use that data to actually produce groups and report on those groupings.

So, the grouping that I have in this example, I apologize it's a little small on your screens, but it's going to group based on that checkbox to give me my revenue centers and their totals, and then my cost centers and their totals. Excuse me. So, and you can see what we're doing here, taking sort of what you might think of as a traditional maybe gross profit or profit and loss statement, turning that a little bit on its head because what I'm actually doing is taking what might normally be columns, turning those into the rows and my accounts now are in my columns.

So, I'm seeing total revenue, total expenses, and then net earnings here as my columns, and I've got those groups broken down as my rows. So, just one example of how Intacct can be really flexible and report on things in all sorts of different ways without a lot of effort. One more quick example, I know you guys can download the PowerPoint. I'm not going to stay in this example too terribly long, but this is just an example of where those different dimensions actually come from.

So, it might be a little small again, but you can see I'm actually using three different dimensions here within this example report, location, department and vendor. My location is coded and department are both coded on that bill that you see. I color coded them here for you. So, location is the blue color. I'm turning that into a column on a financial statement, but I'm taking department and vendor and actually splitting out my revenue and my utilities accounts into the individual dimensions.

So, I'm able to mix and match because I want to use accounts or dimensions to do my reporting. So, very, very flexible and really the ability to slice and dice however you want to see it. Any other questions so far Emily? I don't think I saw any...

Emily Madere: Nope, I don't see any questions. Any questions, feel free to put it in the chat and I see a couple of you all have added the emojis when we're talking, so thank you all so much for doing that.

Karen Penhallegon: All right. So, let's get into a little bit more into the weeds of what are some of the ways that Intacct actually helps when you get down to a job level. So, starting off with just how do you capture costs? And then, turn those into an invoice. So, this is a big one for a lot of people. This is where many, many of the manual processes live. I think I went forward too far there.

Okay, sorry about that, guys. So, there are a lot of things that are going into a project that are determining what that project actually, how that project actually operates. Emily, which slide are you seeing right now? Maybe my computer is lagging. Apologies. Looks like the right slide now. Oh, it keeps going to the next slide. I don't know why.

Emily Madere: That's okay. Just talk through it.

Karen Penhallegon: I'll just talk through it and you guys can just use your imagination a little bit. Sorry about that. So, there are a lot of different factors that are feeding into a project. So, when you're first setting up a project, you're going to have a contract that's going to dictate how are we billing our customer for this targeting the markups. So, that's the first big piece is how is this project going to be set up and that's where the project contract is going to come in.

Then, when you're actually starting to work on the project, you're going to have a number of different things that are happening that are coming into your system. So, whether that's time sheets, that's probably one of the ones we hear pretty often. It's going to be something people are manually typing in still, but time sheets from the field or time sheets from whoever it may be, those have to come in especially for your TNM invoices because you need to charge that time back out. But even if you're just costing, you need to bring those into the system.

The next thing might be things like purchases. So, whether you're purchasing materials. So, if you are in a business that you're actually using materials and tracking that inventory, purchasing materials for the job or if you're doing subcontracting. So, a lot around subcontracting that we can talk about is a big topic, but even just the act of just tracking the POs and the invoices for your subcontractors, that also needs to be factored in.

So, that's just a few of the things that are going to happen, of course, during your project. But then, the last thing that seems like it always happens is change orders. So, how are we tracking change? Whether it's a customer change where they're changing the scope of your project, maybe you're doing more or less and that's going to eventually change your price or it's a change on your vendor side related to that customer scope change. You need to go hire a new subcontractor or change your contract. These are all things that we can actually get into Intacct into the same system and track electronically that you're probably tracking at least somewhat on paper today.

Now, the end goal of all this though of all this information coming together is to give us the ability to automatically produce an invoice for this job. So, giving the system the ability to say, okay, how should this be billed? Is it a fixed fee? Is it based on milestones? Is it T&M? All right. Now, what are the transactions that have gone into it? And then, take those transactions and that information to tell it, "Okay, then I should produce an invoice for this amount."

So, that's really the end goal at the end of the day of kind of all this information to the system so that at the end you can easily get out what you need, not just in reporting but also being able to bill your customers more quickly, and thus generate your cashflow more quickly.

