Extending the Power of Sage Intacct with Smart Rules and Smart Events

We often talk about Sage Intacct’s reporting power and how you can draw deep insights from the data held within. Today, we wanted to talk about two Sage Intacct tools designed to act on that data. Meet Sage Intacct Smart Rules and Smart Events. Two powerful features you can configure to warn or prevent certain things from happening in the software, notify you of conditions you care about, and take action in response.

Webinar: Leverage the Power of Smart Rules and Smart Events. Watch on demand

What are Smart Rules and Smart Events?

Smart Rules and Smart Events are in a category of tools often called business activity monitoring. This simply means that you can configure them to continually monitor your Sage Intacct database waiting for something specific to happen — and then act on that action.

Both tools follow a basic configuration process:

1. Event Type – Do I want to warn, prevent, or take action?
2. Trigger – Should the rule turn on when a user adds, sets (changes), or deletes?
3. Action – What precisely should the message say or the rule do?

What kind of action can they take?

Smart Rules are gates — you configure them to either warn or prevent a user from performing an action. You indicate whether the rule should monitor adds, changes, or deletions and the text to display when the rule detects the condition you’re monitoring.

Smart Events are data validation tasks that perform an action when an event occurs. You configure Smart Events to take one of four kinds of actions, again in response to an addition, change, or deletion of Sage Intacct data.

1. Send an email
2. Push data to another cloud-based application through HTTP
3. Write to a log
4. Update data to Sage Intacct through API
5. Invoice, adjustment, Budget, etc.

Configuring Smart Events involves building the formulas to instruct the tool what it’s looking for and what to do if it finds it. Something like: “if a new order is created, and the total is more than $xx, then send an email to ABC, and include this text in the email.”

What kind of data can they act on?

You can configure both Smart Rules and Smart Events to act on any Sage Intacct object (customer, vendor, order entry transaction) and any document type (invoice, order, adjustment).

What are some examples of Smart Rules and Smart Events?

Smart Rules are pretty straightforward and we’re sure you’ve already thought about ways you could use their talents. Smart Events can trigger both simple and highly complex actions that broadly extend the power of Sage Intacct. Below are a few examples:

• Send an email to the sales manager each time an invoice over $xx is added.
• Populate a custom field on an invoice with dimension data from the customer record.
• Warn a user when trying to post a GL entry outside of a certain department.
• Prevent a user from adding a new purchase order without an attachment.
• Update a custom field on an invoice line based on a header level field.

Smart Rules and Smart Events are powerful ways to extend the functionality of Sage Intacct, customizing it to match your business rules and workflows. View our recorded webinar, Sage Intacct: Leveraging the Power of Smart Rules and Smart Events and don’t hesitate to contact us with your questions.