What’s New in Sage Intacct 2021 R2

Sage Intacct 2021 Release 2 (R2) is now available and is jam-packed with new features emphasizing financial management, contracts management, inventory control, and business analytics. Here’s a look at what’s new in the latest 2021 R2 version.

W: Intacct 2022 Now Available

Financial Management

To reduce the amount of time and effort you spend reconciling bank accounts, a new matching rule automation feature in bank reconciliation helps you say goodbye to manual matching.  These new matching rules allow you to customize how incoming bank transactions are reconciled and matched against your Sage Intacct data.

Beginning with the Intacct 2021 R2 release, you can create matching rules to ignore leading zeroes on incoming checks and match by amount and doc number. Plus, even more matching capabilities are coming in future releases. But for now, let’s take a deeper dive into how matching rules work and setting them up.

Note: previously, incoming transactions for an import file or a bank feed were matched using matching attributes. Matching attributes won’t be available after this release. Before you can reconcile with an import file or bank feeds, you need to set up matching rules for an account.

With Intacct 2021 Release 2, improvements have been made to the checklists (introduced in Intacct 2021 R1) and added dashboard components so you have better visibility of the monthly closing process and where your close stands. A component that you can add to dashboards shows you the last closed date for each application area, as a top-level summary or by entity. 

Plus, a new Closed Thru Summary component gives you the power to view the close status for your GL and subledgers in a central view, directly from a dashboard. It gives you immediate insight into the status of books. You’ll see the close status from each application area that supports a close process.

Also, in the area of financial management, General Ledger approvals have been enhanced to enable more control over notification frequency to match how individual users work, better visibility into who the journal entry has been submitted to for approval, easier access to approval attachments, and enhanced AI-powered outlier detection that has been expanded to flag any allocation splits that require a closer look.

Construction Enhancements

In the Sage Intacct 2021 R2 release, the Early Adopter program for Sage Intacct Construction continues to expand functionality for managing construction projects including the following updates:

Change Management

With this latest release, you can now use change requests with workflow statuses to track change details in your project work breakdown structure (WBS). Change requests enable you to identify how changes impact your project profitability.

The ability to post change requests to your project estimates enables you to track how those changes affect your bottom line throughout the life of your projects.

Price Changes in Order Entry

In prior versions, you could capture changes to project costs by creating source and change order transaction definitions in Purchasing. But now with Intacct 2021 R2, you can capture changes to project prices by creating similar source and change order transaction definitions in Order Entry (OE).

Expanded Billing Flexibility in Contracts Management

Sage Intacct 2021 R2 includes several contracts enhancements that improve the ease of setup and flexibility of subscription billing and revenue management. For example, just as you already specify the Ship-to contact at the contract line level, you can now specify the Bill-to contact. This is an enhancement that came as a suggestion from Intacct customers like you and is laying the groundwork for additional invoice aggregation options that will be available in a future release.

In addition, Revenue Recognition improvements include better control over project revenue calculations as well as the ability to clear MEA allocations that cover predefined percentages in contract lines (previously only available for straight line, daily rate, or quantity-based).

Lastly, you can now import billing price lists using a CSV template. Previously, you had to add billing price list entries via API or manual data entry. Use the import process to create new billing price lists or add new price list entries to existing price lists.  The new billing price list import template contains everything you need to get started importing your data.

See also: Simplify Subcontractor Billing & Compliance

Even Better Inventory Control

When it comes to inventory control, Intacct 2021 R2 introduces a few changes to make managing negative inventory more flexible.  Previously when negative inventory was allowed, warehouse transfers were blocked if there wasn’t enough quantity to transfer out. Now, if negative inventory is allowed, it’s also allowed on warehouse transfers.  Intacct also now offers an option to turn on negative inventory selectively by warehouse (rather than just enabling it companywide).

In addition, over 40 additional standard item attributes have been added for even more detailed and comprehensive inventory item tracking. These additional standard fields allow you to track even more data points without the need to create any custom fields.  Most of these new fields are based on industry research in wholesale distribution, third-party integrations, and customer feedback to further define the unique characteristics of an item according to various and unique business needs.

Lastly, it’s now faster and easier to run reports from an inventory item without having to leave an item record. Simply click the links added to the Inventory section on the General tab to quickly and efficiently run these reports (screenshot below).

Expanded Custom Reporting and Analytics

Sage Intacct 2021 R2 introduces several key updates to the advanced reporting tools, Interactive Custom Report Writer and Interactive Visual Explorer, that make it easier to slice, dice and analyze data to make quick and informed business decisions.

Taking flexibility to another level, you can now join reporting areas on the fly in Interactive Custom Report Writer.  Joining reporting areas shows columns side-by-side, so you can get better visibility into the relationships between your data.

Plus, new pre-built time attributes added in Interactive Custom Report Writer and Interactive Visual Explorer allow you to easily organize your data by fiscal year, quarter, or month. You can quickly drag and drop attributes to filter reporting by prior or current fiscal year, quarter, or month, reducing the time and necessity of manually adjusting dates.

Lastly, based on customer feedback, Intacct 2021 R2 adds a new option to output filter criteria in reports created using the standard custom report writer tool.

Upgrading to Sage Inacct 2021 R2

This article only covers a portion of all the new features and enhancements that are included in this jam-packed release. Be sure to contact us if you need help upgrading to the latest version or want to request a copy of the full-detailed release notes for Intacct 2021 Release 2.