This article will help you understand some of the main concepts of Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) and how you can integrate with Sage Intacct.

SIP (formerly known as Budgeta) is a web-based budgeting and planning application for small and medium-sized businesses. SIP offers basic features and solutions that cover the entire budgeting and planning lifecycle and replaces the often error-prone dependency that businesses have on spreadsheets and emails in the budgeting process. The application also offers advanced features including collaboration, modeling, reporting, and forecasting. Built-in tools simplify the process of creating your budget structure, adding budget amounts, and sharing budget information with other team members.
For an in-depth introduction to SIP, watch the video:

SIP is simple to use, yet powerful and rich in features, as well as affordable. It can be deployed quickly and easily. And it's also web-based, so it's available anytime, from anywhere.

With SIP, you can focus on your business plan, instead of thinking about how to build your cash plan or profit and loss forecast.  

SIP is designed for everyone — not only for finance teams that are naturally involved in the planning process, but also for management teams or board members, and basically anyone who needs or receives planning data. Put your business first and your finances second. 

Once you've built your budget and entered your budget amounts, viewing the big picture is easy. Customizable dashboards and widgets offer a graphical overview of your budget and filter capabilities let you focus on specific areas. Additionally, advanced reporting functions offer both financial and non-financial reporting, and can be easily exported from SIP to Excel.

The integration with Sage Intacct from SIP helps guide you through the setup of your budget structure to reflect your organizational hierarchy or management and budget-ownership structure based on your company data in Intacct.

With the integration, you can easily and quickly share data between the two applications to:

In SIP, every budget line in your budget structure represents a business item such as a specific expense or revenue item, employee, capital expense, loan, etc. The budget lines are organized in a “tree-like” structure under different branches, such as research and development, sales and marketing, headquarter revenues, etc. The more information you enter per item, the more accurate your budget.

The budget hierarchy is unlimited, so if your budget is managed by departments or by locations, for example, you can create more complex combinations like arranging first “by department” and then “by location”. Then you can easily share parts of the budget with the relevant budget owners.

SIP offers several methods for creating a new budget. The first option is Use my Sage Intacct data. You can also build and import budget data from Microsoft Excel (a very common method since the majority of companies use Excel for budgeting). Or, you can combine the methods by first creating a budget structure using the integration with Sage Intacct, and then import the budget data from Excel. Additionally, you can upload an existing SIP budget file, or use one of the SIP “built-in” templates and manually enter your budget amounts.

If you are a Sage Intacct user, the integration with SIP offers you the quickest way to create a new budget. It is also the most effective in terms of importing actuals, or exporting your budget at a later time.

The following steps outline the process of creating a budget using your company data from Sage Intacct:

If you haven't done so yet, enable the Sage Intacct Planning (SIP) integration from your Sage Intacct company, and make sure you have the right permission level to use the integration. 

When you select the option to Use my Sage Intacct data to build your budget, the wizard:

For more information on creating a new budget, go to: 

Once your budget structure is complete, you can enter your preliminary budget amounts, or share parts of the budget with department or location managers (or respective stakeholders) so that they can enter their budget data. Built-in templates help you enter budget amounts associated with budget lines. You can choose from several built-in templates, such as: 

So now that you've built your budget, you can take a look at the big picture with help from your dashboards and reports.

The Sheets view is, in essence, your report view. From the Sheets tab, you can access all of your reports. There are three financial reports - Cash, Profit & Loss, and your Balance sheet (or statement), and three non-financial reports - Bookings, Headcount, and Model.

The SIP dashboard lets you quickly see your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), and budgeting and forecasting data at a glance, resulting in better-informed business decisions. You can add multiple dashboards, add widgets, and create new or customize your existing widgets to display your budget data in a way that's most important to you and your daily activities.

From both the Dashboard and Sheets view, use the filters to adjust your views or click the eye icon to display or hide the filter options. For example, you can change your view from monthly to quarterly, or filter on a specific location. You can easily create a report in Microsoft Excel or PDF. Simply click on Create report and choose the report type and structure.

One of the biggest challenges in managing a budget is how to share your information with your peers and colleagues. Very often different people manage different parts of a company's budget. Using the Share feature, you can share the budget you created with other people, as well as let all those involved in budgeting and planning work on the same source.

Share your budget in view or modify mode; share an entire budget or only parts of it. This capability is extremely important, especially for larger organizations that have different people managing different parts of the budget, like department managers. Advanced sharing options also let you hide confidential headcount data.

For more information on how to share your budget, watch the video:

To review and compare your budget versus actuals, you can easily import your actuals from a spreadsheet or from Sage Intacct using the integration from SIP.

To export your budget from SIP to Sage Intacct, you can use the integration from Budgeting and Planning.

Watch the video:

Built-in capabilities let you quickly create budget lines for your most common budgeting needs, including calculating assets, viewing different revenue models, and employee and contractor planning. Since most companies rely on their own financial models and assumptions that they've built into their budgets, the financial modeling feature enables you to create these models in a spreadsheet-like format. Then you can use the models in your budget in Budgeting and Planning, such as
financial models (like commissions) and business models (like building a marketing funnel to predict sales bookings).

You can also create a new model using a template from a library of some of the most common models that companies use today and add them to any budget. Aside from using model data in the budget, model data can be viewed in the sheets, added to the dashboard, and shared with other people who have access to the budget.

Watch the video:

SIP gives you the ability to manage budget versions and forecasts. Versions are helpful during the budgeting period, prior to the start of the budgeted year. As you're working on your budget, a budget version is auto-saved every few minutes, so that you have a history of your work, and can revert to a previous version, if needed. Snapshots can also be captured and permanently saved. After you finalize your budget, you can lock a base budget version, and then continue to update the plan to create forecasts throughout the budget year, combined with actuals data. You can compare the base budget and forecasts side-by-side in sheets and dashboards, compare to actuals, or view all of the versions in a waterfall view to see the plan progress through time.

Watch the video: 

Scenarios, or “what if” scenarios, let you test how changing budget items and assumptions impact your plan, without making changes to the budget itself. For instance, you can test what might happen if your revenue targets aren't met, or if they are exceeded. Changes can be high level, or specific, like changing a planned new hire date. You can create as many scenarios as needed and view comparisons between the scenarios and the budget displayed in the sheets and dashboard.

Watch the video: