With today’s technological advancements, ERP systems and accounting software have given operational users and business managers access to a broader range of data.
Although traditional, monthly financial statements still play a major role in strategic decisions, daily operational decisions are becoming increasingly important in response to market demands. Businesses are demanding real-time information to speed up their decision-making process, quickly react to market changes and create competitive advantage.
Although all transactions are recorded, detailed information is not always easily accessible. Some of the challenges that companies face include input errors, undefined categories, extensive manual calculations and missing information.
The resulting information may lack detail or have become obsolete. Being unable to extract meaningful and detailed information in a timely manner has major negative impacts on decision-makers.
Cloud-based Sage Intacct has found a solution for this by introducing a new accounting concept called "dimensional accounting" to handle this need for real-time information.
Dimensional accounting allows the tagging of any transaction with dimensional values. This is almost like metadata for financials and allows you to slice and dice the accounting data for greater insights, thereby enhancing your business intelligence.
In Sage Intacct, "dimensions" can be described as a grouping of related records while "tags" are the detailed records or data within the dimension.
Intacct comes with a number of default dimensions such as customers, suppliers and products. The system allows users to activate, inactivate, delete, edit or create an unlimited number of new dimensions and tags to meet their reporting needs. Once created, dimensions and tags are made available throughout the system for a multitude of purposes such as detailed reporting, product description, client information. Intacct allows users to track an infinite amount of analytical data while simultaneously allowing them to expand beyond traditional accounting.
Intacct’s dimensional accounting allows users to reduce the number of segments without negatively impacting their reporting needs. The details and information available in reports are actually enhanced through the integration of an unlimited number of dimensions and tags.
Intacct allows companies to automate most of the data input by linking dimensions with one another. For example, a client account can be associated with pre-selected values of other dimensions such as payment terms, region or client type. In return, when creating an invoice for an account, related dimensions are automatically populated by the system. Not only is the process as a whole sped up, the amount of manual input and the risk of error are reduced.
Overall, dimensional accounting is a major new advancement that can help an organisation get better access to the factors that impact decision-making. As a system that leverages this new concept, Intacct enables companies to reduce the size of their accounts and its flexibility also supports continuous growth and market changes.
Exponant is a leading Sage partner; contact us today to find out how we can assist you with a new way of work. For an obligation free demo contact Kate.Elphick@exponant.com
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