LBMC Technology Solutions Blogs
Dimensional Accounting: A New Way for Finance to Work
As organizations grow, so does the complexity of their financial reporting. New entities, departments, locations, programs, grants, or classes all demand visibility, but many finance teams try to manage that complexity by continuously adding accounts to their general ledger. The result is an overgrown chart of accounts, rigid reports, and far too much time spent manipulating spreadsheets.
This is exactly the problem dimensional accounting was designed to solve, and it’s one of the core reasons companies choose Sage Intacct.
In traditional accounting systems, reporting relies heavily on the chart of accounts. Want to track expenses by department? Add accounts. Need reporting by location or project? Add more accounts. Over time, this creates a bloated GL structure that is difficult to maintain and even harder to analyze.
Moving Document Attachments to External Storage in Business Central
Every scanned invoice, vendor packing slip, and signed sales order attachment in Business Central lives in the same place: your production database. That’s fine until it isn’t — until you’re staring at a capacity warning and realizing that years of PDFs are eating into the same storage limit as your actual transactional data. Business Central now has a built-in answer to that problem: external file storage. Here’s what it actually involves.
The files themselves move off your database and onto external storage; only the link back to the record stays in BC. Users don’t see a difference — they still open, add, and manage attachments from the same Attachments FactBox they always have. What changes is where the bytes actually live.
Critical Things to Check Before Importing Data into Sage Intacct
Data imports can be one of the most powerful features in Sage Intacct, allowing you to load large amounts of information quickly and efficiently. Whether you’re importing customers, vendors, GL accounts, journal entries, or transactional data, imports can save significant time — but only when the data is clean and formatted correctly.
A consistent pre import checklist helps you catch issues early and avoid the most common errors. Below are the top things to check before you hit “Upload,” along with the mistakes they typically prevent.
Purchasing and Cost-Management Approvals in Sage Intacct
Effective purchasing controls are essential for any organization that wants to manage spending responsibly and maintain clean audit results. Within Sage Intacct, purchasing and cost-management approvals are designed around a straightforward principle: no single person should be able to request, approve, record, and pay for the same expense.
This separation of duties is one of the most important safeguards auditors look for when evaluating internal financial controls. By structuring approvals carefully, organizations can reduce risk, maintain transparency, and create a reliable audit trail for every transaction.
Can Sage Intacct Employee Users Approve Transactions?
Organizations implementing Sage Intacct often ask a practical question when setting up workflows and internal controls: Can employee users approve transactions in the system?
The answer is yes—but with an important condition. Employee users can approve transactions in Sage Intacct only when the employee also exists as an active system user with the proper role permissions and is included in an approval workflow.
Understanding this distinction is essential for designing effective approval processes and maintaining strong financial controls.
Construction in Progress in Accounting
Construction in Progress (CIP) accounting represents one of the most complex areas in fixed asset management. The stakes are significant: miscategorized costs trigger audit adjustments, delayed capitalization decisions impact depreciation schedules and tax positions, and poor documentation creates compliance vulnerabilities that surface years later. Construction in Progress is used when a company is building something that takes time to complete—like a new facility, major equipment, or large infrastructure. Instead of recording these costs as expenses or completed assets right away, CIP keeps them in a temporary holding account until the project is ready for use.
This treatment matters because it ensures financial statements accurately reflect what a company owns and how much it invests in long-term assets.
From ERP Data to Strategic Intelligence
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems capture nearly every financial transaction across an organization. General ledger entries, accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchasing, inventory, payroll, and operational metrics all reside in one place. Yet many finance leaders still struggle to answer fundamental business questions quickly.
The problem is rarely a lack of data. The problem is transforming that data into meaningful insight.
As organizations face increasing pressure to improve profitability, manage cash flow, and respond to changing market conditions, finance teams are shifting their focus from producing reports to delivering strategic intelligence. The organizations that succeed are those that transform ERP data into actionable analytics.
$545,000 Phishing Scam That Was a Wake-up Call
Most cyberattacks don’t begin with sophisticated malware, ransomware, or a dramatic network breach.
They begin with trust.
A familiar email arrives. A routine request is made. A payment process that has happened dozens of times before moves forward without raising alarms. Then someone realizes the money never reached its intended destination.
That’s exactly what happened in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, where more than $545,000 intended for a contractor was instead transferred to a fraudulent bank account after an attacker inserted themselves into what appeared to be a legitimate business conversation.
The incident quickly became national news, not because of an advanced cyberattack, but because of how ordinary it looked.
For organizations across Tennessee and beyond, this story serves as a reminder that cybersecurity is no longer just an IT issue. It is a financial, operational, and business continuity issue.
Your Budget Isn’t What You Think It Is…Unless You’re Tracking Commitments
You approved the budget. The numbers looked right. And then, somewhere between the purchase order and the invoice, you ran out of money. If that scenario sounds familiar, the problem probably isn’t your budget. It’s what your budget doesn’t know about yet. Most financial reports show you two things: what you budgeted and what you’ve spent. That seems like enough until you factor in everything that’s been ordered but not yet invoiced. Purchase orders that have been issued. Contracts that are active. Goods that are in transit.
None of those show up as expenses until an invoice is posted. But the money is already spoken for.
That gap between what you’ve spent and what you’re committed to spending is where budget surprises live. And for organizations managing tight margins, grant restrictions, or project-level budgets, that gap can be the difference between finishing a period in control and finishing it over budget.