This is a tour of what Sage Intacct Construction does: dimensions, multi-entity consolidations, job costing, AP automation, payroll, reporting, change orders, and integrations. Dimensions are the part most contractors need to learn first, whether they are coming from QuickBooks or Sage 300 CRE. Everything else builds on them.
We implement this product for contractors. We sat down with our team to explain what each capability does and the order in which most contractors adopt them. Audra Speth, Tina Rehberg, and Troy Guevara contributed their experience.
Dimensions
Dimensions are the organizing structure behind Sage Intacct Construction. They let you look at the same numbers from several angles without adding every distinction to an increasingly complex chart of accounts.
You can tag transactions by customer, location, project, item, cost code, and cost type. Along with seeing which general ledger account a transaction affected, you can see where it occurred, which project it belongs to, and what type of cost it represents.
Companies moving from QuickBooks will need to learn this new structure. Tina explains what changes:
Dimensions, again, are the core hurdle. In QuickBooks they understand customers and vendors — and those are dimensions in Intacct too — but the expansion is the new part: locations, cost codes, cost types, project IDs. A lot of QuickBooks clients don't use projects at all, so the shift we're guiding them through is going from seeing accounting only at the general-ledger level to seeing it at the project and cost-code/cost-type level. The vocabulary is different too; what Sage 300 calls a category, QuickBooks calls a cost type. I make a point of letting the client explain their world first so I hear their language, then I adapt mine to match theirs as we map it into Intacct.
Tina Rehberg · Senior Sage Intacct ConsultantFor example, you can analyze a profit-and-loss statement by customer, location, project, or item. QuickBooks does not have the same dimensional chart-of-accounts structure, so it cannot produce this view in the same way.
If you are moving from Sage 300 CRE, the structure will feel more familiar. Its general ledger structure uses a prefix, base account, and subaccounts. The prefix often represents the company, while the subaccounts commonly represent departments or locations. In Sage Intacct Construction, these distinctions become dimensions.
The terminology does not always translate perfectly from one system to another. We map your current terminology and accounting structure to a dimensional model that your team can use consistently.
For Sage 300 CRE migrations, our extraction tool helps restructure legacy data so it can be loaded into Sage Intacct Construction. This is an Alta Vista Technology tool, not a Sage Intacct module.
Multi-entity management and consolidations
When an owner announces an acquisition, the controller has to plan how to manage the new company’s books. In QuickBooks, that company generally requires a separate file. Your team has to move between files, record related activity in multiple places, and manually create consolidated reports in Excel. There is no shared multi-entity structure that allows one transaction to affect multiple entities.
Sage Intacct Construction provides a top-level structure under which multiple entities can share common settings and roll up into consolidated financial statements.
Picture the owner coming to the controller, excited: "We just bought this new company, it's going to be amazing." In the old world the controller is thinking, "Great — now I have to prepare another set of books and manage another chart of accounts. This is so much more work." With the multi-entity top level in Intacct, you just scoop the new entity up: you build the books, bring in the data, restructure what you need, and it's mostly straightforward data migration. The numbers roll up to the owner, the owner gets his consolidated picture quickly, and the controller has the peace of mind of not running separate books in a separate system. I had a customer tell me exactly that — on Sage 300 she'd have had to set up a whole new company for each acquisition; in Intacct you just scoop it up under the top level.
Audra Speth · Customer Success ManagerThis structure makes consolidations easier and allows a group to move one company at a time.
Moving one entity at a time
An acquired company can continue using its existing system while the first entity moves to Sage Intacct Construction. Once the first team is trained and comfortable, the next entity can follow. Each company can operate independently while its financial results roll up to the top level.
Guardian Restoration followed this approach. The private equity group acquired several types of businesses that were using Sage 300 CRE, QuickBooks, ComputerEase, and other systems. We have been moving those businesses into one environment, one entity at a time, while supporting consolidated financial reporting across the group.
Job costing and project profitability
Assigning a check to an expense account tells you where the payment went, but a contractor needs more detail to track job costs.
Construction accounting must organize job costs and work in progress so the same data supports project reporting and the financial statements.
This is one of the limitations contractors encounter in QuickBooks. It categorizes checks and invoices effectively, but it does not provide a complete cost picture while the job is in progress. By the time you see the full picture, the job may be finished and it is too late to change the outcome.
Sage Intacct Construction makes job-cost information available while work is still in progress. It provides current budget status and project profitability, allowing your team to respond before the job is complete. It also supports regular forecasting and rebudgeting by showing what has been spent, what remains in the budget, and whether projected profitability is above or below the original estimate.
