Jaclyn Anku, ProAdvisor Training & Certification Leader: On today’s episode of In the Know, we'll be exploring updates to Intuit Enterprise Suite.
Hey, ProAdvisors, it's Jaclyn, and you're watching In the Know, where you get exclusive access to demos of Intuit product enhancements by the leaders who built them. Let's jump right in with Daniel, who leads Intuit Enterprise Suite.
Welcome, Daniel. It's so great to have you back!
Daniel Malinov: Thanks. Jaclyn, I’m really excited to be here.
Let's dive in. The first thing we want to jump into is a feature that I'm personally really excited about: allocations of expenses and bills.
Let’s start by creating a new expense. I'm going to select a vendor for my expense—it's going to be Al-Farsi—and in this case, let's say I want to allocate a consultancy expense of $1,000. I'm going to leave my dimensions blank for now. I'm going to click “allocate,” and then you see this one-line item here. I could also allocate multiple line items, but in this case, I'm just going to show the consultancy expense. I click “allocate.”
I have a drop-down that shows my two entities. In this case, I have Keystone Construction and Keystone Terra. Those are the two entities in my organization, and let's say I want to allocate across both of them. I want to allocate the expense equally across both of these entities. So, I check that, click “save,” and it automatically does the allocation for me.
If I wanted to change that up, I could do that by either changing the percentages or by the dollar amounts. In this case, I'm going to leave it as-is. I'm going to select the expense category for Keystone Terra, which is kind of the target company in this case, and it will be consultancy as well. And once I'm happy with my allocations, I click “save allocation.” And…done. Now that expense has been allocated to both these entities. This $1,000 bucks is now $500 per entity. I can always go back and do that allocation again.
I can also go into the actual allocation journal, which is the entry that happens in the back end to actually do this allocation. To do that, I click “view allocation journal,” and this takes me to the intercompany journal entry that actually posts this entry to these two companies. You can see that it captured the account that I selected here for both the source or, in this case, parent company—Keystone Construction—as well as the target or, in this case, the subsidiary or child entity, which is Keystone Terra. You see the consultancy expense, but you also see the “due to” and “due from” have also been automatically captured. And you may be asking, How did it know that these are the right accounts to post to? And I would say that's a great question. Let me show you.
I am going to go to my multi-entity hub and the overview page. Once I land on the overview page, you may see some new KPI widgets, and we'll get to those in a second.
But first, you'll notice in my shortcuts here, I have an option called Intercompany Account Mapping. If I open that up, this is essentially a structured way to map the “due tos” and “due froms” for those intercompany expense and bill allocations. The way it works is you have your “source company,” which can be either entity (or if you have multiple entities, it can be really any of the entities that actually gets charged that expense or bill).
In this case, let's say Keystone Construction is my source company. Then I identify my “target company”—in this case, Keystone Terra (if I had other entities within this group, I'd be able to add them and have a full list). Then I see the next column is “source company’s intercompany receivable.” So again, in this case, Keystone Construction is my source company, and I've selected my “due to” from Keystone Terra as my “intercompany receivable.” Then I have a target company's “intercompany payable.” This is for Keystone Terra, which is my target company. And I have my “due to/due from” selected here as well, so it knows exactly what you can post it to.
Okay, so we covered the allocation from the expense form. We covered the way to set up the “due to/from” to automatically get mapped when you post that allocation through the transaction interface, and we looked at the intercommunal entry on the back end that actually gets generated when we do an allocation.
Now we’ve landed on our Overview Dashboard here, under the multi-entity tab, and you'll notice a number of new KPIs showing up. These are our new KPI widgets, and they cover the profit and loss, the income, the expense, and the accounts receivable and accounts payable at the aggregate level. Basically it pulls in the data across all the entities within this group. As we know, in this case we've got two entities here, and so it pulls in the data from both of these entities.
You can go ahead and change the time periods, so let's say I want to switch this to this year. Same with the income, I can change this to this year. Now you can see all the numbers align and get a good, quick view of the performance of my entities, kind of at an overview level. I also have my AR and AP; this is defaulted as of today, so it shows me my overall AP balance and my overall AR balances.
