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Save time and increase accuracy at period-end with Advanced Allocations | Baker Tilly

Finance professional allocating revenues and expenses

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Save time and increase accuracy at period-end with Advanced Allocations

Nov. 21, 2023 · Authored by Brett Michalson

A crucial component of financial management is accurate financial allocations, the process of allocating revenues and expenses to various activities or projects within an organization.

Understanding financial allocations

Accurate financial allocations are vital for leaders to make strategic decisions regarding the distribution of an organization's resources to maximize productivity, optimize costs, mitigate risks and achieve objectives. It serves as the backbone of sound financial management and is instrumental to an organization's success and competitiveness. Allocation accounting is key to ensuring that these allocations are done with precision.

Examples of allocations include:

Commission expenses based on the prior month's revenue
Professional service labor costs to projects and customers by hours worked
Rent and utilities expense by square footage of locations
Not-for-profit management salaries to the fund-restricted programs the managers are responsible for based on costs incurred by the program
Marketing expenses to all entities based on department expenses
Expenses paid to a specific vendor and/or department based on usage of items

Historically, tedious, time-consuming spreadsheets and manual, error-prone processes have slowed down period-end processing, bogging down resources and producing inaccurate results. In some cases, the complexity of allocations can be so overwhelming that organizations won’t even do them at all.

How Advanced Allocations can help

Advanced Allocations by Baker Tilly gives you the option to set up allocations exactly as your organization needs them. Living directly within Sage Intacct, Advanced Allocations allows finance leaders to create their on-going allocations within a single user interface and ultimately automate their allocations accounting process.

Advanced Allocations is a comprehensive allocation solution that is:

Brett Michalson

Brett Michalson

Principal

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Customizable and flexible

Advanced Allocations allows organizations to tailor allocation methods to align with their unique financial requirements. By having the ability to calculate percentages, Advanced Allocations allows users to base their allocations off any desired statistical data (such as revenue, budgeted revenue, geo account groups, headcount, etc.) and are not tied down to traditional transaction-based allocation methods.

Organizations also have the option to specify the destination for the allocation within the program as users can instruct the program to directly transfer specific expenses to a particular entity, department or any other dimension of their choosing.

Additional customization benefits include:

Allocating revenue and expenses to multiple dimensions at once with unlimited dimension filters
Automate reversals
Allocate groups of accounts at once in a single allocation
Allocate directly within your generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) accounting books or to separate management reporting books
Ability to auto-activate inactive dimensions

Fast and accurate

Advanced Allocations reduces the time spent on creating spreadsheets and eliminates manual, error-prone processes when attempting to complete the month-end allocation processes. Traditionally, allocation challenges lie in having to export data to external tools and invest hours in to data manipulation and formulas, which can be error-prone and lead to inaccuracies in journal entries.

Once configured, Advanced Allocations requires approximately one minute to initiate the allocation, and within minutes, these allocations are accurately processed and correctly posted. As a result, organizations are experiencing substantial time and cost savings.

Additional benefits include:

Creating allocations quickly with a simple single page user interface
Running all allocations at once, in sequence, so results can be used by subsequent allocations
Increased accuracy by minimizing the use of manual processes and offline spreadsheets

Continuously improving

As an add-on module, Advanced Allocations is continuously being updated with improvements. Customer feedback is welcome and encouraged as it allows Baker Tilly to offer tailor-made enhancements designed to improve the user experience.

Users can anticipate receiving regular Advanced Allocations updates, ensuring continuous improvement and an elevated user experience.

Detailed allocation support

Each allocation is timestamped and includes an attachment with detailed descriptions of each action taken during allocation, making it easier for finance professionals to understand the reasoning behind allocation calculations. Most importantly, this detailed allocation support promotes transparency in the allocation process as it ensures that finance teams and stakeholders can trace allocation-related activities step by step, an essential component for ensuring accuracy in financial reporting.

Built on Sage Intacct, supported by Baker Tilly

Advanced Allocations integrates like any other Sage Intacct add-on module. After purchasing, organizations can have it installed in less than 48 hours. Baker Tilly provides additional support by collaborating with the organization to build out two starting allocations. This collaboration helps organizations define their allocation pool and allocation basis, highlighting the best way to look at and validate their allocation data. After configuration, the program is ready to run automatically with minimal oversight.

After the build out of the provisional allocations, Baker Tilly can train users on the tool. Post-implementation support is provided through our Advanced Allocations Help Desk and ongoing support team.