You can’t fix what you can’t see. This is the challenge for many small and midsize businesses when it comes to accounting and financial reporting processes. Critical data is often obscured thanks to increasingly complex processes, and many companies struggle to keep pace with the speed of reporting necessary for digital transactions.

The result? Hidden problems which can lead to significant and far-reaching impacts on your finances. Sage Intacct Dimensions offers an intelligent, automated solution to help fix financial frustrations. Here’s how it works.

Big Challenges for Small Businesses

As both B2C and B2B sales have shifted to a digital-first model, the volume of financial data handled by businesses has increased exponentially. Despite best efforts by companies to keep up, the multi-state nature of data generation and storage — from internal processes to customer websites to mobile applications — creates a situation where businesses are often flying financially blind.

Best case scenario? Some data points are missing or incorrect, leading to minor errors in calculation and reporting. Worst case? Financial errors create compound problems that could put business operations in jeopardy.

According to recent survey data, complexity creates challenges on both sides of the payment paradigm. For businesses making payments, 45% said that manual invoice review was one of their top challenges. It makes sense: If mistakes were made on invoice calculations or data was entered incorrectly, the resulting errors could have negative impacts on the entire business ecosystem. For B2B purchasers, meanwhile, 47% said they faced challenges in anticipating when payments would arrive, in turn making it difficult to predict cash flow and liquidity.

How Sage Intacct Dimensions can Help

Sage Intacct Dimensions offers a flexible foundation for your financial reporting. Instead of relying on legacy tools and manual processes that could introduce data entry errors or duplicate efforts that mean more work for you and your team, Dimensions lets you get the best of both worlds: Complete financial control backed by robust cloud resources.

 

Dimensions offers four key benefits to help boost your business impact:

1) Real-time reporting

First up is real-time reporting. Rather than waiting for daily or weekly data roundups, Dimensions makes it possible to produce up-to-the-minute financials that reflect the current state of business operations, rather than an out-of-date picture that could negatively impact decision-making.

2) Simplified account charts

For most companies, a hard-coded chart of accounts structure remains the most common approach to tracking and managing account data. The problem? As the number of account codes increases across locations, departments, and projects, you can end up with an unmanageable set of codes. Consider a company with 3 locations, 5 departments, and 5 projects. Just to manage this small slice of business operations requires 75 codes — while adding a new project or location could add hundreds of new codes. With Sage Intacct Dimensions, you simply set up your primary account code and the software handles the rest.

3) Complete business tracking

Dimensions lets you “tag” both transactions and operations data with specific values, in turn letting you easily add business context. Tagging can be used for general ledgers, receivables, payables, time revenue management, and fixed assets, just to name a few. As your business grows, add more tracking dimensions to help reduce total complexity.

4) Streamlined reports

Featuring full integration with Sage Intacct’s financial report writer, Dimensions makes it easy for your teams to add context and improve reporting accuracy. Simply select from drop-down lists to filter, group, and organize data by dimensions to connect key reports and provide on-demand data access.

In combination, these benefits not only help your business better manage accounts payable (AP), procurement, and supply chain processes but also make it possible to detect and address previously hidden problems.

Consider a financial reporting system that seems to be working as intended. With Sage Intacct Dimensions, your team can take a deep dive into the system itself to see where financial functions are effectively operating and where improvements can be made. Moreover, you may discover areas of potential conflict that were previously hidden. For example, real-time reporting with simplified account codes could help you pinpoint issues such as duplicated invoices or accounts that are costing your business time and money.

Ready to discover what’s happening under the surface and discover new ways to improve financial operations? Start with Sage Intacct Dimensions.

Contact IWI Consulting Group today to get started. Let’s talk.