All right. So, now I'm going to jump to this additional construction specific features and go through a few of these things that are add-ons. So, we've talked about the basics, but there's more than just those things that go into a job, one of them being estimates. That's probably a big one for a lot of you. I hear all the time that people are estimating in Excel. I think Excel must be the most common estimating tool on earth, but how do you get that estimate in a report on it ongoing? Right? So, that can be a lot of pain if you're just keeping it in Excel because you have to go back into the Excel spreadsheet and update it if you want to actually see your budget to actual.

Sage Intacct can definitely report on your estimates for you and track them and Sage Construction Management and other tools like Sage Estimating can actually come in if you need help generating those estimates. So, you can really have all in one where you generate the estimate, it automatically flows into once you get the project, it'll automatically flow into that job. And then, automatically compare to your budget to actuals for you. So, really making it a holistic experience where you're not having to go back to Excel and update things or export data.

This next one, retainage. So, whether you have customers that are withholding retainage from you or you're holding retainage from your vendors or both, Intacct is going to be able to help with that. We can set up the standard retainage rates. They can be overall for all customers and vendors or you could set up for specific customers and vendors or specific jobs, retainage rates. The system is going to automatically calculate that retainage, automatically withhold it, and there's a process for you to go through when you've reached the milestone where you're able to release it, and actually release that retainage. All automatically built into the system for you.

Now, we talked about subcontractors a little bit earlier and one of those big things about subcontractors is compliance documentation, right? So, if you're tracking their insurance certs or any of those other compliance pieces that you might need based on your individual business type, you're probably again tracking this in Excel somewhere. And hopefully, you're knowing whenever that vendor compliance expires and making sure that you follow up with the to get updated documentation. But if this is a big pain point for you, Intacct can actually help.

We now on vendors set up compliance tracking. We can also set up vendor approvals. So, if you want the vendor to not be able to be used until you've received the compliance documentation, you can do that. We can track all sorts of different compliance documents. You can actually set them up yourself and choose what you want to track for different types of vendors, and you can automate that process where it will automatically create the compliance whenever you create a certain type of vendor, and it will... You get to choose if you want to literally just stop people from processing transactions for that vendor once their compliance documents expire.

So, really, really powerful tool built in there so that you can keep track of that compliance that you need from your vendors and your subcontractors. And then, we talked a little bit about this, the change order and change your request process, but just that ability to be able to track those as their own individual documents that do change the original document but also give the ability to see the individual change orders and change requests separate from the document they're trained changing.

And then, you'll see if you choose to use the AIA semi billing format that's available in Intacct, actually seeing those changes broken out separately. So, you can see exactly what was the change, what was the original contract, and be able to report on that to your customers or vendors as well.

Okay, so I feel like I've done a lot of talking. I don't see any other questions. So, at this point, I think we'll maybe jump in and spend a few minutes looking at Intacct. Like Emily mentioned, I'm going to show some very high-level reports, some drill downs into some specific transactions. But if there's anything that you'd like to see while I'm in Intacct, please just ping us in the Q&A and I can show you something specific. We left a little bit of extra time in here specifically for that. So, please feel free to let me know what you would like to see.

I'm going to share my screen. You guys are going to lose our cameras while my screen is shared, but we'll get us back whenever we stop screen sharing. So, give me just a moment here to get it shared. Okay, Emily, can you confirm that you're able to see my screen?

Emily Madere: Yes, I can see your screen. I can't tell if it's big enough for everybody. So, if you need, Karen, to zoom in a little bit, please pop in the chat.

Karen Penhallegon: All right. So, I've got an example company here that I'm going to be using today to talk through some of the aspects of Intacct for you. This is the Timber Construction Group. Like we mentioned before, I want to just start out with some high-levels, sort of tips and tricks here in this company. But the way that I'm going to access Intacct because it's a cloud solution, it's not installed on your computer. I'm accessing it through a browser.

So, I personally just like to use Google Chrome. That's the browser that I'm going to use today, so you'll see Chrome. But whatever browser you have, as long as it's an up-to-date current browser, you can use it to access Intacct. So, if you like Firefox or Edge or any of those browsers, you're perfectly fine to use them. At the end of the day, the key thing to remember here is that, anywhere that you have an internet connection and a browser you can get to Intacct.

So, especially right now, we're in the Baton Rouge area, Emily and I, so hurricanes are always on our mind this time of year. What's happening in Florida right now, and of course, in the Carolinas in the other parts of the southeast is definitely weighing on us. In previous years, we've had hurricanes come through, our clients will tell us, "All we had to do was go to the coffee shop or go somewhere else where there's power and we're back online with our system if we need to be." So, it's really fantastic because you're not dependent on that location where a server is sitting, instead, you're in the cloud able to just access it no matter where you are.

