Small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) are the bedrock of the global economy — responsible for the majority of jobs, products, and services worldwide. However, many SMBs still rely on a patchwork of manual processes to manage their finances, operations, and people, resulting in higher costs and greater inefficiencies.
As SMBs modernize back-office functions and transform financial operations, many rely on Sage Intacct to help manage and streamline processes. But are they getting the most out of the platform?
By automating workflows to pay domestic and foreign invoices, SMBs can leverage Sage Intacct to increase efficiency and accelerate future growth. With the right tools, you can unlock the full potential of Sage Intacct. This blog takes a deeper dive into how your business can benefit from integrating your AP automation with Sage Intacct. Let’s jump in!
Key takeaways
- Sage Intacct offers many benefits to small and mid-size companies, with numerous payment options available.
- Even with Sage Intacct in place, AP teams can continue to improve their payment process by automating steps of the process or converting the check spend to digital spend.
- Automation can help companies maximize the value of their ERP solution while allowing Sage Intacct to remain the system of record.
Payments offered in Sage Intacct
There are more options than ever to process and pay invoices. Sage Intacct offers several payment types that enable you to choose the method that works best for your needs, including the following:
1. ACH
Automated Clearing House (ACH) payments provide a secure and electronic way to transfer funds between bank accounts. This method offers flexibility and reliability, reducing manual intervention in the payment process.
2. Check
Though traditional check payments require more manual effort to process, they remain a preferred option for many SMBs. One advantage is that they enable you to easily maintain a paper trail.
3. Credit card
Corporate cards can be added to the Sage Intacct cash management module. Sage Intacct also has credit card feeds, which can make it easier to reconcile this form of payment. Virtual card payments provide a digital alternative to a physical credit or debit card. This digital placeholder provides greater convenience for online payments and offers an added layer of security compared to traditional card payments. However, virtual cards are not natively supported in the Sage Intacct platform and require either their AP automation module or a third-party solution.
How to make payments with Sage Intacct
Within Sage Intacct, the payment process is seamless and user-friendly. Overall, it provides greater flexibility and security to pay invoices using your preferred payment methods.
Customers can easily set up ACH payments by contacting their banks for specifications, configuring ACH payment details in the Cash Management module, and obtaining necessary permissions. The platform also supports traditional check payments, ensuring a straightforward process with a paper trail.
The first step is to configure your preferred payment method within the platform. Once set up, you can initiate payments by selecting invoices, authorizing transactions, and leveraging the user-friendly interface to enhance the entire payment process.
Tips for streamlining the payment process in Sage Intacct
You can level up the Sage Intacct payment process by integrating it with other tools and features that offer additional efficiency, visibility, and cost savings benefits.
Here are some ways your finance team can augment the capabilities of Sage Intacct:
Automate the payment process
You can automate invoice capture, approval, and payment workflows to reduce manual effort, increase accuracy, and speed up payment cycles. By automating the Sage Intacct environment, it’s possible to meet your digital transformation goals without the need to add headcount.
Automation enables your team to code and post invoices faster, eliminating data entry work and improving accuracy. This ensures all invoice details are captured quickly and correctly.
Convert check spend to digital payments
Transitioning from traditional check payments to digital alternatives increases ease of use and reduces the risks associated with manual transactions.
Digital payments also provide advanced threat intelligence tools that monitor and analyze threat data from various sources, including network logs, security event feeds, and malware analysis reports. Advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms can identify patterns and anomalies to quickly flag a potential threat, enabling you to respond to suspicious activity faster.
6 benefits of payment automation for Sage Intacct
In today’s digital economy, efficient and effective payment processes are necessary to optimize operations and fuel future growth. There are many benefits to leveraging an AP automation solution, which we discuss below.
- Better approval process
- More payment options
- International payments can be made more easily
- Sage is the system of record
- Access to payment data upon invoice capture
- Single or multi-entity support
1. Better approval process
Sage Intacct does offer some approval tiers, but these can be further expanded to include functionality such as role-based invoice approval. AP automation tools can allow flexibility to invoice approval structures, letting users set rules based on different tiers and roles within the organization.
The right AP automation solution offers unlimited user accounts for invoice approvers and allows users to review and approve or reject invoices via email without logging directly into Sage Intacct. This optimizes the entire invoice approval process, especially in remote and hybrid work environments. Shifting invoice review and approval tasks to an AP automation solution may also help companies reduce the number of user licenses required for Sage Intacct, as accounting managers, invoice approvers, and payment authorizers can now accomplish these tasks outside their ERP.
2. More payment options
In addition to automated check and ACH payments, payment automation can enable virtual card payments for faster, more secure payments–all from a single integrated payment workflow that’s easier to process and reconcile.
Did you know? MineralTree enables a choice of virtual card payment options — and more streamlined and simplified payment processes. MineralTree’s collaboration with American Express allows American Express Corporate Card customers to securely use their American Express Corporate Card in their AP workflows. You can also use checks, ACH, or SilverPay virtual card payments.
3. Make international payments more easily
International payments typically require a manual, cumbersome process. It can also be expensive. Banks often lock customers into a fixed daily exchange rate, which is generally marked up to protect the bank from unfavorable fluctuations in currency value. The right AP automation tool allows customers to use the real-time rate, ensuring more accurate and cost-effective international transactions and avoiding the pitfalls of fixed daily rates. As a result, you can avoid costly errors and hidden fees, reducing foreign currency costs compared to typical bank fees.
