Name: Future-Ready Finance: Real-Time Insights & Automated Spend with Sage Intacct + Emburse
Uploaded: 2025-10-22T18:16:05.673Z
Duration: 40 min 20 s
Description: Future-Ready Finance: Real-Time Insights & Automated Spend with Sage Intacct + Emburse

Transcript for "Future-Ready Finance: Real-Time Insights & Automated Spend with Sage Intacct + Emburse": Hello, everybody. We'll give everyone a couple moments here to join us today. Alright. Thank you guys so much for joining us. I hope you guys are having a wonderful Wednesday. Give everybody just a couple more seconds to trickle in, and then we'll go ahead and get started. Sorry about that. Alright. Let's go ahead and dive in. Thank you everybody so much for joining our webinar. My name is Taylor Decorte. I am on the North American events team here at Emburse and your host for today's event. We're excited today to dive into some best practices around aligning your spend management and ERP solutions with our partners at Sage Intacct. Today's webinar is called Future Ready Finance, Real Time Insights and Automated Spend with Sage Intacct plus Emburse. Just a few housekeeping items before we get started. Today's session is being recorded. A copy of the recording will be emailed to you twenty four hours after the event ends. In the documents tab, you'll find, the some additional insights. If you are interested in learning more about Sage and Emburse, we do highly encourage that you check that out. That documents tab along with the q and a tab and the chat tab, can be found in the engagement area to your right. Chat and q and a are both available today, so we highly encourage that you take advantage of those. This is gonna be a great time to connect with our Imbursed and Sage experts, So do, ask them plenty of questions throughout the webinar. And with that, I wanna make sure I introduce our lovely, speakers for today. If I could have everybody join me on stage here. I'll introduce everybody one by one. So starting off with the lovely Maxine Stanley, our alliance manager at Emburse and responsible for our Emburse and Sage relationship. Joining me as well is Tori Dennis, our product manager who has been phenomenal in leading, the connection between the Emburse and Sage platform. And then from the Sage Intacct side, we have Brandon Patrick, a senior solutions consultant at Sage, and Dan Diaz, principal solutions consultant at Sage as well. And with that, I'll hand it over to Maxine. Thanks, Taylor, and, welcome everybody. So let's start off by talking about what really sets Emburse apart from other vendors in the travel and expense space. For us, really what it all comes down to are three key pillars that guide our vision to completely transform how companies manage their t and e. So first, we are true innovators, and Emburse has always been a company of first. We were the first to introduce AI driven real time expensive mission and the first to bring airline contract auditing solution to market. And innovation isn't just something that we talked about, it's actually who we are. It's really in our DNA. Secondly, we believe that success comes through partnership. So we just don't build technology and hand it off, we co innovate with our customers and our partners. And this means listening, learning, and solving real world challenges together. We have customer advisory boards, user groups, and conferences and make sure that our customers' voices help shape what comes next. And third, we bring deep industry expertise in a powerful ecosystem. From travel and payments to banking gateways to TMCs, OBTs, ISVs, and ERPs, our network of integrated partners help customers streamline every part of their spend and travel management. Together, these are our three pillars, innovation, partnership, and expertise, and what keeps Emburse leading the way in transforming the t and e experience. And I'm going to pass it over to Dan. Awesome. Thanks for that, Maxine. So a little bit about who Sage Intacct is. Our journey started nearly forty years ago, in Newcastle in 1981 as a provider of accounting software for small businesses. Our portfolio has evolved significantly, to cover not just accounting software, but finance, sales, and even HR. And with that, the mission has changed. Instead of just purely being a a technology provider, we really do try to transform how people think about their work, about their technology, and leveraging AI machine learning to enable their organizations to thrive. Every day, we do this all around the world. And there we have in support over 11,000 colleagues in local networks, whether that is partners and CPA firms to leverage those resources in developing and providing the best solution and experience within our technology to our clients. Like a lot of the businesses that we serve, we also were a small business, but, of course, have grown to a much larger organization beyond anything that we all could have imagined, when the organization started. We really do try to drive today's business builders with a new generation of products that manage everything from money to people. And also our social and mobile technology does provide live information instantaneously so that you can make fast and formed in business value at decisions anytime, anywhere from