I also mentioned security earlier, so I'm going to be logged in today as Emma. So, Emma's the CFO of my company here, TCG. She's going to have access to everything. But I want you to keep in mind as we're going through these different screens and different tasks, we can actually control security down to a very granular level. So, we can get down to individual tasks like maybe it's a journal entry, who can view journal entries, can somebody enter a journal entry and post it or can they only see it or can they not see them at all?

So, we've got very detailed level control over who can see what. And the reason that's important is because we want to get as many people access directly to our data as possible without giving them too much access to our data. So, if you're somebody who's going to be in an accounting department and you're getting lots of requests for reports from people all the time, wouldn't it be better just to give them a report that they can go to a dashboard like what you're seeing here and we'll see in a moment with our project dashboard, and let them go self-serve that data whenever they want it.

So, that's really ideas and want to give them as much as they need to do their jobs, but then we can also use that security to control so they don't see too much because your project managers probably don't need to see your balance sheet, but they certainly need to see their projects and costs to their projects, for example.

I'll also point out; I do have multiple entities set up in my environment here. I've actually got three entities set up. I've got a development company, a general contractor, and then a specialty subcontractor just for three different examples of different types of entities that you might have. There's not really a limit on the number of entities that you can have. We have clients that have just one and we have a client that has over a hundred.

So, you can really have any number of entities in here. I'm sitting at what's called the top level right now, which means that I can actually see and interact with all of the entities that I have access to. So, I'll be able to see consolidated reporting and enter transactions to any of these entities from this top level or I can filter down to a specific entity or even a location under that entity if I'd like.

As far as navigation, there's a drop-down menu here that has all of a navigation. I'm not going to be using this too much today because there's a lot of things to click on in here unless you guys need me to go off script a little bit. I'm going to use bookmarks, which is one of the ways we can create shortcuts for navigations. You can see here I've got some bookmarks set up. And also, going to be using my various dashboards to just do drill-downs and links to different places.

So, I'm going to go ahead and just pop over into my project dashboard, just a moment to open up. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and zoom out just a little so you guys can see a little bit more of my dashboard at once here. What I want to spend just a couple of minutes talking about is some of the different types of reports that we can generate, and then we're going to actually do some drill-downs into some specific transactions so you can see some examples of how transactions are actually producing this data that's on your dashboard.

But I'd like to point out a few different of the different types of reports we can create and different things, I call them them widgets here. So, the first being these performance cards. So, these that you're seeing right here are called performance cards and you saw them on my executive dashboard as well I had a moment ago. They're really just quick pieces of information that are helpful to whoever's using the dashboard.

We can have as many dashboards as you want. I have this project manager dashboard. I have an executive dashboard. I have clients that even have individual dashboards for each person because they all want their own things on a dashboard and that's perfectly fine. That's something we can help you with. But specifically for this project manager dashboard, I've got some project specific information on here. Things like my profit margin, both in dollars and percentage, and my number of active jobs that I have going on, which is 22.

Performance cards, you can also note here they can be for a certain time period. These happen to all be for inception to date because projects as we all know can go over multiple accounting periods, whether it's years or months, whatever it may be. So, from a project basis, we normally would use things from inception to date. So, we get the project's entire life cycle included in our reporting.

If you're looking forward on accounting focus dashboard, you might see things like month to date, year to date, quarter to date, or any combination. It can be daily or weekly even that we can use in these performance cards. And we'll really tailor that to what you're trying to look at on a day-to-day basis on your dashboard. Now, these aren't doing comparisons, but the ones in my previous dashboard where they are looking at comparing either to a prior period or to a budget.

So, I can actually look and say what is my budget to actual for revenue or different cost accounts right here on the dashboard and see it in an instant. So, if you're waiting until after the fact past the end of the month, maybe you're a department manager or you have department or division heads looking to you for those budget numbers, we can give them a dashboard that actually will tell them where they are throughout the month as expenses actually hit the books and they can see that with a nice easy picture that tells them green, you're good, you're under budget, red, you're bad, you're over budget, for example.

So, that's one type of report. Another type would be financial reports. So, you're probably familiar with what you might think of as a traditional financial report, a profit and loss statement or an income statement or a balance sheet. To Intacct though, financial reports are really, really flexible tools and we can do a lot of different things with them.

