Sage launches next gen AI timesheets app for Sage Intacct to help services businesses reduce revenue leakage

ATLANTA, Sept. 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Sage (FTSE: SGE), the market leader in cloud business management solutions, today announced the first artificial intelligence (AI) powered application built directly into the Sage Intacct cloud financial management system. Sage Intelligent Time, available online or via a mobile app, provides continuous, timely, and more accurate insights to better manage billable time in services-based businesses.

Sage Intelligent Time uses an AI-powered personal time assistant to enable service professionals to complete their timesheets more quickly and accurately by automatically reconstructing their workday. This also offers the ability to capture billable time more easily from one-off activities, such as email, that are often too time-intensive to track manually.

By helping to ensure all billable time is captured, Sage Intelligent Time reduces revenue leakage from either not billing, or under-billing, customers – enabling firms to improve project profitability and increase revenues. For example, by properly accounting for billable work and recovering just one hour of lost billable time per week, based on a $200/hour billing rate, a firm could generate up to $10,000 in additional revenue annually – per billable employee.

“Intelligent timesheets can provide a much-needed boost to professional service organizations that are trying to find ways to reduce revenue leakage that is commonly seen with traditional time entry,” said Aaron Harris, CTO, Sage. “We’re using the power of AI and machine learning to make a tedious, manual process more streamlined and accurate. We developed Sage Intelligent Time to enable services-based businesses to quickly capture the critical information needed to manage profitability and close the books on time, while securing revenue often lost due to unlogged, billable activity.”

Intelligent Timesheets Streamline Data Entry
Manually reconstructing the week’s activities for time entry often results in untimely, inaccurate, and incomplete timesheets. Sage Intelligent Time enables service professional to simply review automated suggestions from the personal time assistant based on activities during their work week. Users can make any necessary adjustments and then drag the items onto the timesheet – saving time and improving accuracy. Furthermore, the personal time assistant gets smarter with every activity review, saving users even more time as it learns.

Sage Intelligent Time also features a user-friendly mobile application, providing service professionals the ability to review and record billable time while working on the go. This can help eliminate the usual process of project staff spending valuable time attempting to reconstruct the last week (or two) for their timesheet. Accelerating the timesheet submission process also helps the finance team by eliminating the need to track down overdue timesheets, so they can close the books on time.

Sage Intacct customer and Sage Intelligent Time early adopter, Patricia Wakim, SVP of finance for M/A/R/C Research, a marketing research firm, commented: “Our project managers are typically very busy and required to juggle multiple projects, which can make time entry delayed and often less accurate. We depend on that time entry to get an understanding of the financial performance of our projects and catch any revenue leakage before it gets out of control. To streamline the process, Sage Intelligent Time helps suggest what should be entered instead of forcing our project managers to dig through their calendar and email to reconstruct the workweek. The automated alerts are also helpful for me, so I don’t have to play ‘timesheet cop’ and hound people to complete their timesheets.”

Improved Insights into Employee Utilization and Project Profitability
With timesheets completed on time and with better accuracy, Sage Intelligent Time helps project managers gain continuous visibility into project hours, including real-time project status and profitability information. Armed with these insights, managers can more accurately guide future project resourcing and pricing to optimize profitability as well as provide more precise forecasts.

In addition, as timesheets are more complete and capture all activity details, client invoices are more accurate and specific. Clients know exactly what they are paying for, which accelerates payments and cash by reducing the likelihood of invoice disputes and trimming.

Sage Intacct customer and Sage Intelligent Time early adopter, Sheri Petras, CEO and partner at CFI Group, a leader in customer experience measurement and business insight services, noted: “We bill our projects on a fixed-fee basis, so accurate project cost data is critical for us to understand how we’re performing and how to price future work. Getting dependable project labor costs can be difficult when our team is working on 10-15 different projects in any given week, often spending time on unscheduled tasks. With Sage Intelligent Time, we are much more confident that we have the most accurate understanding of our project status and costs, so we can make financially sound decisions about current projects and better price future work.”

Maintaining Privacy and User Control
User privacy is built into Sage Intelligent Time. The user is in complete control over what types of information to provide to their personal time assistant, and the activity data collected by the time assistant is visible only to the user. Once Sage Intelligent Time suggests a time entry, the user can review and adjust it before applying each suggested entry using a simple drag-and-drop interface.

To learn more about Sage Intelligent Time, watch this short overview video and visit the Sage Intelligent Time product page.

Availability
Sage Intelligent Time is currently in Early Adopter phase. It will be generally available from Sage Intacct and its network of channel partners in the U.S. in the next quarter.

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Peter Olson
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About Sage
Sage is the global market leader for technology that provides small and medium businesses with the visibility, flexibility and efficiency to manage finances, operations and people. With our partners, Sage is trusted by millions of customers worldwide to deliver the best cloud technology and support. Our years of experience mean that our colleagues and partners understand how to serve our customers and communities through the good, and more challenging times. We are here to help, with practical advice, solutions, expertise and insight. Learn more at www.sage.com/en-us/ or www.sageintacct.com.