any sort of device. And we really do try to support those business builders for life by offering them choice, support, expertise, and innovation. Now what about the recommended solutions? So, obviously, we're here to talk about Emburse. Intacct and Sage overall does have a marketplace where a lot of our partners do live, and those different products can be whether it's in AP, accounts receivable, expense and spend management, bank reconciliation fees, and just general finance and HR technology. But there is another level of that, and that is a Sage recommended solution, which is what Emburse is. The advantage of using a product such as Emburse through a recommended solution is not just that it works, but is built in a way to take advantage of both sets of technologies to provide that pinpoint experience and bringing a best of market or best in class solution to our clients. And so very excited to have this partnership with Emburse and having them be a Sage recommended solution, particularly in this fintech space. Thank thanks, Dan. And, let's, actually talk a little bit about our presence in the Sage marketplace and, how it helps our joint customers, manage spend more easily and more effectively. Inverse actually offers three powerful solutions in the Sage marketplace, Inverse Spend, Inverse Professional, and Inverse Enterprise. And you might remember some of these or know some of these, based on our former names, Tally, Certify, and Chrome River. Each of these solutions is designed to meet the customer where they're at. From small businesses looking for a simple spend control to mid sized companies needing scalability, all the way up to very large organizations, large global organizations, looking to manage complex global programs. The Sage marketplace is such an important part of this story because it's where Sage and Emburse come together and make life easier for our shared customers. It gives our customers choice, flexibility, and trusted integrations that streamline expense, and spend management directly within the Sage ecosystem. At the end of the day, it's all about empowering finance teams to spend smarter, save time, and focus on what really matters, growing your business. Sage and Emburse, we've been proud partners since 2012. And over the years, we've built a strong global presence together across North America, EMEA, and APAC. Together, we're thrilled to support over a thousand joint customers, which is a real testament to how seamlessly our solutions work with Sage and how we make finance teams' lives easier. So for anybody that's exploring Emburse, as mentioned, you can find our solutions right on the Sage marketplace. We integrate directly with in in EmburseSpend and in Emburse Professional. And so Sage Intacct users can manage, their AP automation effortlessly, all within the tools they already know and trust. Together, Sage and Emburse are helping customers across all sorts of industries, such as health care, commercial real estate, non for profit, retail, software, professional services, hospitality, and distribution, all with the goal of simplifying their finance process, improving compliance, and focusing more on growing their business. At the end of the day, it's all about working smarter, not harder, and doing it together. Excellent. Well, let's talk about the state of finance today. Let's start by grounding ourselves in the current reality. Finance teams are balancing growth, complexity and the demand for real time data, and many are still running on outdated systems. We're seeing a lot of mid market companies that are outgrowing their systems. When you're managing multiple entities, global operations, complex reporting, what worked before simply does not scale. You can't get that real time visibility, and you spend more time consolidating spreadsheets than analyzing the results. That's where we see finance leaders looking for systems that give them dimensional reporting, scalability, and automation. And that challenge extends beyond the ERP, and the AP processes within that are still manual. Approvals often get stuck in inboxes, delayed reimbursements, compliance issues, and that means limited visibility into spend before it hits the books. So even when you have a powerful ERP, disconnected expense workflows can still slow down the close. Finance leaders want automation that closes that loop, connecting spend data to financials in real time. Thanks, Brandon. No. I'm sorry. Go ahead. Sorry. I was just gonna ask, what are some signs a a business has outgrown some of those old processes or legacy systems? So most of my clients come to me when they've exceeded their entity requirements, or they're spending a lot of time combining reporting. So, another scenario might be, on prem database sizes. I do sometimes see that that will also cause close like, slowdowns within the system. The the other scenario is if you find that you're doing a lot of your work in Excel, if you're doing 80% of the work in Excel, that's usually a good indicator that the current system that you have in place is not really kinda matching and meeting the needs that you might have. Right. Thank you. And how have those expectations for finance team shifted in the last few years? Great question. So we internally, we're