So, financial reports and Intacct are really just anything that is reporting on data that is in the general ledger. And that data could be dollars, like revenue or cost. It could be non-financial information. So, maybe it's statistics like job counts, head counts, all sorts of different statistical information that you can get in from your various systems. We can take all of that and put it together and do calculations on it as well to give us really these custom financial reports. One example being something like this project overview.

So, this is actually a financial report. I'll zoom in just a bit so we can see it a little bit better. In this case, what I've done again is turn traditional report on its head. My rows instead of being shell accounts are actually my projects. So, I see my individual jobs here. I've got my job type, so information from the actual job can be pulled into these reports as well. And then, I've got a number of different columns that I've set up to be different financial pieces of information, whether it's the amount of the contract, the estimate, commitments, actual billings, actual costs, so all sorts of information.

We can really customize this to exactly what you'd like to look at on your projects with the goal being at the end of the day that you can come to this dashboard and just immediately see this information at the click of a button rather than having to wait until after the fact. We'll come back to this in a minute, but all of these blue icons are drillable.

So, I can look from here straight to a project or to any of these amounts that are posted to a project. So, if it is blue, that means it's a link directly to the transactions that make that number up. So, keep that in mind, we're going to come back in just a moment to those amounts.

All right. Two other types of reports that you might see. You have charts and graphs. So, Intacct comes out of the box with a large number of just what we call financial charts and graphs, which is what you're seeing here similar to a financial report, taking that data that's living on the general ledger and actually turning it into a chart or a graph. In my case, I'm looking at profit margin by project, but this can be almost anything you can imagine. If you're looking at things like expenses or revenue by department or location, you can do all those comparisons. It can be trend reports over time, lots of different power we have there.

There's also an additional tool that you can add on called the Interactive Visual Explorer, which I like to think of as Power BI built into Intacct. And so, it gives you a lot of what I call the fancier charts. Some of you want to do heat maps or word maps or layer different types of charts on top of each other. That gives you that ability as well if you need that. So, just a quick example of one of the charts.

And then, here on the left I have what's called interactive custom reports. So, Intacct Construction actually comes with almost a hundred of these out of the box. I've just got a few examples on here for things that you might use. Things like open POs by project, or in this case, like a schedule of values or application for payment detail here. So, you can see things like schedule of values.

The reason they're called interactive is because you can actually move them around and do things with them. So, just as an example, I can click and drag the data that's actually in this little report and rearrange the columns. It'll automatically resort and regroup things for me. So, now, I'm sorted by vendor instead of project, and then I can just move things around to get back to whichever view I like. This is all just dynamic in the window. It's not going to save to the report.

So, you can quickly just do that slicing and dicing of your data. I can group by the data as well or create filters by that data very easily right here in my window without having to go actually create and modify our report. So, I've just got a few examples of this on here and some other reports that you can always look at, and we can go into more detail later if you guys have specific questions on this.

All right. Next, I want to do a couple of drill-downs, and then we will pop and see if there are any questions. When I go to screen share, I can't see the questions. Emily, if anything comes in, I need to stop for, please just interrupt me. Okay, so I want to show you a couple of different ways...

Emily Madere: Sorry.

Karen Penhallegon: ... that you can drill down. So, a lot of these... Oop, yup.

Emily Madere: Yeah, there is a question. So, we have some folks asking about sharing dashboards and reports. They're asking if it's typical for our clients to share Sage Intacct with their project managers or do most of our clients just keep it inside of Sage Intacct and they print out reports?

Karen Penhallegon: Oh, they're really good question. I'm going to answer a little bit of it depends. Depends on which of the solutions you're using. So, clients that are primarily just using Sage Intacct, I would say absolutely the best practice is to allow your project managers access to Intacct, not just because they can get reports from Intacct that you have to kill a lot of trees and give them pieces of paper that they have to wait on. Or even Excel if you're exporting things out to Excel and sending it to them, they can get on-demand reporting. But there are other pieces we can actually allow them to see as well. Maybe you could have them approve bills before you actually pay them or approve POs against their projects.

So, if you're holding your PMs responsible for those budgets, that really gets in front of any budget issues you might have because they're having to approve that information before it hits the project. If you're dealing with people who are tracking time sheets, you can do approvals for that as well. So, it really lets them get a lot more power around the financials of their project. If you're giving them access to Sage Intacct. Another place that you might, if you're using something like Sage Construction Management, you might not necessarily give them access into Intacct, but you might still for reporting purposes.

