What Are Sage Intacct Dimensions & How Are They Useful?

In Sage Intacct, a dimension refers to a classification system used to organise, sort, and report on your company’s data.

Dimensions essentially work like tags which you add to transactions as you enter them in Sage Intacct. They allow you to get more detailed analysis when building reports and viewing dashboards.

This week, we’ll go through what dimensions are, how they’re useful and what they look like in the system.

Types of dimensions

You get 7 standard dimensions out of the box:

• Department
• Location
• Customer
• Supplier
• Employee
• Item
• Class

You can get more dimensions when you purchase additional modules, for example:

• Project (included with Projects)
• Warehouse (included with Inventory)
• Asset (included with Fixed Assets Management)

Using dimensions to filter dashboards

To begin with, we’re going to look at a standard Controller dashboard. Navigate to:

Dashboards > All > Controller

The filters along the top are based on the dimensions we have set up in the system. We have Departments, Locations and Customers.

All you have to do is open the dropdown, select one of the options and click ‘Apply’ to filter your dashboard by that dimension or dimension group.

Parent/child dimensions

Dimensions can also be set up with parent/child relationships for even more granular reporting.

To show you an example, we’ll navigate to:

Company > Setup > Cross-company dimensions > Departments

The parent dimensions are coloured orange, and they’re the core business units, e.g. Marketing, Services etc.

The child dimensions are coloured green, and they’re smaller departments that roll up to the core business units, e.g. Advertising, Support and Client Services.

We can set up these relationships for any of the dimensions in the system using the ‘+ Create’ button.

Dimension groups

We can also create dimension groups, which give you more flexibility and control over how you want to organise and display your data.

To show you an example, we’ll navigate to:

Reports > Setup > Dimension groups > Location

In this example, we’ve got a Regional Manager who oversees multiple locations in the north, but the locations are part of a few entities.

We set up the North Region dimension group so we could hand pick which locations we wanted to group together.

Click ‘Members’ to see which locations form part of the group.

As you can see, in the North Region dimension group, there’s a mix of locations from different parent entities.

This is quite unique to Sage Intacct, as most other systems only let you report on locations within a single entity.

Going back to the Controller dashboard from the beginning, you can see we’re able to filter the dashboard to the North Region.

This means we can give our Regional Managers access to see data for locations in their region, while restricting what we don’t want them to see.