Sage Intacct integrations with spend management: Worth it?

If you run a global finance function, complexity comes with the job. You deal with multiple entities, currencies, and compliance rules every day. The real challenge isn’t growth. It’s keeping data clean and staying in control as everything scales.

Integrating Sage Intacct with a spend management platform helps you do that. You get consistent data, one set of reports, and audit-ready records across every entity.

No one wants to key in supplier invoices by hand or match figures across systems by eye. That’s slow and error-prone. Manual entries lead to duplicates, wrong amounts, and long hours spent fixing avoidable mistakes. Automatic data transfer removes that risk. Which is why if you invest in an integration between Sage Intacct and a spend management platform, it’s going to pay off.

Finance complexity needs connected systems

As you scale, the workload doesn’t just grow with the number of people submitting expenses. Going international also adds layers like paying suppliers in different currencies and tracking department spend across several legal entities. Things shift fast as your company grows, so it helps to put the right financial infrastructure in place early.

Sage Intacct is a solid step up from basic accounting tools. It gives you multi-entity support and dimension-based accounting, so you get a stronger foundation for structured control. But on its own, it can’t give you real-time spend visibility or the level of automation you need at scale.

Connect Sage Intacct to a spend management platform, and it becomes a fully linked financial system. You remove siloed spend processes, cut reporting delays, and avoid manual reconciliation. You get one view, faster decisions, and cleaner data across every entity.

What makes Sage Intacct popular in mid-market finance

Launched over 25 years ago, there are two major reasons for Sage Intacct’s enduring popularity:

1. It supports multi-entity and advanced dimension-based reporting. You can track your spend by different dimensions like department, location, project, or custom dimensions. By creating custom dimensions, you can match your reporting to how your business operates, making the data easier to understand for everyone.
2. It’s modular and cloud-native. The modular setup means it’s all ready to grow with you. It handles project accounting, inventory management, and VAT tracking across multiple jurisdictions. So if you’re a CFO managing complex financial operations, there’s no doubt that Sage Intacct is a powerful tool.

Core problems mid-market teams face without integration

It’s true, Sage Intacct is a great piece of software. But, if you don’t currently integrate with a spend management platform, you’re missing out on things like real-time employee spend, integrated corporate card programmes, and payment and approval workflows. Integrating with a complementary system can elevate your financial management to a level that gives you up-to-the-minute data to make impactful spending or resource allocation decisions. Decisions that can change the course of your organisation for the better.

Let’s dive a little deeper into some of these core problems.

• Disconnected spend data across card, invoice, and reimbursement systems. Manually transferring data from your expense system to Sage is long and error-prone. And you can imagine just how tedious this process becomes as your teams, departments, and entities multiply.
• Delayed data synchronisation distorts budget accuracy and hinders real-time forecasting. Delays mean you don’t have real-time data flow, so when transactions finally appear in your ERP, someone has spent the money already, meaning you’re making decisions on outdated information. The worst case? Project managers think they still have some budget remaining when it’s actually long gone.
• Manual vendor data handling increases the likelihood of duplication, misclassification, and non-compliance across entities. The more frequently your accounts payable team have to involve themselves with data input (i.e. keying in invoice data or matching the invoice with the receipt note or purchase order), the more likely it is that they’ll make mistakes.
• Manual close cycles slow enterprise reporting, reduce transparency, and distract finance leadership from strategic analysis. Each month, you’re left chasing missing receipts and documentation and correcting any miscoded expenses. It’s at this point that you realise all the incomplete manual data entries. And all of a sudden, the focus is on all this rather than strategising or analysing.

The strategic advantages of Sage Intacct and spend management integration

The integration between Sage Intacct and Payhawk creates a unified financial ecosystem designed for scale, control, and compliance. Here are the top four ways that enterprise finance teams benefit:

1. Accelerated month-end close and data accuracy

By automating your data flows, you remove unnecessary human intervention, which reduces bottlenecks. Automation also helps flag errors before your closing periods, so now, instead of panicking your way through month-end, you resolve issues in real-time and close quicker.

2. SOX compliance and audit trail

With a native Sage Intacct integration, you can maintain comprehensive audit trails, which also supports SOX compliance. The system records all transactions from the moment the spend happens to the final posting in the general ledger. That means an auditor can easily trace any expense right back to its original receipt. So there’s no need for finance to collect documentation.

