Mastering Sage Intacct Financial Reports: Structure

If you are a sports nut like me, you may know how coveted a Triple Crown is across a variety of different sports. In horse racing, the Triple Crown refers to winning the three 3-year-old thoroughbred horse races in the series.

In baseball, a Triple Crown recipient is recognized for hitting the most home runs, while also having the highest batting average and most runs-batted-in in a single MLB season.

In Sage Intacct, the less well-known (but equally as significant, in my opinion) Triple Crown refers to mastering the three main components of financial report building: structure, configuration, and format.

In this three-part blog series, we will review these three concepts and how you can leverage each to customize, automate, and unlock the full potential of financial report writing in Sage Intacct.

By the end, you will be able to recognize how to create and customize financial reports to meet specific business needs, so that you too can be the “Triple Crown Winner” of your organization. Let’s dive in.

Structure

Design outside of Intacct

A report’s structure is by far the most important component of financial report building. Our suggestion — start simple. The easiest way to recognize the structure needed for your report is to start the design process outside of Sage Intacct. By building the desired “roll-up” of your report in Excel, this quickly allows you to identify your GL Account groupings and the subsequent “Groups of Account Groups” for your report.

In the above example, the green cells are your GL Accounts, the lowest level of your financial report. The orange cells are your Account Groups, and the blue cell is a Group of Account Groups. Once you replicate this exercise in the other sections of your report, you will have identified all account structure components needed for your report.

Create groupings in Intacct

Now that you have identified your GL Accounts and account groupings, you will want to create them in the Reports module of your Intacct instance. The account groupings in Intacct can either be created manually or via a CSV import upload. Our recommendation is to familiarize yourself and understand the manual creation of these groups before importing.

When building the report groupings, it’s best to start with your lowest level account groupings and work your way up the hierarchy. Sticking with the Revenue example from earlier, in Intacct the two groupings we will first want to build are our “Revenue – Subscriptions” and “Revenue - Services” groupings. See below for some recommended practice tips and tricks for account group creation:

• Consider using a prefix or other identifying information to distinguish your custom account groups from the system generated groupings. Then, edit the “display as” fields to match the terminology you would like on the specific report.
• Using the optional Account Group Purpose field can also allow you to categorize your groupings and easily find them in later steps.
• When possible, use a range of GL Accounts rather than choosing each individually when specifying accounts to include. This will simplify maintaining your groupings if/when new GL Accounts are added to Intacct.

You will also note in our above account group example, we have selected the structure type of “Accounts” which allows us to select from our Chart of Accounts. Now that we’ve created our two revenue groupings, the next step is to combine them into a Revenue “Group of Account Groups” structure to build the hierarchy of the Revenue section of this report.

The goal is to replicate these steps in the subsequent sections of the report (i.e Gross Profit, Total Expenses, EBITDA, etc.), and then combine these sections into the grand total “Net Income” group of account groups. Combining all groupings into one master grouping will make maintaining and troubleshooting reports much easier. Once you are finished, you can run the account group “Hierarchy” to verify the structure is correct and all necessary GL accounts are included.

If you find new accounts added are sometimes missing from reports, you might benefit from a smart event email to notify you when new accounts are added so you can be proactive about report maintenance. Learn more about how to set this notification up here.

Add the structure to a financial report

With your “grand total” group of account groups set up and ready to go, you can now start to create your financial report. See below for the steps to add your account structure to a financial report.

1. Navigation — Navigate to the Reports module within your Intacct instance, and on the ‘All’ tab you will select either the Reports Center or the plus (+) sign next to the Financial Reports option.

If you have selected the Reports Center, you will then select New Report — Create a new report:

2. Report info — The report info tab is where you will name your report and select the basic structure the report will be built on. Our example in this blog has been based on an “Account” structured report, but for more information on dimension structures and dimension based reports, see the linked blog.

Like the naming conventions used for your account groups, consider adding a prefix or distinguishing details to your report name to easily sift through the list of pre-built financial reports to find yours.

3. Rows — The rows tab is where you will choose the account group structure you’d pull into your report. Since we leveraged the use of Group of Account Groups until we reached the highest level in our account hierarchy, we only need to select this highest-level grouping to include in our report.

Once the account group is selected, you will see how all the account groupings you have built and combined into your “grand total” grouping will also pull into the report. From here, you can set the detail level of your report and determine which groupings will display GL Accounts (detail) versus just the total for the group of accounts (summary).

Bonus tip — If you have selected a summary detail level for an account group row, you can then choose to expand the account group by a dimension. For example, if we wanted to break out our “Revenue – Services” account group by department, we can set the detail level to summary and then expand this grouping by our department dimension.

See below for the result:

Congratulations! You are now a master of Intacct financial report structure and on your way to the Intacct Triple Crown. One skill down, two to go… subscribe to the blog to be notified when the next two installments in our report writing series are available.

What’s next?

Excited to learn more about report writing in Sage Intacct and can’t wait until next week for the next installment? Join our complimentary webinar January 28 from noon - 1 p.m. CST to learn live how to unlock the full potential of financial reporting in Sage Intacct.