Why integrate Sage Intacct with an expense management software?

For any business, it’s critical to keep all its financial records clean and up to date. The Accounting department has to keep track of income and business expenses, ensure compliance with internal and external legal guidelines, and provide investors and management with enough financial information to make business decisions.

This is where accounting software like Sage Intacct comes into play. They help Finance teams keep track of financial operations and save time by automating and simplifying the process. Additionally they:

• Automate and streamline financial processes. 
• Migrate financial data to the cloud more securely.
• Focus on expense data analytics and outcomes.
• Use real-time data to evaluate business performance and make strategic decisions.

Plus, with Sage Intacct’s integration capabilities and APIs for custom integrations, users can connect with other software and move sensitive data securely and seamlessly. By opening up their API feature, they've empowered companies to do almost anything they would need out of their ERP or financial software. 

For example, managing business expenses is a crucial process for all companies - they need to ensure their business expenses comply with both internal guidelines and external tax regulations. But it can be time-consuming to orchestrate an expense management process with manual processes like pen and paper, spreadsheets.

But by integrating Sage Intacct with an expense management software, you can replace several broken processes and eliminate the need to keep separate books or records for expense management and accounting purposes. In addition, integrating with software like an expense software helps automate procedures for recording financial details.

Let’s dig deeper into what an expense management software is and the additional benefits users can reap by integrating it with Sage Intacct. 

What is an expense management software?

An expense management software is a tool that can simplify your entire employee expense reimbursement process. From expense reporting and receipt management to making payments, it can automate repetitive manual tasks and ensure that the financial reimbursement cycle is painless for employees and Finance teams. 

In addition, it can reduce the need for paper, minimize accounting errors, lower the reimbursement turnaround time, and boost employee morale and productivity. 

Benefits of integrating your accounting software with an expense management software

Integrating Sage Intacct with an expense report software can help you power your accounting and expense management workflow from beginning to end. Additionally, you can easily sync, move and keep your data consistent between the two systems. 

Easy expense reporting and tracking for traveling employees

Employees incur most of their corporate expenses while on the road. For example, their business expenses can be meals, accommodations, flight tickets, cab rentals, etc. Without an expense reporting software, employees will have to log in all their expenses once their trip is over or when they get to their work set-up. This means employees will have to hold on to piles of business expense receipts until it's time to claim reimbursements.

But with an expense management software installed on their mobile devices, they can simply take a photo of the receipt and upload it to the system. The software uses OCR technology to read the receipts and automatically extracts important expense data onto the digital expense report. This makes uploading receipts and reporting expenses a one-click deal with little to no manual effort. Additionally, employees can simply review and submit expense reports on the go. 

Manage multiple corporate credit cards and solve reconciliation challenges

Corporate credit cards make it easier for businesses to manage on-the-job expenses and have become increasingly common. However, keeping an accurate record of each business expense and manually reviewing and approving each charge can be challenging. In addition, businesses also have to devote the necessary time and resources to get the job done, leading to unseen costs. Thus, some companies might see corporate credit card management as costly and time-consuming. 

With an automated expense management software, Accountants can eliminate the challenges they face with corporate credit card management and reconciliation. Businesses can also integrate their corporate credit card with an expense software to get real-time feeds or direct bank feeds for every transaction. The software auto-matches the receipts to the right transaction data and cuts down the need for manual intervention and reconciliation.

Seamlessly enforces policy compliance and prevents fraud

Some areas of Travel & Expenses (T&E) policy may be easy to track and enforce, but expenses such as per diems or business mileage can be challenging and time-consuming to verify if you're relying on spreadsheets. 

In addition, fictitious business purchases, reimbursement for personal expenses, overstated expenses, and multiple reimbursements can be hard to catch if there’s a high volume of expense report submissions. As a result, companies can lose thousands of dollars to human error and expense report fraud.

You can safeguard your organization from becoming a victim of expense report fraud by maintaining strong internal controls. 