But then, Sage Construction Management is integrated with Intacct. So, they'll be able to get information over in Sage Construction Management. They can do draft or pro forma billing over there. They can manage the estimates, manage budget actual. They can actually manage the day-to day of the projects in Sage Construction Management. So, maybe you're giving them access there as well as end into Sage Intacct. So, that's a great question.

Emily Madere: Thanks, Karen.

Karen Penhallegon: Absolutely. All right. So, let me then hop into a couple of just quick drill-down examples. So, like I said before, anything you see that's blue is drillable. So, we can see a lot of dribble information right off the bat, but other things are actually drillable as well. They're just not quite as obvious. For example, I can drill into these performance cards. I can drill into the charts and graphs as well. So, if I hover, I'll see the data, but I can also drill into this data and actually see the information behind it.

I'm going to really focus a little bit just on this financial report at the top here because it's a great summary report of things that I can drill into. So, let me... Let's just look at one of these. I'm going to look at this here, and let's pull up the revenue or the buildings for this.

So, when I click into that drill-down, what's going to open up now is going to be the general ledger report. So, this is the GL detail or general ledger detail, whatever your system might call it. But every transaction that has gone into that number that we saw here in the background. So, I can see here, this is all the individual invoices that have been generated for this particular project. I can continue drilling down here though.

So, if I want to draw another layer deep, I can click on again the blue link here on the number. And this is going to actually pull up the invoice, so I can get into all the way down to the originating transaction that actually produced that information that I'm seeing on my dashboard. Now, my demo data is a little old, so please excuse me, but my customer has not paid me. They're very overdue. You'll see here. But I can see all the little at the top for this invoice for, excuse me.

I can see the customer information. If I have contracts related to this, I could see the contract summaries as well. And then, down here, here's that schedule of values that I'm actually billing, right? So, this is generated by the system. So, I happen to know this is a fixed fee project. So, I'm actually seeing each of these individual pieces here. Any questions on that? Does that look good, Emily? Or is it not showing? The drill-down is not show.

Emily Madere: Yeah, I can't see the drill-downs. Try it again.

Karen Penhallegon: Just a moment. Let me actually, I'm going to reshare just in case something's going on guys, give me a second here please. Apologies for that. Popped up in a new windows, that could be why I'm not showing my entire screen, but I will switch to that.

Emily Madere: Hey, it wouldn't be a webinar if we weren't having technical difficulties.

Karen Penhallegon: Exactly. All right. Let me try that again. Do you see my screen now?

Emily Madere: Yeah, I can see your screen.

Karen Penhallegon: And then, do you see the new window that popped up?

Emily Madere: Yip, we can see now.

Karen Penhallegon: There we go. Sorry about that, guys. So, this is all talking about the GL detail report, the general ledger report that has all the individual invoices on it that we've sent out for this project. And here's where I can drill another layer even deeper to see the actual invoice.

So, you can see here, invoice the high-level details at the top, the customer information, if you have contract information related to this, and this happened to be a fixed fee invoice, I can see all my different... Whether it's milestones or phases, whatever you call these. And the amounts that I'm billing to the specific invoice. I happen to have no retainage on this one, but if you have retained, you'd see that as well.

All that reporting that we're seeing on the dashboard is coming from these fields that you see here. So, these are those dimensions that you see. So, I have an item, dimension, location, customer job. This is all generated by the system automatically when it produces the invoice for me based on my fixed fee contract. But then, what that does is then flow into all those reports. So, I'm looking for a report by customer, report by job, then I have that information available to me for reporting.

So, that's where it also retires back to those dimensions that are so important. We've only got a few minutes left and I want to leave a little bit of time at the end. So, I'm going to go to one other quick drill down and show you an AP bill, and then we will hop back into our presentation.

I'm going to go ahead and open up this customer profitability full screen. So, I'm using a slightly different dimension here. And now, my columns are actually my customers across the top. And then, I have traditional gross profit accounts on my left-hand side here. Let's go take a look at a quick subcontract invoice. Let's see here.

So, here's the same report that I saw earlier, but now I'm looking at the bills associated with this project. Sorry, this customer. Let's just hop into this one... So, from an AP standpoint or purchasing either one, you'll see the screens are going to look very similar, but this is actually on the AP side rather than AR. A couple of important things I want to point out, we can include attachments, this is very important because you often will want to actually attach the pieces of paper that you may have received or the email you got right into the system.