Labor makes current job-cost information especially important. It is the biggest variable on most projects and the hardest one to predict.
I can build a school. I know how many brick it takes, I know how much concrete it's going to take. If something's out of whack on any of that, I get a change order, so I'm compensated. But I can't control my labor. I literally have to guess what it costs me to lay every brick and pour every yard of concrete. It's an educated guess, but it's a guess. If I can't control that number I'm going to lose money, and if I control that number I make money.
Troy Guevara · Construction TechnologistAccounts payable and invoice automation
Accounts payable automation reduces the time between receiving an invoice and including that cost in the project’s financial picture.
The system reads the invoice, captures its information, and routes it to the appropriate approver. Your team reviews the captured information without having to type every field or carry the invoice from desk to desk.
Cloud-based automation changes everything. Instead of an invoice sitting on someone's desk for days before it gets entered, it comes in, gets read automatically, and routes directly to the approver. I just get a notification: 'Troy, do you approve this? Yes or no.' Done. If my job cost report isn't current, and I've got 30 invoices sitting in the queue waiting for my approval, that's on me — I can see it. It puts accountability where it belongs.
Troy Guevara · Construction TechnologistThe queue also shows exactly where each invoice is waiting, so your team can see whether accounting or an approver needs to act.
Payroll
Contractors moving from Sage 300 CRE need to plan carefully for payroll because Sage Intacct Construction handles it differently.
Sage 300 hands-down has one of the best payroll solutions out there for job costing, because it's independent — it has a payroll that posts to the general ledger for GL reporting, and a separate payroll that posts to your job cost and gives you transactional costing. When clients come over to Sage Intacct, that dedicated job-cost payroll they're used to seeing isn't there in the same form, and that's a big surprise. It's worth setting that expectation early for any Sage 300 CRE shop that leans on job-cost payroll.
Tina Rehberg · Senior Sage Intacct ConsultantSage Intacct Construction does not include native payroll as a module. It integrates with specialist payroll providers. We bundle Hammr as our preferred payroll option in the overall solution. Hammr supports certified payroll, prevailing wages by county and trade, multi-union projects, timesheet-level labor synchronization, and California compliance.
Reporting, change orders, and integrations
Once the accounting structure is in place, reporting, change-order management, and integrations make the information useful across more teams and processes.
Reporting
Many reporting problems occur because a system cannot arrange existing data in the form someone needs.
Your team may spend hours rebuilding the same reports for the bank and the bonding company. A state may add a requirement that calls for a different view of the numbers, while a private equity owner may want the package in a format your older system cannot produce.
In Sage Intacct Construction, we can build a report once and reuse it. Because dimensions organize the underlying data, you can present it in different ways for different audiences without rebuilding the accounting structure for every request.
Change orders
Change orders are a normal part of construction. The challenge is keeping each change order’s status, financial effect, and owner visible throughout the approval process.
The challenge with change orders is the processing of them and the accountability of them. That's where the software's power is. It speeds up the process, it holds the process accountable, and it gives you the ability to have the change order in different statuses.
Troy Guevara · Construction TechnologistA pending change order can appear on the schedule of values while remaining separate from approved work. Once approved, it moves to the actual schedule. This allows the team to see the potential financial effect without treating the amount as approved revenue.
Integrations
A construction accounting system needs to exchange information with other systems. Project management, field service, estimating, and document-management tools all create information that may need to reach the accounting system.
Sage Intacct Construction has an open API, and many third-party vendors have already built integrations for it. If your service technicians use ServiceTitan and your estimators use Bluebeam, they can usually keep working in those tools.
Interstate Mechanical & Core faced this issue after outgrowing Sage 300 CRE. The company needed a cloud accounting system that could integrate with Procore for its project managers, so we implemented Sage Intacct Construction with the Procore integration.
How a staged implementation works
A staged implementation establishes dimensions, entities, job costing, and core accounting processes before adding more capabilities.
The strength of how we do it is that we work in stages. During implementation, a customer only gets what they need to know at that moment — we don't bombard them with everything at once. We wait until they have a true foundation, then we say, "Now that you're comfortable in the basics, let's level up." We hold certain products back during implementation on purpose, because introducing them too early is just too much and they can't zone in. So they build the foundation first, and the rest comes in layers after that.
Audra Speth · Customer Success ManagerBefore implementation begins, confirm that the product listed in your contract is Sage Intacct Construction and that your implementation partner has experience with that specific product. Once the fundamentals are stable, choose the next capabilities based on your team’s needs and readiness. These may include equipment management, AP automation, or AI and Copilot features.
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