4. Sage remains the system of record
Before investing in an AP and payment automation solution, make sure it offers a true bi-directional sync. This will ensure that approval and invoice data continuously sync between the two systems, allowing your company’s ERP tool to remain the system of record.
5. Access to payment data upon invoice capture
Usually, teams have to wait until invoices have been posted to the ERP to use the payment data. When you invest in the end-to-end AP solution, you no longer have to. With advanced analytics offered by AP automation tools, teams can leverage this data and get a better sense of their financial performance faster.
6. Single or multi-entity support
The right tools will support single and multi-entity setups, catering to diverse organizational structures within Sage Intacct. With multi-entry setups, businesses can manage financial processes across multiple entities or distinct business units compared to a singular structure.
This flexibility allows businesses to easily manage diverse organizational structures and complex processes — creating invoice workflows that save time, money, and errors associated with manual processes.
Automation and Sage Intacct case studies
Let’s look at some real-world examples of how organizations have leveraged AP automation to transform their AP processes.
BrightView improves the approval process
BrightView Health, an outpatient medication-assisted treatment center in Ohio and Kentucky, faced significant challenges in manual invoice processing. The organization’s time-consuming processes often led to delays or missed payments. To support the company’s rapid growth, BrightView Health revamped its financial processes, switching to Sage Intacct and then implementing MineralTree’s automated solutions.
With MineralTree’s invoice capture and AP automation, the company streamlined approvals and significantly reduced the time spent on invoice processing. MineralTree’s invoice capture capability uses optical character recognition (OCR) in conjunction with human review to accurately capture important data from each invoice. Implementing this technology allowed BrightView Health to reduce the time spent on quality assurance and instead focus on the invoices themselves.
Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma further reduces manual processes
The Community Food Bank of Eastern Oklahoma provides food through non-profit partners and agencies to people in need throughout 24 counties in eastern Oklahoma. After switching to Sage Intacct, the organizations gained improved functionality and better visibility into financial information. However, the food bank still wasted significant resources manually processing invoices, making payments, and capturing approvals. And because there were no systemic workflows, invoices were sometimes lost, and the organization was at risk of understating payables.
In need of quick, effective implementation, the food bank leveraged MineralTree’s out-of-box integration with Sage Intacct to automate AP operations and reallocate resources to accounts receivable activities. MineralTree’s end-to-end AP automation, including multi-tiered approval workflows, facilitated a smoother AP workflow that enabled multiple payment options and empowered the finance team to focus on value-added activities as the organization grows.
Final thoughts: The power of the MineralTree and Sage integration
Efficient business operations require an effective payment process. MineralTree’s solutions provide a seamless experience for businesses seeking to transform financial management. Using MineralTree, your AP team can maximize the value of your ERP system through virtual card enrollment, more payment options, and a true bi-directional sync.
Integrating MineralTree with your Sage Intacct instance enhances digital transformation goals, offering a cloud-based, scalable solution. The result is payment processes that better align with the needs of your growing organization.
MineralTree’s unique advantage
At MineralTree, our approach to enrollment is all about collaboration and long-term support, which is why a team backs every payment optimization. Your dedicated payment optimization manager simplifies the process of accepting virtual cards with our in-house payment services team, providing white-glove services to optimize payments and strengthen vendor relationships in the background.
Our goal in this approach is not only to streamline transactions but also to minimize transaction fees and mitigate fraud risks associated with alternative payment methods, all while boosting conversion rates to maximize your rebates. Throughout the implementation process, we work hand in hand with you to analyze current spend patterns and identify strategic vendor relationships. Based on analysis, we’ll create a tailored enrollment campaign designed to optimize your rebates while respecting the preferences of your vendors.
Explore MineralTree’s integrations with Sage Intacct to discover how to simplify, streamline, and strengthen your organization’s financial management.
Frequently asked questions
1. What is an invoice payment?
An invoice payment is a financial transaction where a business settles the amount owed to a supplier or vendor for goods or services received.
2. Can MineralTree support Sage Intacct customers transitioning from American Express Card Payment Services?
American Express and Sage have recently communicated changes to the integrated AMEX Card Payment Services for Sage Intacct, which will no longer be supported after December 31, 2024. American Express Business cardmembers must find alternative solutions for processing checks, ACH, and virtual card payments. MineralTree offers a direct replacement for automated payments and natively supports American Express cards for secure, virtualized payment tokens. MineralTree also offers a choice of full invoice-to-pay automation or payments-only automation if you prefer to utilize your existing Intacct workflows. Find out more by contacting your Sage rep and asking about MineralTree, or book a demo.
3. How do I set up payments with ACH in Sage Intacct?
Getting started with TotalAP is easy. MineralTree’s application can be installed directly from your ERP.
Setting up ACH payments in Sage Intacct involves contacting your bank for ACH payment specifications and configuring ACH payment details in the Cash Management module. MineralTree’s dedicated implementation manager can guide you through this process, ensuring a smooth setup.
Here’s a broad overview of the ACH payments setup process:
- Meet with your dedicated implementation manager to configure TotalAP based on your company’s needs.
- Add MineralTree to the Web Services authorizations in your Intacct account.
- Click “Connect to Intacct” in the MineralTree application, selecting your company and entity if applicable.
