We continue with our blog series on how Sage Intacct provides significant value for growing entertainment companies.
Challenges
One of the unique challenges faced by entertainment companies is the need to keep an accrual set of books, but provide reports to internal and external stakeholders on a cash basis.
Traditionally, this has required a lot of custom reporting in the form of manual Excel work / aggravation to produce the desired output.
Solution
Way back in 2005, the team at Intacct created a way for clients to keep an accrual and cash set of books. Then in 2014, the smart accountants and engineers at Intacct outdid themselves and added the ability to create an unlimited number of user-defined books. Clients could keep accrual and cash books, but also add others such as tax, GAAP, or IFRS.
Another idea that a number of RKL clients have implemented is to create a “PO Commitment” set of books, which means that they can have better visibility into purchasing reports even prior to receiving the vendor invoice. And for some of our commercial production friends, they can also keep an “actualized” set of books, which enables them to make budget line item adjustments and report accordingly without cluttering up the GL. (See the screenshot below.)
Benefits
Solstice Studios is one of many RKL clients that benefits from Sage Intacct’s multi-book capabilities. Adam Beranek, Accounting Manager, said this, “Being able to run reports in both cash and accrual books is very useful for budgeting and cash flow purposes. You can also post journal entries in separate books and this allows you to keep accruals from interfering with your cash accounting.”
Conclusion
The more our entertainment clients know about the capabilities of Sage Intacct, the more they appreciate the many ways it helps them to make the most of their time and increase their strategic value to the rest of the organization. After struggling with entry-level options like QuickBooks or legacy systems such as Microsoft Great Plains, they’re thrilled to be able to do their best work with the best-in-class cloud financial management solution.
If you’d like to know more, please contact RKL today!
