Sage Intacct Dimensions: Get More from Your Reporting

If you already use Sage Intacct, there’s a good chance Dimensions are already an important part of your reporting.

You may be using them to analyse performance by department, location, customer, project or another part of your organisation.

But simply using Dimensions and getting the full reporting value from them are two different things.

There are several ways Dimensions can go beyond producing another version of the P&L. They can help improve the quality of the data being captured, reduce repetitive coding, make management reporting more flexible and even bring financial and operational information together.

And if you currently use Sage 200, this is also an interesting example of how Intacct approaches financial analysis differently.

In Sage 200, cost centres and departments form part of the nominal account structure, with separate account combinations created where different cost centre and department reporting is required. Sage Intacct uses Dimensions to hold much of that additional business context separately from the primary account code.

So, whether you already use Intacct or you're simply interested in what it can do, here are some areas worth exploring.

A quick reminder: what are Dimensions in Sage Intacct?

Dimensions are essentially additional pieces of information attached to transactions that allow you to analyse your financial data from different perspectives.

Sage Intacct includes standard Dimensions such as Location, Department, Customer, Supplier, Employee, Project, Item and Class, with additional Dimensions available depending on the modules being used. Organisations can also create user-defined Dimensions for reporting requirements specific to their business.

Instead of trying to represent every possible reporting requirement within the chart of accounts, you can keep the primary account structure relatively simple and attach additional context to the transaction.

For example, the same type of expenditure could be analysed by:

Department → Location → Project → Customer

without needing a unique primary account for every possible combination.

Sage uses the example of three locations, five departments and five projects potentially creating 75 hard-coded account combinations in a traditional structure. Dimensions allow those business attributes to be handled separately instead.

For many Intacct users, that will already be familiar.

The more interesting question is: what else can you do with the information you're capturing?

1. Are you still entering every Dimension manually?

This is one of the areas existing Intacct customers may be worth reviewing.

Sage Intacct supports Dimension Relationships, which can be used to automatically populate related Dimension values during data entry.

For example, imagine a particular customer is always associated with the same location.

Rather than expecting somebody to select:

Customer: ABC Ltd

and then separately choose:

Location: London

you can create a relationship so selecting the customer automatically fills the appropriate Location value.

Relationships can also be used to limit which Dimension values are available based on another selection, or even create cascading relationships between several Dimensions.

That potentially gives you two benefits.

First, less repetitive data entry.

Second, more consistent reporting data.

If users are repeatedly entering information that could logically be inferred from something they've already selected, it could be worth asking whether a Dimension Relationship could simplify that process.

One important distinction is that Sage describes these relationships primarily as a way to assist and automate data entry, rather than automatically treating them as a hard control mechanism.

2. Are you checking for transactions with missing Dimensions?

Having a sophisticated reporting structure is only useful if the underlying data is being captured consistently.

Imagine building a departmental profitability report only to discover that a proportion of your transactions were never assigned a Department.

Intacct financial reporting can identify transactions where a Dimension has no value, allowing uncoded amounts to be shown separately within dimensional analysis.

That makes for a useful housekeeping exercise.

Rather than simply assuming your Dimensions are being completed correctly, periodically ask:

How much activity currently has no Department?

Are any transactions missing a Location?

Are projects being coded consistently?

Finding those gaps early is much easier than discovering them when somebody is questioning a management report.

For organisations where particular Dimensions are essential, Intacct can also require Dimensions for transactions associated with certain accounts. Sage's current documentation, for example, describes selecting Dimensions that must be completed before transactions against a statistical account can be submitted.

The bigger lesson is simple:

Good dimensional reporting starts with good dimensional data.

3. Are you using Dimensions to answer different questions from the same data?

This is where Dimensions become particularly powerful.

A traditional financial report might tell you:

Total revenue = £5 million

Useful — but it immediately creates more questions.

Which locations generated it?

Which customers?

Which projects?

Which departments are most profitable?

How does one part of the organisation compare with another?

Sage Intacct financial reports can analyse account groups across different Dimensions, use Dimensions within report structures and apply dimensional filters to the same underlying financial information.

Sage gives examples ranging from a standard income statement through to profitability by project or revenue by geography.

The important point is that you don't necessarily need to build an entirely new accounting structure every time management asks a different question.

You're changing the view of the data, rather than changing the underlying accounts simply to produce another reporting perspective.

If you're coming from Sage 200...

This is one of the differences worth understanding.

Sage 200 uses cost centres and departments alongside nominal codes, and separate nominal account combinations can be created to report across those different parts of the organisation.

That works well for many organisations.

