Announcing Sage Intacct 2021 R1 – Here’s What’s New

The first release of 2021 makes its debut this month. There’s a tremendous amount of new functionality, all designed to help you work smarter and more efficiently than ever. Here’s a high-level view of what’s new.  You may also view a recording of the webinar we held on February 23^rd where we covered the changes.

Cash Management

The new release will help you save time and streamline the reconciliation process with increased automation and expanded actions directly on bank feed transactions. In addition, you’ll get a whole new, more reliable way to streamline electronic payments to your vendors.

• Bank feeds now download transactions every four hours in the background.
• Create journal entries, manual payments, or other receipts directly from the bank transactions list page. 
• Enhanced matching rules automatically match bank feed transactions that are lump sums to multiple transactions within Sage Intacct.
• The new GL posting tab is available on credit card and charge payoff transactions, providing greater visibility and traceability into resulting AP and journal entry transactions.

Electronic Payments

For Sage Intacct early adopter clients, there’s a new streamlined electronic payments service for paying your US vendors. Through a partnership with CSI, a trusted payments platform, Sage Intacct can now offer a superior payments experience that is seamlessly integrated into the Accounts Payable workflow. Supported payment methods include ACH transfer, printed check, and virtual card. If you’re interested in being an early adopter, contact us.

Enhanced Approvals in GL

This release adds two features designed to reduce approval bottlenecks, keeping  your workflow moving.

• Shared approvals– You can set up shared approval responsibilities by assigning user groups as approvers. This way, any member of the assigned user group can approve the transaction and keep the approval process forward.
• Approval delegation– If you’re out of the office, or unavailable, this new feature lets you delegate approvals to an authorized team member.

Enhanced Receive Payments in AR

Now, when using the Receive Payment feature in AR, you can add attachments to payment receipts, filter for posted payments faster, filter for specific invoices with column filters, filter set inline item details, sort invoices and invoice line items, and use additional dimensions for overpayment information.

Financial Reporting

This release includes several financial report enhancements, including:

• Report distribution– Easily set up a scheduled report to execute for each department or location and distribute to the associated department or location manager.
• Column date calculation– You now have improved visibility into how as-of- date parameters are used to calculate the dates for generating the report output.
• Filter parameter viewing– Gain visibility into how a report was filtered or narrowed with the inclusion of filter parameters in the footer of the report.

Custom Reports and Analysis

Sage Intacct 2021 R1 includes improvements to the Custom Report Writer (CRW), Interactive Custom Report Writer (ICRW), and Interactive Visual Explorer (IVE).

• Custom reports categories– Find your custom reports and analysis faster by categorizing them by specific report types and audiences.
• Expanded prebuilt reports and analytics– Sage Intacct expanded the  library of prebuilt reports and analytics. New IVE visual boards provide insight into projects and timesheets. New ICRW reports provide insight into customer profitability, purchased items, sold items, and sales orders. Prebuilt reports and analytics shorten time to value. The reports can be used as is or can be copied and used as a starting point for creating your own custom reports and analysis.
• Flexible date-based analysis– Analyzing your data by dates is now easier than ever. You can perform flexible date-based analysis in both ICRW and IVE using new prebuilt time measures, such as yesterday, last week, current or prior month, quarter, year, and more.

Working Checklists

Who doesn’t like a checklist? Now you can create and manage them inside of Sage Intacct. For example, you can create and use checklists to manage and track the close process. More specifically, you can break down the process into granular assignments, and get others to help! The system will generate email notifications to keep people informed of their new assignments and keep you informed of the assignment progress.

Projects/NFP Grants Supporting Documentation

Keep vital project or grant information together. Now, the system will automatically link source document attachments to project invoices and allow you to easily access them with a click. You can choose to include these source documents in email invoices to reduce questions or discrepancies and to speed up the payments process.

Contracts, subscription billing and revenue recognition
Sage Intacct 2021 R1 gives you more control over contract and billing with deeply customizable functionality.

• Enhanced contracts usability– Configure your contract line layout to focus on the data your company needs. And, with the new MEA tab, get visibility into the MEA details directly from the Contract transaction page.
• Enhanced Contracts billing – Use line-level recurring billing schedules to reduce implementation time and ongoing complexity for subscriptions with different recurring billing schedules. And, with partial period billing, get the flexibility to partially bill based on your company’s billing schedule.
• Multi-element arrangement (MEA) fair value price– Get more precise MEA calculations for fair value price. For organizations with complex revenue requirements, gain more control over how to define the fair value of a specific item without the need for custom applications or third-party systems.

Inventory Enhancements

New costing method flexibility and expanded functionality in Inventory continue to build the capabilities of this module.

• Track bins, lots, or serial numbers with FIFO (First In, First Out)– Gain the flexibility to track bins, lots, or serial numbers using the FIFO costing method.
• Item cross-reference – You can now associate your internal item numbers or SKU’s with those of your customers or suppliers if they are different.

New Domestic Consolidation

Sage Intacct already offers Global Consolidation, and with this release, it has added domestic consolidation functionality. Domestic Consolidations is a new subscription for customers who need to consolidate and streamline high-volume, inter-entity reporting — but do not require multi-currency capabilities.

Curious to see some of this functionality in action? View our Sage Intacct 2021 Release 1 webinar recording.  As always, contact us with your questions.