seeing a lot of internal pressure on the accounting and the finance teams overall. Right? They essentially have to do more with less. That does tend to fall on the back of house teams, mostly because they end up playing multiple roles. To give you a good example, when I started, you know, I was purely AP. That is literally all my job was back in the day. Today, I don't I don't see that happening as often. Right? I very rarely run across finance teams who only ever have a dedicated AP team, a dedicated AR team. A lot of us are wearing multiple hats and a lot of that falls back on the finance team and it's raising expectation to do more with less. Perfect. Thanks, Brandon. Mhmm. Okay. So let's talk a little bit more about just how do we leverage that modernization. Right? How do we take advantage of scalability? Finance teams in general want a system that's gonna meet their needs as the organization grows, as the requirement of their roles expand. So automation and integrations are an important function of that process when you need tools that work and even when they aren't directly built into your ERP. So in today's example, by automating expense data to flow directly into Sage Intacct, you can unlock those real time insights, allowing you and your teams to reduce that end of the month scramble. When your teams have faster access to data, when they spend less time chasing data to get to month end close, it frees up time and hours for your teams to pursue additional growth opportunities within the organization. So let's talk really quick and focus on how you guys are doing that. Perfect. Yes. Let's, take some polls here from our, a polls from our audience here. We're gonna do a quick poll just to get an idea of where you guys see your top challenges today. So I'm gonna open that up for us. Give me one second. Sorry. Alright. That should be open. You should see a polls tab now in that engagement area. Go ahead and submit your answers. What is your top challenge today? Is it month end close, compliance, visibility, forecasting? Or if it's none of those, and you have another option you want to submit, go ahead and throw that in the chat as well. Perfect. And I'm gonna share those results as they're coming in here. Definitely looks like the biggest pain point is month end close. Considering we are at the end of the month here, I can understand why that might be relevant. And we'll go ahead and give everybody a couple more seconds to fill that out before we close this poll and move on. Perfect. Definitely, that month in close. Compliance and forecasting are neck and neck, so that's good. Alright. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and close out our that poll for today. Thank you guys for participating. And we'll go ahead and talk about, ERP solutions and how, those are relevant to today's context. So, now that we've talked about what's driving modernization, let's focus in on the foundation, which is your ERP. For many organizations, that core system is Sage, but we're really excited to learn more about our partner today. So with that, before we dive into the Sage Intacct capabilities, I actually wanna ask Brandon, why does the Sage and Emburse relationship work so well compared to other integrations on the market? It goes back to the fact that you guys are one of our preferred providers. Right? We have really, really tight integrations, automating, making it easy for you and your teams to get that data in. So when you're using Emburse, we don't have to work as hard to have teams manage those data points, pushing that data back and forth. So that tight integration is really a part of the process that makes it really easy for you guys to get data into our system, make it easy for us to leverage that back to our end users so that you guys, as end users, can get to your data much more quickly. Awesome. Thanks, Deb. Can you tell us a little bit about Sage now? Yeah. Of course. So, you know, what makes Sage Intacct so unique? First off is the idea of this real time, multidimensional insights. So a lot of you probably use legacy technology such as QuickBooks or even, some other products out there in the market, and trying to segment your data is very difficult because of that long string of accounting that you have to worry about. Well, since everything is tied within a sing a single instance, we leverage this concept of dimensions. So your departments, your vendors, your clients, your facilities, your service lines in a way to catalog that data in a meaningful way while all using the same natural modern chart of accounts. That, of course, is going to make consolidation incredibly easy. Whether that is consolidating by the entity structure or consolidating across those different dimensions, you'll be able to have that real time perception into how the business is doing and also be able to slice and dice in a variety of ways to make sure that you're getting a true understanding of how the business is performing. And then furthermore, the idea of compliance, and I kind of view compliance in both a horizontal and a vertical mode. A horizontal is really compliance that any organization is gonna be able to take advantage of. Whether that is just making sure that your financials for your balance