Now I can actually go ahead and filter this to only show an individual company or multiple companies, depending on what I'm looking to view here. So, if I have 15 entities, I can select as many entities as I want and aggregate only those entities, easily filtering and using this drop-down and all the different widgets get updated accordingly.
This is what we just launched in March, but we are actually going to be launching in fast file, where we'll show the aging metrics here for the AR and AP, so you see the typical aging view that you currently have available on the single entity dashboard. Following that, we’ll also launch the supporting aggregated AR/AP aging reports (another way to put it is consolidated AR and AP aging reports) that will be linked directly from these widgets. These are all the fast file launches coming up in the future.
The last thing I want to call out is we looked at the expense allocation. You can also do a build allocation. I'm not going to do it, but I'm going to show you.
So, once the bill is loaded, you can see that you've got the allocation here. Once you've selected a category, you can allocate it in a similar fashion as you do for an expense. And then, if you go to your expense list, you will see which of your expenses have been allocated.
Now, the last thing I'll mention about this is that although this multi-entity dashboard and the selection from the left navigation is only available on the parent entity within the group, these allocations that I just showed you for both expenses and bills are available on all the entities. If I were to switch to Keystone Terra and I had an expense that I wanted to process from that side, I will see the allocation options showing up on the expense form as well as on the bill form, so it can be allocated from any of the entities, not just the parent entity.
Alright, now we're going to switch gears, and we're actually going to go to Keystone Terra. I'm going to show you some of the innovations that have come to market on our financial planning and analysis modules.
The latest innovation is to create a custom forecast. First, I'm going to click on Forecasting. Now we can actually subdivide it by dimensions. In the past, we were only able to do it by class. Now we've expanded that to also include custom forecasts by dimension. So, customer service group, type, earthwork, concrete. These are all custom user-defined dimensions that I have for this entity. I can easily create budgets for the header level within my service group type.
Let's say I want to use the average of the actual for the last three months. Maybe I want to increase income accounts by 4%, increase my COGS account by 3.5%, increase expenses by 2%, increase “other income” by one, and maybe decrease my other expenses. We'll click “go.” This will generate a forecast for these three-dimension header levels, and forecast it out for next few years. When I'm happy with that, I'm actually going to edit the name. I'm going to call this “forecast by dimension - service type,” and I'm going to save.
Now if I wanted to, I can actually convert this into a budget as well. But in this case, I'm just going to leave it as is; I've got my forecast. This is something we just launched. Now you will be able to forecast by specific dimensions and then convert those forecasts into budgets by dimensions as well, to run your budgets versus actuals.
If I go through reports and I type in “forecast,” you’ll notice I have two new forecast reports. The first one is the forecast overview, so if I click this (and in this case, I'm looking at April 1 until the end of the year, December), it gives me the line-item forecast. I can split it out by months, by quarters, or even just for the full year.
I'll leave it at quarter level, then I can go in and change some of the details. In this case, I'm using my latest one, so forecast by dimension. What I also like to do is make this only non-zero rows, so I only see the rows with values in them. Then I can also filter by account type or actual account, but I'm not going to do any of my filters right now, because I want to see everything. This gives me that overview report so I can see the overall forecast accordingly. Then if we go back to reports, and we type in “forecast” again, we can also run a forecast for actuals.
This is something there’s been a lot of demand for, so we're excited to bring this to market. Now you can run a report that shows your forecast versus your actuals, and you can control how the comparatives look. Do you want the variance? Do you want variance percentage and your display to be by month or by quarters? I can see exactly how my forecast is performing by quarter. Now, obviously this is in the future, and we don't have actuals yet. These actuals are just flowing in, though it looks like I'm using different accounts now; I'll likely need to adjust my forecast so everything aligns properly. But for the purposes of this example, you kind of see how it all flows through. And then similarly, I can go into my general options and only include non-zeros, and that makes the data a lot more consumable.
And that's my new forecast of actual reports.
Next thing, we're going to talk about some of the industry-specific innovations that we launched, and specifically it's going to be on the project side. So I go to projects and look at my project list. There's my pool. Once I open this, I notice I now have a couple new options; one is called “Add budgets.” I can add a budget through the SMS actuals widget here. I can add a project budget through the drop-down here.
