Discover how Sage Intacct Planning works
In this Tip of the Week, we show you how the Sage Intacct Planning tool works and go through step-by-step how to create a budget for your business.
Additionally, you can watch the quick tutorial to help better your understanding.
What is Sage Intacct Planning?
Sage Intacct Planning is a cloud-based planning tool, designed to simplify financial planning, by seamlessly integrating with Sage Intacct. It allows you to import actuals directly from Sage Intacct when building budgets, eliminating the need to manually enter data. Your customised budget can easily be exported back into Sage Intacct, streamlining the entire budgeting process.
When Sage created the planning tool, they made it inclusive and user-friendly, so that both finance and operations teams could work collaboratively. It is also possible to create budgets in multiple different currencies and manipulate them to the nth degree (filtering by dimension, periods and accounts for your actuals, budget figures or your actuals against your budget), as well as instantaneously generate new budget scenarios and create new shareable reports.
On the Sage Intacct Planning main page, you will be able to view all of your values and budgets (once they have been set up). Here, you can also switch to a ‘grid view’ and you have the option to filter your budget. For example, filter by ‘department’.
From this page, you can also add what-if scenarios (if built). For example, you could access a ‘best case scenario’ or a ‘worse case scenario’ budget. You may wish to create a budget for unusually low revenue, or contrarily, a budget for a high-performing year with unexpected growth.
You also have the option to share your budget, if you would like give access to someone else within your company. For example, you might want to give the budget to a manager to review.
Within Sage Intacct Planning, you also view your ‘Actuals’, which are the figures that have been pulled from Sage Intacct. Here, you can view your Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, Cash holdings and begin to model your budgets and reports.
Building a budget for your business
Building a budget within Sage Intacct Planning has a few simple steps. As the planning tool imports your actual data from Sage Intacct, the process of building a budget is quick and easy.
Once signing in with your Sage Intacct account credentials, you can build a new budget. To do this, click on the three lines at the top of the page and then click the ‘New Budget‘ option. You can now work your way through the wizard to customise your budget.
To start, simply fill out the information required to build your budget.
- select the entities you would like to include.
- Name your budget and the choose type.
- Select the date range for your budget (this can be changed using the filters after the budget’s been created).
4. Select the dimensions you would like to use in your budget. For example, department, vendors, location.
5. The next page will ask if you would like to import employee records from Sage Intacct. Select ‘Yes’ or ‘No’.
6. Next, select the accounts you would like to merge to a budget line.
7. Now you will be able to customise your budget structure by dragging and dropping the dimensions (choose where you want the dimensions to show)
8. Next, decide if you would like to import your statistical data from Sage Intacct. If yes, select which accounts to use.
9. Select the dimensions to set up your statistical accounts.
10. Next, it will ask if you would like to populate your budget based on actuals from Sage Intacct.
If yes, to populate the budget based on your actuals, select which year you would like to pull the data from (for example, the previous year)
Additionally, select where from (for example, accrual book)
11. The last step is to enter your estimated yearly increase/decrease percentages. For example, operations expenses to increase by 3%.
Your budget will now be generated. Once ready, you will now be able to export the budget and import into Sage Intacct.
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