sheet, your your, profit and loss statements, your expense reports are all in line with what you're looking to provide to your investors or your other stakeholders, or is it something a bit more unique to an industry that you work in? I primarily work in the health care industries. HIPAA compliance is a very big need. Sage Intacct does offer that level of compliance to ensure that you're not just worrying about your internal audits, but also those external audits that are out there. And and, also, the last thing I wanna point out is the idea of integrations. Obviously, First being a great partner, you really want to look at your accounting system as that financial core. So it's bringing in expense data. It's bringing potentially revenue data. It's bringing in payroll data. And really any other type of information that you'll be able to need to make those value add decisions. And Intacct has really done a great job in developing the product that ensures that you have that visibility and that flexibility to get that information in a meaningful way. Perfect. Well, I think a a good follow-up to this is by looking at how easy it is to connect Sage Intacct with Emburse Professional. So we're going to play a quick clip here, that's gonna walk through our integration. Great. Thanks, Taylor. So through our marketplace integration, administrators, are able to establish a connection in just a few clicks. What you saw there is there's no custom setup required. We are using a predefined web service user in Sage Intacct. You can authenticate, configure your inbound data sync, and map all of your necessary dimensions, such as departments or projects. You you just saw there how simple it is to line and map, certain fees, such as your corporate cards and your schedules. The short video, highlights how members can make a complex integration just incredibly simple and secure. As an administrator in our systems, you have the control and the visibility that you need to ensure spend is captured and posted just as your teams need it. So some key benefits of the connector, automation. So with a fully cloud based prebuilt integration, all your expense and financial data flows automatically between Emburse and Sage Intacct. That means no more manual imports, no spreadsheets, and far less room for human error. Secondly, the real time insights. So as soon as expenses are submitted and approved in Emburse, they are available to sync into Sage Intacct. That gives finance teams continuous visibility into spend, rules, budgets, not at month end, but all month long. And third is the the hassle free setup. So because the connector is is preconfigured, there is no need for IT heavy projects or custom coding. Your administrators can authenticate, map, and sync within minutes, allowing your finance team to focus on higher value work instead of integration maintenance. K. As a Sage recommended solution, what really amplifies the value of our integration is the partnership, between Emburse and Sage. Together, we've built workflows that cover every aspect of the financial operations from reimbursement automation to corporate card syncing and global policy enforcements. For organizations operating across multiple regions, our integration supports multicurrency, ensuring compliance and consistency worldwide across multiple entities. Every transaction includes an audit trail, giving finance teams full transparency and accountability. But what users love most is the experience, an interface that's thoughtfully designed and easy to use while providing robust controls for administrators. Behind the scenes, the integration supports native bidirectional data flows. Information stays perfectly aligned between Emburse and Sage Intacct, reducing reconciliation effort and strengthening the financial accuracy. In short, this isn't just an integration. It's a partnership designed to streamline spend management, improve compliance, and give your finance teams the clarity they need to make smarter decisions faster. Tory, we've talked about ERP control, but when you layer in Emburse, there's another piece that stands out, and that's the flexibility and spend management. The bring your own card model, for example, is a huge differentiator. Can you explain how that works and why it's so impactful for finance teams using Emburse and Sage? Thanks, Tyler. That's that's a great question. I think, the combination of Sage and Emburse is so powerful because it blends that ERP control with the flexibility and spend management. So the break bring your own card model allows employees to use their existing corporate or even personal cards, while finance teams can maintain full visibility and policy control through Emburse. Emburse doesn't disrupt what's already working for you and for your teams. We're meant to fit seamlessly into your, Sage Intacct environment, and we're embracing the systems, the card programs, the relationships that your team already relies on. Thanks, Tori. Do you wanna share a real story of a customer we have? I would love to, and I think this is a good follow-up from the poll that we had earlier. So today, I'm gonna talk a little bit about Frisco First. They were dealing with missing transactions, receipts, and invoices. I think what they had was a