As the way we do business evolves, the best approach to business accounting is changing. Luckily, tools like Sage Intacct make it easy to stay on track. Today, I’m going to introduce you to a new way to simplify your chart of accounts and power up your reporting with Sage Intacct’s Dimensions.
Out With the Old, In With the New
Traditional accounting software requires a large number of individual accounts to account for different business dimensions (departments, locations, etc.). This calls for hard coding and lots of heavy lifting from users. Adding a department, for example, could mean manually adding hundreds of new accounts. Sage Intacct chose a different route altogether to give businesses a simple way to manage their general ledger.
Sage Intacct Dimensions
With Sage Intacct’s dimensions feature, you can identify the dimensions that are the most relevant to your business and tag transactions to them. As your business grows, you can continue to rely on your primary account code and add new dimensions as you go. This opens up new doors and gives businesses the freedom to manage accounting in a way that fits their unique needs. For example, if you’re running a marketing agency, you’d probably be curious to know your expenses by project or your revenue by each individual line of service. Dimensions make it all possible in a few simple clicks.
Sage Intacct currently offers users access to different dimensions, including:
- Department
- Location
- Customer
- Vendor
- Employee
- Item
- Class
- Project
Don’t see the dimension you’re looking for? That’s ok. Sage Intacct makes it easy to repurpose and rename these standard dimensions. If you’re a nonprofit, for example, managing various funds, you can easily rename a dimension to “funds.” Or, if you’re running a restaurant chain and want to analyze the profitability of a certain menu item between your different locations, you can make it happen with the “location” and “item” dimensions. This feature can and should be tailored specifically to your business to bring the most value.
The Business Value of Real-Time Perspective
Using this type of “tagging” methodology comes with many advantages. With visibility into the true context of your financial and operational data, you’ll be able to make smarter business decisions that drive profitable growth. It will also vastly improve your financial reporting so you can answer important business questions with speed and confidence. Rather than manually manipulating your data in Excel, Sage Intacct’s simple drop-down lists are designed to filter, group, and organize data by dimensions. Pulling data is easy and you can automatically produce reports tailored specifically to your business.
Ready to enable dimensions in your general ledger? We’d love to help! Get in touch with the cloud accounting experts at ACI Consulting today to learn more.
