2026 Sage Intacct Best Practices: How to Optimize Your ERP and Maximize ROI

Sage Intacct is designed to evolve alongside your business. With quarterly product releases and continuous innovation, organizations that actively manage and optimize their Sage Intacct environment consistently realize greater efficiency, stronger reporting, and a higher return on investment.

Yet many organizations still approach Sage Intacct reactively – adopting new features sporadically and relying on legacy configurations that no longer reflect how the business operates. Ensure your Sage Intacct ERP scales with your organization with these best practices:

1. Establish a Quarterly Sage Intacct Release Management Process

Sage delivers new functionality every quarter across financial management, reporting, automation, and integrations. Without a structured review process, valuable enhancements often go unused.

Best practice: Implement a formal quarterly release review that includes:

• Reviewing Sage Intacct release notes relevant to your modules.
• Evaluating new features against current pain points.
• Identifying process, reporting, or automation opportunities.
• Assigning clear ownership for adoption and change management.

Organizations with a defined release management process are better positioned to reduce manual work, avoid unnecessary customizations, and stay aligned with Sage’s product roadmap.

2. Ensure Your Sage Intacct Configuration Reflects Today’s Business

Most Sage Intacct implementations are designed for a specific moment in time. As companies grow and evolve, the original configuration may no longer support current operational needs.

Common triggers for misalignment include:

• New revenue models or pricing structures.
• Mergers, acquisitions, or new legal entities.
• Increased reporting, audit, or compliance requirements.
• Expanded use of automation and third-party integrations.

Best practice: Periodically reassess whether your chart of accounts, dimensions, workflows, and reports still reflect how the business actually operates, not how it operated at go-live.

3. Define Clear Ownership and Governance for Your ERP

Sage Intacct often sits at the center of finance, operations, and leadership decision-making. Without defined governance, enhancements stall and inefficiencies compound over time.

High-performing organizations clearly define:

• ERP strategy ownership versus day-to-day administration.
• A structured intake and prioritization process for enhancements.
• When to leverage external Sage Intacct advisory support.

Best practice: Treat ERP governance as an ongoing discipline so the platform continues to deliver value as the business scales.

4. Get a Sage Intacct Health Check

Even well-managed environments benefit from an independent review. A Sage Intacct Health Check provides an objective assessment of how effectively your system is configured, utilized, and integrated within the broader business ecosystem.

Best practice: Conduct a Health Check every 2-3 years, or following major events such as:

• Rapid growth or organizational change.
• M&A activity.
• Leadership or strategy shifts.
• Persistent close, reporting, or data challenges.

A comprehensive Sage Intacct Health Check goes beyond core configuration and includes a holistic review of how Sage Intacct supports end-to-end business processes.

This often includes assessing:

• Core configuration and dimensional structure to ensure scalability and reporting flexibility.
• Reporting, dashboards, and data accuracy, including executive and operational visibility.
• Automation opportunities and manual workarounds that impact close, billing, or reconciliations.
• Customizations, integrations, and technical debt, with a focus on long-term maintainability.
• How Sage Intacct interacts with upstream and downstream systems, such as CRM, billing platforms, payroll, AP automation, or data warehouses.
• Cross-system business processes that traverse Sage Intacct, including Order-to-Cash (O2C), Procure-to-Pay (P2P), revenue recognition, and financial close.

In many cases, inefficiencies are not isolated to Sage Intacct itself but arise at the intersections between systems, where data handoffs, ownership, or controls may be unclear or outdated.

The outcome of a Health Check is a prioritized optimization roadmap, helping organizations address immediate risks while positioning Sage Intacct and the surrounding systems to support future growth.

5. Embed a Culture of Continuous Optimization

Organizations that get the most from Sage Intacct view optimization as continuous rather than episodic.

Best practice: High-performing finance teams consistently improve efficiency, strengthen reporting, and avoid costly re-implementations by combining:

• Quarterly release management.
• Intentional ERP governance.
• Periodic Sage Intacct Health Checks.

To integrate the latest best practices in your Sage Intacct environment, contact CrossCountry Consulting.