quarter of receipts were lost. Sometimes they've been scribbled on. Otherwise, admins needed to track down expenses and signatures, and the time spent on these manual tasks was extreme. Within two months of going live, with Emburse, Frisco First saved over forty hours a week by eliminating the need to reenter data data manually into Sage Intacct, as well as greatly ramping up productivity. So month month end closing month end was a much smoother experience for them overall. Perfect. Thank you. And what makes clients like Frisco First successful? What advice would you give, to prospects considering implementing Emburse Sage? I would say that, implementation is a bit of a team sport. You need to have the, the right stakeholders aligned in order to be successful. So bringing your IT, your finance, your approvers, and your change champions to table early on in the process will help you be successful long term. It will help to drive adoption throughout the organization, and also designing your, your Emburse experience with a balance of accounting needs and also user needs. So looking at critical data points that matter most in Sage Intacct and designing a workflow in Emburse that makes everyday tasks very simple for employees. Perfect. Thanks, Troy. Alright. Brandon, do you wanna talk about Yeah. Looking ahead? Yes. So let's let's talk a little bit about that. I think that Frisco first story is really an exceptional example of this. Right? Why does automation matter now more than ever? Just from a baseline. Right? Eliminating the manual entry process. Right? Getting away from the idea of copying and pasting, chasing receipts, like a quarter of receipts is insane. Right? Spend data, capturing that data and syncing it automatically across all of your systems reduces errors for your team and buys you guys time back. Kind of some of the secondary advantages of this though. Right? It also speeds up approval. Right? With intelligent workflows, you get expenses that are instantly routed to the right people, helping reimburse your employees and pay your vendors much more quickly without those bottlenecks that you get in manual processes. The third advantage is that automation really does build up resilience within the organization. Right? In uncertain markets, you need real time insight to make those quick, informed decisions. Automation gives you that visibility much, much faster so that you guys aren't flying blind when conditions change for your team. And then finally, there's ESG, which is the environmental, social, and governance components. Right? Organizations tracking, we're starting to get into the idea of tracking things like emission and sustainability metrics so I can get tax credits and things like that for it, specifically around travel. So tying in these automations simplifies the ability to collect data so that when you want to start moving towards that ESG space, you have the ability to do so much more quickly and much more conveniently. So in short, these automations aren't just simple conveniences for your team. They become competitive advantages, buying you guys back time, creating resilience within your organization, and speeding up things like your approval processes for your teams. Thanks, Brandon. Tori, do you wanna talk about some of the best practices for those looking to set up those integrations? Absolutely. So choosing the right integration type is incredibly necessary. It's making sure that you understand how often you need information, updated between your Sage environment and Emburse, whether that means using an API, a direct integration, or, looking into, what type of file transfers and what type of information that you need, moving back and forth. Integration frequency is also, really important, making sure that you know how often information will change. Perhaps you have a project list that gets updated frequently. You need to make sure that, you have all that information that you need for an expense to be properly, properly submitted within Emburse. Mapping data accurately between systems. And I think that comes back to looking at your integration and implementation team, making sure you know what information is going to be necessary for posting successfully and that it's available and mapped accurately in your Emburse products. Monitoring and maintaining the integration. So we we had a short clip there. It was a fast one. So there's a section that we always include in our integrations in terms of visibility, making sure that you can see what is posting, and understand if there are any errors that you need to take a look at so that you are able to move information across successfully and that you're not missing transactions, maybe due to a misconfiguration or, a timing issue with your integration. So making sure you have the tools that you need to to view, that things are posting and that, everything is, successfully moving between each system is important. Perfect. Thank you, Tori. And thank you to the rest of our speakers. We do want to set aside some time for questions today. So I do see a couple in the chat. But, before we do that, I I'm gonna put Tory on the spot and ask another question here. The Sage connector is fairly new, for Emburse. And I'm just curious, Tory, for anybody