AI, generative AI and automation are game-changers for finance leaders, helping them become more efficient and proactive.
This is according to speakers at a webinar hosted by Sage, in partnership with ITWeb, on automation, AI and analytics for finance professionals.
Mohammed Mosam, Regional Product Marketing Director at Sage Africa & Middle East, said: “Finance is the heart of most businesses. Since COVID forced us into new ways of work and forced businesses to become more agile, the role of finance leaders has changed. Gone are the days where they were seen as bean counters. Now they are looked on as strategic advisers – businesses look to the CFO to help give them direction.”
Mosam said technology was helping finance leaders redefine their role.
“Sage’s recent global survey – The Secrets of Successful CFOs – found that 86% of finance leaders have already incorporated AI into their operations. However, much of this is generic AI, not AI developed specifically for finance. Sage also found that 49% of finance leaders indicated they would like specific tools for finance. To meet this need, Sage has built out AI tools based on business cases for finance,” he said.
Mosam noted: “Sage has been developing AI tools over the past eight years to ensure financial data outputs are as accurate as can be. The newer generative AI tools to come will allow finance professionals to type in a prompt in simple English, the system will interrogate the data and give you an output as an answer, graph or chart.”
In the world of finance, AI enables organisations to improve accounting, trust and insights, he said. “For example, you can synchronise supplier invoices, harness AI-driven time management, use AI to assist with data imports and optimise the month-end close. AI can also improve financial reporting analysis with predictive models, and be used for anomaly detection,” Mosam said.
Mosam highlighted Sage Intacct AI features such as Outlier Detection, which proactively picks up and highlights anomalies. The system learns over time the patterns and values processed within the organisation, so any anomalies will be flagged. Mosam added that purchasing just got smarter with Sage Intacct’s AP Automation. Using AI-powered matching, we automatically capture invoice details and match them to POs, delivering faster, more accurate results. For customers with non-traditional purchasing workflows, simply import your vendor invoice. With one integrated system, purchasing and payables are now seamlessly connected, saving you time and effort.
Sage Intacct’s AP Automation addresses one of the biggest pain points for finance – accounts payable processing per supplier invoice. A poll of webinar attendees found that 31% of typical SMEs take over 12 minutes to process accounts payable per invoice. Mosam said Sage and IDC research had found that it takes on average nine to 24 minutes per invoice for data entry. He said: “Sage Intacct automation of accounts payable or purchasing processes saves up to 50% of their time, and frees up finance employees to spend more time on higher value tasks.”
Tasneem Dajee, Manager Presales Sage Intacct at Sage, demonstrated Sage Intacct’s 2025 release 2, which can be used on laptop or tablet. “Within Sage Intacct, we are continuously innovating our system to enhance the user experience and offer better dashboards and reports,” she said.
Highlighting outstanding features, Dajee noted that Sage Intacct caters for multi-currencies and entities, with the ability to consolidate in one or multi-currencies.
“Sage Intacct caters for approval policies, which can be streamlined by allocating them to approvers based on value, and dimensions like departments or individuals. It allows for more control, gives more visibility and reduced money being spent,” she said.
Sage Intacct report centre includes a built-in report writer that allows users to add dimensions and dimension tags with just a few clicks, to create custom reports and dashboards. It is powerful, intuitive and easy to use, and supports in-depth analytics, Dajee said.
In general ledger, organisations can tag line items to departments or individuals and can also view approval processes related to an outlier, or directly query an anomaly using the Collaborate tool.
Sage Intacct AP automation matches invoices to suppliers and automatically captures all the line items in an invoice, while for enhanced security, Sage Intacct allows organisations to limit what specific groups and roles have access to.
Other features include the statistical accounts feature, which allows users to collect and analyse data that is not necessarily part of the general ledger. Sage Intacct also has additional modules available for spend management, inventory control and contracts.
Share