3. Support for dimensions and subsidiaries

When integrating two tech systems, it’s essential that they can work together to minimise manual data entry. Through the Payhawk Sage Intacct integration, you can sync all charts of accounts and lots of other dimensions like locations, departments, and custom fields. That means the two systems perfectly sync; no need for reworking anything later on.

4. General ledger logic-first export

You can set up export templates that fit your general ledger and accounting workflows. Pick the fields, groups, and mappings you want to send to your spend management system, like expenses, deposits, and line-item details. You won’t be stuck with a fixed file format.

The deep capabilities of Payhawk’s Sage Intacct integration

The following features aren’t just nice-to-haves; they’re what make an enterprise-ready solution.

Andrei Banea, COO at Big Bang, describes:

Payhawk's Sage Intacct integration is exceptionally comprehensive! We're impressed with its bank reconciliation and multi-entity management capabilities. The automated two-way sync supports clients' digitalisation efforts by hosting real-time supplier data for up-to-date insights.

• Multi-entity support with split exports. This means you can automatically distribute single expense reports or transactions into multiple appropriate places with Sage Intacct. We’re talking about different projects, departments, cost centres, or general ledger accounts. So if an employee travels for a project that spans multiple entities, our integration will automatically allocate it based on your predefined rules.
• Reconciliation of bills and payments is simpler with automatic matching. There’s no more manually connecting payments with invoice records. Instead, the system understands when a card transaction happens, matching it with the correct expense report and syncing everything seamlessly into Sage Intacct.
• Bank feed export for reconciliation. The integration automatically transfers bank transaction data from Payhawk into Sage Intacct. You can finally say goodbye to the manual download-and-upload performance.
• Full dimension mapping. You can sync all standard and user-defined dimensions in Sage Intacct to use them directly in Payhawk. So employees see the same projects and cost centres in the Payhawk mobile expense app as finance sees in the ERP. Everyone is on the same page.

The step-by-step setup for Sage Intacct integration

It can seem a little daunting to set up a brand new system, one that will affect every financial touchpoint across the business. But we’re here to show you that it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

Step 1: Prepare your system

The best first step is to clean your chart of accounts and custom dimensions. You want to transfer data that is accurate and useful. That means consolidating duplicate entities, amending your dimensional structure in Sage Intacct so it reflects how you want to track spend, and reviewing things like approval workflows and tax codes, too. Optimise all this now, not after integration!

Step 2: Connect Payhawk and Sage Intacct

Our native Payhawk and Sage Intacct integration setup guide is simple to follow. From mapping dimensions to tax fields and suppliers, Payhawk’s support team can help guide you through the process, but it’s relatively straightforward when you’ve done the right prepping.

Step 3: Sync and validate

Always test the integration with sample expenses before pushing it live across your organisation. You need to check that your expense types match nicely with the dimensions and coding. Now’s the time to iron out any errors.

We have an overview of shared data with Sage Intacct if you’re not sure what to expect from the direct integration.

FAQs: What finance teams ask about this integration

Does Payhawk support all Sage Intacct dimensions?

Yes, it does. Including custom dimensions. So we support all standard fields like location, department, class, and project, plus any custom dimensions you configure in Sage Intacct.

How do bank transactions and reconciliations work?

Bank transaction data flows from Payhawk into Sage Intacct. It pre-matches transactions, so you only need to review and confirm in your bank reconciliation module, rather than manually match them.

Can I connect multiple Sage Intacct entities to one Payhawk account?

Yes, you can. Our integration has multi-entity support built in. So if you have multiple legal entities or are operating across multiple countries or business units, you can manage all spend under one roof, while keeping them separate in your ERP.

What kind of audit logs does the integration provide?

Our integration with Sage Intacct logs every transaction, including expenses, payments, bank deposits, and more. The system records each with timestamps and user actions. All receipts, invoices and supporting documents are attached to journal entries, too, making them audit-ready.
Other things Payhawk records include expense creation, approvals, comms, and policy enforcement. All this provides finance teams with full visibility and spend control, helping to enforce spend accountability across the organisation.

How fast is the setup process?

For technical activation, the process can take as little as 15 days. That’s because our integration is native, and the process is designed to be as low-disruptive as possible.

Empower your finance team

With an expense management integration, you unburden finance teams from manual administrative tasks. Instead, they can focus on analysis and decision-making. Ensure your financial infrastructure isn’t just an afterthought as you scale. You need the proper connected systems to scale with efficiency. Book a personalised consultation.