Now, this is a feature that we've been getting a lot of requests for, and again, that is the ability to create a project-based budget, which is different from a company budget. Number one, it allows you to do a budget for a specific time period that doesn't necessarily align with your fiscal period.
So, if you're January to December, you don't have to have a project budget that's January to December, because that's not how projects actually run, right? It could be from any time period. In this case, it's from April 9-29; that is the range for this specific project budget. Secondly, it actually ties to a specific project, not to the company overall. Every individual project can now have a custom budget for a custom time period, and within that budget, we are also able to pull in additional items like classes, dimensions, custom fields, etc. if we have them. All that can be pulled into our budget. And then, as you enter the data, you can add additional line items and so on. But that's not the coolest thing here.
The coolest thing here is we now have a way to import budgets from Excel, and it leverages our actual AI capabilities to pull in unstructured data. You can apply your budget—it doesn't have to use our template; you can use whatever template that you're comfortable with or you're already using. The AI tool will identify individual line items, map them to the cost codes you already have in your products and services, and make some suggestions if it can't align something at 100% certainty.
So, let's see what that looks like. I have a budget already prepared, so I'm going to import that budget from Excel. Then it asks me which tab. In this case, my budget has multiple tabs. I want to use my final cost tab.
Okay, so here's kind of the summary of what just happened: We auto-filled nine details from the budget examples to my actual project. We found two items without a 100% match, and Intuit then suggested we do a quick review to make sure that the mapping the AI decided on is correct. And if not, we can make some changes. Everything else matched one to one, meaning the name that I had in my Excel match is exactly what I had in my products and services listing. But these two were not exact. I open this up by clicking this little icon here. It tells me, “Okay, we found this item. And there's two potential places that it may make sense to map it to: “maintenance of concrete” or “cement bags.” In this case, I'm happy with the “maintenance of concrete,” so I'm going to add it. And then in this case, we found a similar item called “maintenance of metals.” That's kind of what it's mapped to, but it could very well be “maintenance of finishes,” which is actually what it is.
So, I'm going to switch that, and if there was something else that's not currently available in our existing listing, I could go ahead and create a new product or service for this line item. But in this case, I'm happy and can click save. I can also close this thing. But before I do that, I’ll show you a few more areas of customization: You can rearrange or organize your columns; you can add or remove available fields; and you can control the structure of the table. You can make it roomy or more compact. You could also throw in some alternate row colors and make it look nice.
When I'm happy with this, I click save, and my budget gets saved to this project. I can then close it. Now I land back on my project page for Dan’s Pools. I see my budget added to the estimates versus actuals. I can then create a brand-new estimate for this customer.
Then when I go ahead and select a product and service from my budget, the cost gets auto populated, so all I have to do is enter the quantity that I want to set an estimate for at this point (maybe four). Then I enter what my markup is. In this case, let's say 15%. Then everything is populated automatically. So, a customer rate is 115, which is 15% on top of my costs of 100. At a quantity of four, that adds up to $460. Then I can review and send it to the customer. I'm not going to do that right now, but I am going to save.
When I save it, if I go to transactions, there's my estimate—because it has to be accepted first. I open this back up, and I change this to “accepted.” Now I close this. There it is. Now I have this estimate that's been sent out or accepted, and here's my overall budget. Everything gets populated automatically. Then, when you run your estimate versus actual reports, all that data gets flown through. If I go to my project reports and I look at my estimates versus actuals for this project, I see my budget here, my estimated cost based on that budget, and my estimated income based on the estimate I sent out. And as my actual income or my actual costs flow through, this all gets populated, showing the difference across the costs, the revenues, and the overall profitability.
And that's a wrap for the March releases of the Intuit Enterprise Suite. Until next time! Remember, Intuit loves accountants.
Jaclyn Anku : Really great stuff. Thank you so much, Daniel, and thank you. If you find this update interesting or helpful, go ahead and like, comment, and subscribe. That's all we have for now. For more product updates and demos, check out our In the Know hub, and be sure to register for our monthly webinar. We'll catch you next time!
