Mastering the art of accurate measurements

Accurately automate period-end allocations 

As businesses face pressure to optimize costs and drive growth, managing financial allocations has become increasingly important. With Baker Tilly's Advanced Allocations solution, businesses are enabled to enhance their financial insights, increase productivity and eliminate error-prone manual processes.  Benefits of our Advanced Allocations solution include: 

• Easy to use single page interface 
• Reduce errors and save time by minimizing manual processes 
• Allocate multiple dimensions at once 
• Allocate directly in GAAP accounting books or separate reporting books
• Ability to report pre and post-allocations 
• Use budget or actual amounts as the allocation pool or basis 

With Baker Tilly’s Advanced Allocations solution, businesses can more accurately automate period-end allocations. Instead of having to manually update percentages in Excel and download data from multiple sources to calculate percentages, Advanced Allocations calculates based on the parameters that you set. The tool aids businesses in saving time at the end of each month, allowing them to focus on more strategic aspects of their business. 

Advanced Allocations use cases 

 Some common use cases for our Advanced Allocations solution include:  

1.   Allocating commission expense based on the prior month's revenue 
2.   Allocating rent and utilities expenses by square footage of locations 
3.  Allocating marketing expenses to all entities based on department expenses 
4.   Allocating professional service labor codes to projects and customers by hours worked 
5.   Allocating not-for-profit management salaries to the fund-restricted programs the managers are responsible for based on costs incurred by the program 
6.   Allocating expenses paid to a specific vendor and/or department based on usage of items  

Preparing for your allocations 

When preparing for your allocations with Advanced Allocations, it is imperative to follow five steps to ensure optimal results. The five steps include:  

1. Defining your pool and your basis 

To prepare for your allocations, begin by clearly defining both your pool and your basis. Your allocation pool is what you want to allocate, and your allocation basis is how you want to allocate it. The best way to validate either the pool or the basis is to either run a general ledger report or a dimension balances report to really define those amounts. Our tool can drill down to a specific amount by using specific accounts/account groups along with specific dimensions or dimension groups. The tool will look at a general ledger account and a dimension combination, if applicable to come to the correct amounts. The key is that you need to be able to get to that value of either the pool or the basis on either of these reports by using the general ledger accounts/dimensions to isolate the amount. 

2. Identifying dimension requirements 

Identify your business's dimension requirements. Determine if your system has smart rules or dimensional relationships. Our tool posts a journal entry, and it must follow all restrictions set up within your Sage Intacct system. Knowing what requirements you have will help you set up the allocations properly.  

3. Training your team to properly code data 

Once you have your allocations set up, make sure to train your team so that they can code the data properly. If your team is not informed about what needs to be allocated, then you're not going to get precise allocations. Ensure that everybody who's coding data within Sage Intacct is aware of what needs to be allocated and how it is allocated. 

4. Identifying your reporting needs 

What are your reporting needs? Allocation journal entries can be posted to a user-defined book. This will allow for pre and post-allocation. If you don't need pre and post-allocation, we can post directly to your accrual books.   

5. Creating an allocation sequence  

Lastly, if you have multiple allocations, we can create an allocation sequence. What you need to define is if there are dependencies. Do I need to run my payroll allocation before I run my overhead allocation? If you do, then we can create a sequence and we'll run them in the order that we list them.

Enhancing your business's period-end processing doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Contact Baker Tilly today to learn how we can help improve your business intelligence and boost productivity.