• Set up a comprehensive T&E policy and communicate your carefully crafted policy to your employees to ensure there is no room for doubts and confusion. For example, provide detailed info on out-of-policy expenses, per diem amounts, and mileage allowance.
• You can further combat potential expense fraud by integrating your T&E policy inside an expense management platform. The software runs real-time policy checks, often before they’re submitted, on all reported expenses and notifies employees every time an expense does not comply with the company's set expense policies. 

Having a well-written policy and an expense management system that flags irregularities can greatly help reduce expense fraud. 

Leverage expense data to make informed decisions

To make an informed decision, Finance teams need to have visibility into their organization's overall expenditures. Plus, all the expense data they receive must be complete, accurate, and up-to-date. 

By setting up an expense management solution with Sage Intacct, Finance teams can store and document all expense-related details in a secure manner. They can also access them at any time from any device. This helps Finance teams gain meaningful insights into employee spending trends and patterns in real-time. For example, you can identify top spenders and policy violators, frequent vendors, policies that require tweaks, and more. 

What initially took Finance teams months to compile, clean, and analyze can now be done in just a few clicks. 

Easy to use and increases employee and financial productivity

As any business aiming for scale and sustainability, it is crucial for management teams to pay attention to employee and financial productivity. An easy start would be to automate repetitive and time-consuming low-impact tasks for your employees.

An expense software comes with easy-to-use features that can simplify the process of expense reporting for employees on the go and help them focus on important tasks at hand. For example, instead of saving expense receipts and manually entering the data into a spreadsheet, employees can simply take photos of their receipts with their mobile phones using the app that auto-scans and populates crucial data into an expense report. 

The Finance team can also establish straightforward policies that align with your company's processes and then enforce them through a simplified workflow. You can cut down on unnecessary back and forths with employees and ensure they submit error-free expense reports with receipts attached every time. 

Integrating with an automated expense reporting software can reduce unproductive repetitive tasks, employee frustration, and unseen costs. You can tap into the power of expense automation to transform employee experience in ways that boost productivity and drive better business performance. 

Get the best of both worlds with Fyle + Sage Intacct integration

Fyle’s ability to seamlessly integrate with Sage Intacct helps organizations save productive hours by automating manual tasks. For example, employees can easily report their expenses from anywhere using our mobile app, and all the expense data gets automatically synced with Sage Intacct. This eliminates the requirement for manual data mapping and simplifies the export and import of data from Fyle to Sage Intacct. 

Here are some of the biggest advantages you can gain by integrating Fyle with Sage Intacct.

Real-time expense tracking and reporting 

Fyle as an expense report software is an employee-friendly tool that ensures employees can easily report every expense, from pesky paper receipts to digital invoices lying in the inbox. 

For paper receipts, employees can Fyle’s mobile app to take a picture of the receipt. Our intelligent OCR technology automatically scans and extracts all the crucial information from the receipts and auto-fills the expense report form. Finally, the expense report and the receipt are stored as a draft expense, ready to submit for review. 

For e-receipts that land directly on an email address, employees can use Fyle's Gmail add-on, or Outlook Plugin to do the job. Here, Fyle uses the same OCR technology to automatically scan and fill the expense form while ensuring an attached e-receipt. 

Additionally, employees can attach their business receipts from everyday work apps and tools like Slack & Teams. 

With Fyle’s intelligent expense coding, you can automatically set up a workflow to fetch expense data around employees, expenses, projects, categories, cost centers, departments, or any other custom fields from Fyle to Sage Intacct and vice-versa. 

Our Fyle + Sage Intacct integration ensures all expense-related data are matched automatically and correctly without any need for human effort. 

Advanced tracking of project spends

The most common challenges Finance teams face when controlling budgets for projects are:

• Incomplete or missing data around employees and expenses.
• The inability to tweak or have visibility over budgets.
• The lack of real-time data around spends and budgets.
• Multiple categories to track for different employee expenses.
• Manually verifying and approving expenses.

These seemingly menial tasks not only cost your Finance teams time, effort and resources but also cost your company in the long run. 

