INSIGHT

Getting More from Sage Intacct: 5 Commonly Underused Features

Jennifer Kinzel, Angela Thomas • October 15, 2026

Services: Sage Intacct

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You invested in Sage Intacct to improve visibility, streamline finance processes, and reduce manual work. Yet reporting still ends up in Excel, allocations still live in spreadsheets, and approvals still happen through email in many organizations. Teams naturally build workflows around the Sage Intacct features they use most often.

As a result, some of Sage Intacct’s most valuable capabilities never become part of the process, even though they can reduce administrative effort and improve the quality of financial information. If you’re looking for ways to get more value from your Sage Intacct investment, these five features deserve a closer look. 

Use Dimensions to Simplify Reporting 

As your reporting needs grow, it can be tempting to keep adding account codes to capture new departments, locations, projects, customers, or entities. Over time, that structure becomes harder to navigate, maintain, and explain to new users.Dimensions are one of the Sage Intacct features that let you capture that detail without creating a new account for every reporting view.

Instead of expanding your chart of accounts every time a new reporting need emerges, you can tag transactions by department, location, project, customer, grant, or other criteria and use those dimensions for reporting. That flexibility allows you to analyze financial information from multiple perspectives while keeping the underlying structure cleaner and easier to manage. 

Dynamic Allocations 

If your team rebuilds the same allocation spreadsheet every close, it may be time to review how those calculations are handled. Dynamic Allocations can apply configured rules using drivers such as headcount, square footage, or revenue. Your team still needs to define the methodology and review the results, but the recurring calculation does not have to start from scratch each month. Instead of rebuilding and posting the same calculations manually each reporting period, your team can focus on reviewing results and understanding what the numbers mean. 

The Interactive Custom Report Writer 

Standard reports do not always answer the next question a department leader or finance executive asks. When the same report requires manual changes every month, a custom report may be worth building. The interactive custom report writer allows you to build reports around the information your stakeholders actually want to see.

Reports can be filtered using dimensions, tailored to different audiences, and saved for future use. Keeping reports connected to your system supports real-time financial insights with Sage Intacct, so you spend less time exporting and reformatting information and more time analyzing it.

Workflow & Approval Automation 

As transaction volume increases, approvals become harder to manage through email chains and informal processes. Tracking where invoices, purchase requests, and journal entries are sitting in the review process requires more effort when multiple stakeholders are involved. Workflow automation is a key part of automating accounting with Sage Intacct.

It routes transactions based on rules you establish, such as dollar thresholds, departments, vendors, or transaction types. Requests move directly to the appropriate reviewers rather than depending on manual follow-up. You gain greater visibility into the approval process while creating a documented audit trail that is easier to follow during reviews and audits. 

Smart Rules & User-Defined Fields 

Every organization has information it needs to capture beyond standard fields. You may need a project identifier on a transaction, or a check that required information is entered before a record moves forward. When those requirements are managed through spreadsheets, email reminders, or individual team knowledge, consistency becomes more difficult to maintain. 

User-defined fields can capture information that matters to your team. Smart Rules can help validate entries or guide users at the point of entry, where supported by the applicable object and configuration. The result is cleaner data and processes that reflect how your organization actually operates. 

Are You Getting the Full Value from Sage Intacct? 

Finance teams are constantly looking for ways to improve reporting, strengthen visibility, and reduce manual work. Some of the most meaningful improvements do not require new software or major process changes. They come from making better use of functionality that already exists within the platform. Take a look at where your team spends time today.

If allocations still require spreadsheets, reports still need extensive manipulation outside the system, or approvals are being tracked through email, there may be opportunities to simplify those processes using functionality you already own. The right starting point is a focused review of where your team spends the most time. With BPM’s Sage Intacct services, we can review your current workflows with you and help prioritize the improvements that will make the biggest difference.