Sage Intacct 2025 Release 1 - What’s New & Notable

Kiwi Partners' Consulting team has reviewed the recent Sage Intacct release of product updates and have highlighted a few new features below that will be the most beneficial to our nonprofit clients.

Authenticate and Validate Custom Domain before May 2025
Copilot Variance Analysis
Search Help with CoPilot
AP Automation with Purchasing
Vendor-based Approvals for Bill Routing
Prevent Direct Posting to Specific Journal
Trainings on Project/Grant Module

Authenticate and Validate Your Custom Domain

Implementation Required – Contact Kiwi

Starting May 2025, all customers who send emails using a custom domain must authenticate and validate their domain. This is a critical step as Sage transitions fully to using the enhanced email delivery service.

Copilot Variance Analysis

Automatically Updated

Copilot Variance Analysis provides insights into budget or prior period differences so business leaders can proactively investigate discrepancies and address spending concerns. Copilot notifications are designed to keep budget owners in the loop, whether it’s a timely update or an on-demand review. You can drill into report insights to see exactly how your budget is doing, including detailed breakdowns and visualizations.

Copilot Variance Analysis includes the following:

Automated alerts: Receive notifications when actual expenses exceed budget, allowing for immediate action.
Real-time variance tracking: Monitor budget vs. actual variances in real-time, ensuring that you're always aware of your financial health.
Data visualization: Visualize your financial data through intuitive charts and graphs for easy understanding.
Drill-down analysis: Easily drill down into reports to identify the root causes of variances for specific GL accounts.
Detailed variance insights: Get AI-generated variance descriptions that identify potential causes and implications of the variances.
Targeted data visibility: Get visibility into data relevant to your respective budget areas. For example, a department manager will be able to see variance analysis for a specific department while a controller will be able to see variance analysis for the entire organization.

Search Help with Copilot

AI-powered search

Search help with Copilot is designed to help you find information within the Sage Intacct Help Center and offers the following benefits:

Natural language understanding: Copilot understands the nuances of Sage Intacct terminology and can interpret complex queries.
Increased efficiency: Significantly reduces search time and the need for multiple searches by delivering more relevant results.
Intelligent recommendations: Provides suggestions for related topics and articles to expand your knowledge.

AP Automation with Purchasing

Implementation Required – Contact Kiwi

Streamline the process of drafting and matching incoming purchasing transactions with Purchasing automation, an add-on to AP Automation. AP Automation with Purchasing drafts the incoming vendor invoice and matches it to any previous documents, such as the purchase order or receiver.

Details

You define how incoming Purchasing documents map to existing source transactions in a one-time setup. Then, instead of converting Purchasing transactions to vendor invoices, you let Sage Intacct match incoming vendor invoices, using the following flow:

You email or upload vendor invoice documents for automated processing.
Sage Intacct uses artificial intelligence (AI) to detect the vendor and match the vendor invoice to a Purchasing transaction.
The system creates a draft vendor invoice for you, with the source document attached. Line items populate based on the matched source transaction.
You review the draft vendor invoice, validating it against the source document and making corrections as necessary, and then post.
Your corrections are fed back to the AI engine, where it updates the machine learning model to improve future matches.

As you review drafts, you have the option to change the match to a different Purchasing transaction or change the draft transaction to an AP bill or another transaction type.

How it works
Automated transactions appear in a new Automated transactions list, which is available in the Accounts Payable and Purchasing menus.
Incoming transactions are created as vendor invoices by default, and you can change the transaction type as needed before posting.
You can change the transaction match for a draft transaction at any time before you post it.
For transactions that do not belong in the Purchasing workflow, such as rent or utility bills, you can select Change to AP bill to move the transaction to Accounts Payable.
If you want Sage Intacct to create all future transactions for a vendor as AP bills, you can set Change to AP bill as a preference on the vendor record.
Sage Intacct automatically detects files that were previously uploaded and flags them as duplicates, bringing them to your attention.

Vendor-based Approval for Bill Routing

Implementation Required – Contact Kiwi

Details

Add the Vendor-based approval rule type to your bill approval policy in Accounts Payable configuration.
The Bill approver field appears in the vendor record after you add the vendor-based approval rule type and save your configuration.

Assign bill approvers by editing vendor records directly or by updating vendor records using CSV import
Any unrestricted business or employee user with Approve bills: List permissions can be selected as a bill approver.
You can assign a user group as a bill approver provided all members of the group are unrestricted and have the appropriate permissions. Only one user in the group is required to approve a bill.
When multiple rule types are present in your bill approval policy, they execute as follows:
If your bill approval policy includes multiple rules, rules are executed in the order you list them.
If a bill is submitted for a vendor that does not have an assigned approver, the bill is automatically approved for that rule and Sage Intacct proceeds to the next approval rule.
If you have both a Value Approval - Transaction Department rule set and a Vendor-based Approval rule type present in your bill approval policy, Intacct executes the rules as follows:
- For bills from vendors with assigned bill approvers, Vendor-based Approval executes and Value Approval - Transaction Department is bypassed. This allows you to create bills for vendor-based approval that are allocated across multiple departments.
- For bills from vendors that do not have assigned bill approvers, Value Approval - Transaction Department executes and Vendor-based Approval is bypassed.

Prevent direct posting to specified journal

Implementation Required – Contact Kiwi

Direct entries to General Ledger journals are one of the primary causes of discrepancies between subledgers and the General Ledger. You can prevent these entries on a journal-by-journal basis.

Details

Sage has added a Disallow direct posting checkbox to the Journal setup page. If you select this checkbox, users cannot create entries for the journal through the Journal entries page in General Ledger. Instead, users must post through the subledgers. This setting also prevents the creation of journal entries through an import or the API.

Trainings on Project/Grant Module

Automatically Updated

Nonprofit	Qualified expenses and Invoicing with Projects and Grants	Teaches project and grant users about qualified expenses and invoicing in Sage Intacct Projects and Grants. Review the invoicing workflow options, creating qualified expense transactions, Project and Grant billing reports, and troubleshooting.
Recognizing Revenue with Projects and Grants	Learn about revenue management with Sage Intacct Projects and Grants. Review the Order Entry revenue management workflow options, creating revenue activation documents, billing and revenue recognition workflows, Projects reports, and troubleshooting.