So, I can attach right here the exact invoice that the vendor sent me. So, I have that backup available. When I produce an invoice because I'm doing time and materials billing, this can also become an attachment on my invoice as well. So, it can automatically become attached to the email that you send out to your customer.

I can also use, in fact, AP bill automation to do automation around this. What that means is that you can set up an email address or if you drag and drop bills into the system, they will automatically kind of OCR and read the data on them and create draft bills for you. And it actually uses machine learning and AI to get better at those bills over time. And so, it will learn exactly when you see this email address, it's from this vendor and it's usually to this GL account and it's usually to this location. So, it'll learn to read those things off the bill for you and actually fill out your AP bills for you. So, a very neat functionality that you can actually add on to help with your AP as well.

Okay. Now, I know we're running a little short on time, but are there any questions, Emily, that I need to address before we hop back into our PowerPoint?

Emily Madere: No, I think we're good.

Karen Penhallegon: All right. Let me stop sharing then. All right. Okay. Okay.

Emily Madere: So, everyone should see about EisnerAmper and Sage Intacct. So, I know we have a couple of minutes left. So, high-level EisnerAmper is a value added reseller of Sage Intacct and that just means, we are licensed to sell, implement, and provide support for Sage Intacct.

So, in the event you are interested in learning more about Sage Intacct and how EisnerAmper can help you, please just drop in the chat that you are and I will reach back out. High-level about Sage Intacct, of course, Karen just showed you some amazing functionality inside of Intacct. But Sage Intacct is the only financial management solution that is endorsed by the AICPA and that was a really important fact to us when we were looking with partnering with an accounting solution.

Along with that, these next three light bulbs you see here are for TrustRadius, Gartner and G2, and those are really where end users can go out and put reviews on software. And year-over-year, Sage Intacct has ranked number one in customer satisfaction year-over-year. And the last three bulbs just kind of really speak to Sage. Sage does offer a buy with confidence guarantee. They do maintain their customers for life, and they really do practice customer friendly practices.

So, high-level your Sage Intacct, Karen, as I mentioned, in the event that you would like to look at Sage Intacct, you'll be working with EisnerAmper. So, we do have best practices when it comes to implementation. We really like to take a phased approach because you don't need to build the house and decorate it all at one time.

So, over time, we will go, work with you on bettering your Sage Intacct instance. But I would say, for the first two, six months we're really implementing best practices. We are talking with your staff. We are taking you away from those paper manual-based processes into something digital. And then, we really transform. We are putting automation in place. We are helping you customize reports. We're helping you expand your dashboards. And in the next 12 months, we really help elevate.

So, Sage Intacct is constantly releasing new feature functions. So, there's stuff being pushed out to Intacct all the time. And as your partner, we help you implement those new features. We also help you learn those new features as well. And then, I think our last slide is question.

So, I think we have a couple minutes left, and there was some questions in the chat. We'll have two follow up one. But I do see one Karen, and I'll throw this one to you, is how long does a construction Sage Intacct implementation take?

Karen Penhallegon: That's a really good question. It does vary a little bit depending on how complex the business is. I would say, on average, we look from kickoff of the project to going live on Intacct. Usually, four to six months is our average.

Construction clients do tend to be a bit more complex, so I like to lean toward the longer, if I'm going to give you an estimate, rather it be shorter than you expected and not longer than you expected. That's probably the average four to six months.

Emily Madere: Okay. And maybe one more question before we toss it back is how much does Sage Intacct cost?

Karen Penhallegon: That is the question we always hear, right? Is how much does it cost? So, Intacct is a mid-market solution. So, if you are currently on QuickBooks, it's definitely going to be a jump up. It does depend very heavily on what type of construction business you are because there are a lot of bundles that Intacct offers that bundled many of these products together for a low price.

I would say, if you're just looking for a range, Intacct is an annual cost and I would say, annually, our clients are anywhere from $25,000 to $30,000 up to even if they're very large, $75,000 or $80,000. So, like I said, mid-market solution, it's really the next step up from our QuickBooks. And hopefully, that answers the question. If there any other questions out there we're not going to get to, we will reach out over email and get with you guys individually.

Emily Madere: Yeah. Okay. Well, we thank you all so much for joining. I will now pass it to Astrid to wrap us up.

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