Intacct's dimensional approach becomes particularly interesting when the number of things you want to analyse starts increasing.

Rather than continually expanding the account structure, Dimensions allow multiple pieces of business context to sit alongside the transaction and then be used when reporting.

4. Are your Dimensions making it onto your dashboards?

Dimensions don't have to live purely inside finance reports.

Sage Intacct dashboards can bring together real-time reports, metrics and visualisations tailored to different people across the organisation.

Sage specifically highlights dashboards for stakeholders across finance, sales, operations and the boardroom, with examples including cash balances, project profitability and other business-specific metrics.

That raises an interesting question for existing Intacct customers:

Are your dashboards reflecting the way different people actually manage the business?

A finance director may need an organisation-wide view.

A departmental manager may care about their own cost base.

A project manager may be interested in project profitability.

An executive may only need a handful of high-level KPIs.

If Dimensions are already being captured against transactions, consider whether that information could be surfaced more effectively rather than finance repeatedly producing different spreadsheets or report packs for different audiences.

Sage's current reporting tools allow users to filter and analyse financial and operational data by Dimensions and drill from reports into the underlying transactions.

5. Are you combining financial and operational information?

This is one of the areas of Intacct reporting that can be easy to overlook.

Not everything that's important to a business is a £ value.

You may also want to understand:

number of employees

number of customers

number of contracts

units or rooms available

square footage

or another operational measure relevant to your organisation.

Sage Intacct's Statistical Accounts can hold non-financial information and bring it into financial reporting. Sage gives examples including employee headcount and number of rooms, with resulting calculations such as revenue per employee.

That changes the types of questions your reporting can answer.

Instead of simply asking:

“What was this department's revenue?”

you might ask:

“What was revenue per employee?”

Instead of:

“What did this location cost?”

you could potentially compare that cost with an operational measure that provides context around why one location behaves differently from another.

The exact measures that make sense will depend entirely on your organisation, but it's a useful reminder that Intacct reporting doesn't have to stop at the numbers sitting in the General Ledger.

6. Could some of your statistical reporting maintain itself?

This is another capability that existing Intacct users may not necessarily have explored.

Sage Intacct can automate Dimension Counts into Statistical Accounts.

For example, an organisation could automatically track the number of active customers. As members are added to or removed from the relevant Dimension group, Intacct can update the statistical count automatically.

Those counts can then be used within reporting and calculations — for example, recurring revenue per customer.

It's quite a specific capability, so it won't be relevant to every organisation.

But if somebody in finance currently maintains operational counts manually simply so they can be used in a monthly management pack, it's worth knowing that Intacct may be able to automate some of that work.

7. When did you last review your Dimension structure?

Finally, there's a wider point worth considering.

Your Dimension setup may have made perfect sense when Intacct was first implemented.

But businesses change.

You might have:

• opened new locations;
• introduced different services or product lines;
• changed your management structure;
• added entities;
• altered the way the board wants to see information; or
• developed new KPIs that weren't relevant during implementation.

Sage recommends considering reporting requirements, security and workflows when designing Dimension structures.

So Dimensions shouldn't necessarily be something you configure once and then never revisit.

A useful question for your finance team might simply be:

If we were designing our management reporting from scratch today, would we still structure our Dimensions in exactly the same way?

If the answer is no, there may be an opportunity to get more from the information Intacct is already capable of capturing.

Dimensions are about much more than Department and Location

For many Sage Intacct users, Dimensions are already part of everyday life.

The opportunity isn't necessarily to start using Dimensions.

It's to consider whether you're using them as effectively as you could.

Could relationships remove repetitive coding?

Are you identifying missing Dimension values?

Could your existing data answer more management questions?

Could dashboards give stakeholders information without another spreadsheet being produced?

And could financial information be combined with operational data to produce more meaningful KPIs?

These are the kinds of questions that can turn Dimensions from a useful reporting feature into a much broader source of management insight.

And for Sage 200 users, dimensional reporting also provides an interesting look at how Sage Intacct handles growing reporting requirements without needing every new analysis requirement to become another variation within the nominal account structure.

At The HBP Group, we work with both Sage 200 and Sage Intacct customers, so we can help you understand what makes sense for your current system and where additional functionality may be worth exploring.

Already using Sage Intacct? If you'd like us to review how you're currently using Dimensions and whether there are opportunities to get more from your reporting, speak to our Sage team.

Using Sage 200? If some of the reporting approaches in this article have got you thinking, we'd be happy to show you what dimensional reporting looks like in Intacct and discuss whether it could be relevant to your future plans.