You can address these challenges with Fyle + Sage Intacct integration. 

The integration allows you to map projects in Sage to projects in Fyle automatically. The only thing you need to do is add them in Sage Intacct, and they get auto-populated in Fyle.  So even with new projects coming in, you can simply add them, and voila! You can continue to track and control your expenses to avoid any overspending or financial leaks.

Also, once you connect Sage Intacct with Fyle to track different employee expenses for multiple categories, it automatically maps and syncs all expense types. No need to spend hours manually matching them.

The powerful integration between the two tools allows you to: 

• Have a real-time view of project spend vs. budget.
• Allocate weekly, monthly, or quarterly budgets to different projects.
• Split expenses between multiple projects.
• Allow certain categories of expenses for employees of a specific project.
• Nest sub-projects within a single project.
• Easily export billable expenses for clients.

Manage multiple corporate credit cards and eliminate manual reconciliation

If you reconcile your corporate credit cards manually, it can look something like this: 

• Your Accountants collate all the bank statements starting from the beginning to the end of a financial period.
• Once they have the statement, they painfully match and verify every transaction with the corresponding receipts/invoices. 
• Even with countless hours going into the reconciliation process, it can still leave room for erroneous transactions, disputes, and reversals to go unnoticed. Since these transactions are time-bound, they can quickly create big trouble if mishandled.

With Fyle, you can bid goodbye to manual corporate credit card reconciliation. 

This is how Fyle + Sage Intacct integration can automate your credit card reconciliation process: 

• Fyle works on cards you already use. With its direct integration with Visa & Mastercard, Employees get notified via text message as soon as a transaction is made, often while they are at the PoS with the receipt in their hand. They can reply to the text with a picture of the receipt, and Fyle matches it to the correct card transaction automatically.
• For every card transaction, Fyle creates a new expense for it. And with real-time feeds, when employees attach the receipt, Fyle reconciles them automatically. 
• The integration maps Fyle fields to Sage Intacct fields. This makes it easier for the integration to export reimbursable expenses and credit card transactions as either expense reports, bills, or charge card transactions. 
• If employees incur a credit transaction, they can create a negative expense for Fyle to show possible reversals. If it shows no possible reversals, Fyle waits for the card statement to be updated and then reconciles later.
• Credit card reconciliation in Sage Intacct is done with just one click, thanks to its auto-expense matching and ability to sync employee card expenses to corresponding fields.

In addition to reconciliation, Finance teams can manage multiple card programs from various card providers, get real-time visibility into their card spends and transactions, assign cards to employees, and more from a single dashboard.

Faster reimbursement with next day ACH payment feature

After an expense report has been submitted, reviewed, and approved, the last thing your Finance team does is deposit the payments to the employees' bank account. 

Fyle makes payment processing easier by automating it via the next-day ACH feature. The feature can help reduce reliance on banks, eliminate manual data entry and potential errors, and get real-time status updates on each transaction. 

With ACH, you can:  

• Easily verify and ensure employee bank account information are correct with Fyle. 
• Process payments to different employee bank accounts in bulk with a single click.
• Track the transaction status of each payment from the Fyle dashboard in real-time and maintain transparency with employees.

With Fyle + Sage Intacct’s robust integration, you can automate the import of Sage Intacct payments into Fyle or export Fyle ACH payments into Sage Intacct. So, for example, if you make the payment in Fyle via ACH, it will get automatically imported in Sage Intacct, marked as paid. This can eliminate unnecessary manual intervention and ensure data consistency all around. 

Integrate Sage Intacct with Fyle today

If your Finance and Accounting teams use Sage Intacct as their main accounting software, then it's time to make their work a lot easier by integrating it with the perfect expense management tool. To configure this integration, you don't even need to  wait on your account manager. All you need are your Sage Intacct and Fyle credentials to get started. 

It is that simple!

Schedule a demo to learn how Fyle simplifies and streamlines the expense reporting and management processes for businesses across the globe.