Sage Intacct Allocations: Making it Simple
Monthly allocations are part of many businesses’ month-end close — and for some, allocations are a lengthy, manual task filled with rounds of spreadsheet imports and exports, manual calculations, and duplicate data entry.
If this sounds familiar, we’d like to introduce you to another way: Sage Intacct Allocations. The Sage Intacct Allocations function makes complex allocation tasks simpler and more accurate. Whether you’re managing shared expenses across departments or distributing revenues among various projects, Sage Intacct Allocations will speed and simplify the process.
Read on to discover how you can accelerate your financial processes and drive your business forward using Sage Intacct Allocations.
Watch the on-demand webinar—All Things Allocations in Sage Intacct
What Are Sage Intacct Allocations?
Sage Intacct Allocations is a function that allows you to allocate expenses, revenues, and investments across multiple dimensions, such as departments, projects, funds, and entities. In brief, this type of functionality is extremely valuable for companies that need to distribute costs or revenues routinely based on specific criteria.
Allocations is a fully automated tool inside Sage Intacct that helps you better understand the true performance of your organization. That is you can use the tools to allocate indirect costs, revenue contributions, assets, and liability amounts across multiple dimensions and entities — potentially saving days of time, increasing accuracy, and gaining insight into the impact on financials, all with a solid audit trail.
How Do Sage Intacct Allocations Work?
Many companies handle allocations manually, relying heavily on spreadsheets. This involves gathering data from various sources, manually entering it into spreadsheets, and creating complex formulas to distribute costs and revenues across departments, projects, or entities. Consequently, as your business conditions change, these formulas require frequent adjustments, which is time-consuming and prone to errors.
Allocations in Sage Intacct allow you to define allocation rules based on various parameters. You can allocate costs and revenues based on predefined percentages, fixed amounts, or dynamic criteria such as actual usage or headcount. Once you set up the rules, they automate the allocation process, saving you time and reducing the risk of manual errors.
For example, if your business incurs a shared expense like office rent, Sage Intacct can automatically allocate this cost to different departments based on their respective square footage. It’s a level of precision that helps you be sure that each department bears its fair share of the expense, leading to more accurate budgeting and financial planning.
Key Benefits of Sage Intacct Allocations
The clients we work with to configure Allocations are realizing some truly impactful benefits, including:
- Better Accuracy: Automated allocations reduce the risk of manual errors, leading to more accurate financial statements and better decision-making.
- Time Savings: By automating the allocation process, you can save significant time and focus on more strategic tasks. Many clients report a much faster monthly close when using Allocations.
- Improved Financial Visibility: Allocations provide a clearer picture of cost and revenue distribution, helping you better understand your financial performance.
- Flexible Allocation Methods: Sage Intacct offers various allocation methods, allowing you to choose the best fit for your needs.
- Better Budgeting and Forecasting: Accurate allocations contribute to more reliable budgeting and forecasting so you can plan more effectively
A Typical Use Case — Allocating Marketing Expenses
Consider a company with multiple product lines and a central marketing department. The marketing expenses need to be allocated to each product line based on the sales revenue each generates.
With Sage Intacct Allocations, the company can set up allocation rules to distribute the marketing expenses proportionally to the sales revenue of each product line. In this way, each product line bears its appropriate share of the marketing costs, giving the organization an accurate picture of profitability for each line.
By using this feature, the company ensures accurate financial reporting and gains insights into which product lines are driving the most value and which may need additional support.
Learn More
Sage Intacct Allocations is a powerful tool for businesses with complex financial structures. Still, it’s also helpful for smaller companies who need a simple, straightforward way to allocate expenses and revenue. By automating the allocation of costs and revenues, Sage Intacct Allocations supports greater accuracy, efficiency, and visibility into your organization’s financial performance. We’re here to help you leverage this feature to your best advantage.