who is already using Emburse and Sage, and has that legacy connection in place, why should they consider moving over to the new connector? Well, I I think it it it shows that we have had a long standing relationship, with Sage Intacct. We, have developed integrations since, I think it's 2014 might be our our first one on the marketplace, and we are always looking to innovate and improve. So our our newer integrations that we're releasing, similar to the, Emburse, professional, short clip that we had there, they're looking at we're looking at new ways to connect more accurately, more efficiently, and making sure that all of those frequencies, those tools that you have as administrators are updated so that you can leverage all of that, Sage Intacct ERP goodness right in your inverse, system. Perfect. Thank you. And I do see we do have a couple of questions. They are mostly about that connector, and some inverse product questions here. So, Victoria, I am gonna put you on the spot a little bit more, as we go through a couple of these. One, one of our questions is asking about the road map for, audit trail to Emburse Pro. Is that on, is there an audit trail on the road map for Emburse Professional? I think it's question. Okay. In terms of the the integration, what we do include in our export from, Emburse Professional, into Sage Intacct is we do include the, receipts. So when you have a posting that's made into, professional, it will include information to help you with that audit history, but you'll see the receipts are also attached, natively as well, to any of the expense reports or, vendor bills or or cash management transactions that we send across. Okay. I hope that answered the question. If not, please feel free to provide some more context as to what you're looking for. We can definitely dig into that for you. There's also a question here, about, currently using Tally. Will our account be automatically transitioned to Emburse Spend? We can absolutely follow-up with you afterwards to, like, to to leverage and burst spend. It's absolutely a a a great product. It's good for, really leveraging all of that information that we just talked about, through the sync with Sage Intacct, great interface. We can do a follow-up and and discuss your options there. Okay. Great. Yeah. Some of these we might, have to do some follow-up for. If you guys have, specific questions about your processes or you're interested in learning more about how the Emburse or, Sage solutions best fit your needs, I would definitely check out, that link in the docs tab. We can set up some time with, an Inverse or a Sage rep and get you connected to the right people to answer your questions. Let's see here. We have some questions too about, updating the connection or some dashboards. I think that in those cases, definitely reach out. If you guys are already a customer and you have, an legacy connection in place and you're looking to update connect with your customer success rep, we can also, have them reach out to you after this call as well. Yeah. So going through the questions here, guys, it does look like a lot of these are scenario specific. So what we'll do is we'll have, somebody reach out to discuss your specific needs, and connect with you one on one to make sure that we are able to handle the the needs that you guys are inquiring about. Jason, I see your message about inverse versus ramp in the chat too here. I would highly check out, highly recommend checking out some of our materials, on the Emburse website and connecting with a rep, who can talk to you about what exactly you're looking for and see if the Emburse solution, aligns with what you need there too. Yes. Can I get a comparison of all the Intacct products you offer? Yes. You can find the compare you can find details on our website. We can also send you comparison information. Again, guys, your best bet if you are looking for specific information around, the Emburse or Sage Solutions is going to be to use that link in the docs resources. That way we can connect you with all the right people. But glad to hear there's so much interest. We definitely want will be reaching out to everybody, after today's call and make sure that we can answer all of your questions. That's fine. Perfect. We will definitely get you guys more information. Any questions though for, our speakers in attendance today specifically about, wanting to know a little bit more about Emburse or Sage, our relationship, and the connector that we've built. If there's anything that you guys would like us to dive into deeper, we do have a couple more minutes here. So I'll let you guys throw your chat questions in the chat there for our speakers. Alright. Perfect. Well, thank you guys so much, for joining us today. Like I said, we appreciate all the interest, and we'll definitely be reaching out to everybody, whose questions we didn't get to. We'll make sure to connect everybody with the right people here. And with that, we're gonna go ahead and close out our webinar for today. We thank you all so much for joining us and being in attendance. And if you would like to connect with us, after this call, again, please check out that link in the docs tab. We appreciate you guys' time, and have a good rest of your day.