By Hugh O. Stewart 

Sage Intacct’s greatest strength is also its biggest challenge: it can be configured hundreds of different ways. Its flexibility is what makes the system so powerful — but that same flexibility makes it incredibly easy to configure in a way that may eventually prove ineffective. 

Most teams don’t realize this until they’re already deep into implementation. They sit down with their VAR, talk through their needs, review industry-standard templates, and begin making decisions about entities, dimensions, account structures, and permissions. 

But if these conversations happen before you map your legacy data, then none of those decisions will be grounded in how your business actually uses data. They’ll be based on recent memory, current settings, assumptions, and general best practices. Sage Intacct, however, is far too flexible — and far too customizable — to rely on guesswork. 

The only reliable foundation for configuring Intacct correctly the first time is to look at your historical transactional data before you design anything. 

That’s what transactional data mapping does, and it’s why it should be the very first step of every Sage Intacct implementation. 

Transactional Data Mapping Reveals How Your Organization Really Works 

Most VARs recommend that you look at your active master data lists to build your configuration requirements. Master data lists will tell you which vendors, customers, or projects exist in your system today. But they won’t tell you: 

• Which of those records mattered historically 
• Which ones were barely used 
• Which ones underpin critical reporting 
• Which ones appear inconsistently across entities or years 
• Which ones have been deactivated that may be still be relevant for consideration 

And they definitely won’t show how deeply your business relies on hidden structures your implementation team can’t see — things like multi-level projects or legacy GL segments that must be rebuilt as Sage Intacct dimensions. 

Almost every time we perform our unique transactional data mapping process, customers have the same reaction: “I totally forgot that record existed,” or “I assumed this category was important, but we barely used it.” 

Transactional data mapping brings your lost institutional memory back to life — especially when the people leading your implementation are new to your organization and never lived through the original system setup. 

Without Early Mapping, Configuration Decisions Are Made Blindly 

Because Sage Intacct is so flexible, every decision you make early in the project has massive downstream consequences. 

→ Should you use entities or departments?
→ Should you use Class or Location to segment reporting?
→ Which dimension should you use to track revenue categories? 

Sage Intacct can’t tell you which choice is right for your business, but your data can. 

Mapping shows how your business actually groups, categorizes, tracks, and analyzes information. That clarity improves everything. 

For instance, imagine a team that assumes “Department” is the backbone of their reporting because that’s how they talk about the business internally. But once their historical transactions are mapped, a different picture emerges: nearly all of the meaningful reporting activity actually lives in “Location,” or “Item,” while Department codes appear inconsistently or barely at all. If they had configured Sage Intacct around Department as originally planned, their reporting would fail their expectations on day one.  

Early Mapping Prevents the Most Common (and Expensive) Implementation Mistakes 

Here’s the reality nobody likes to admit: many Sage Intacct re-implementations happen because the initial configuration didn’t align with the company’s data structures or workflows. 

And almost every one of those issues could have been prevented if the team had mapped their data first. 

We’ve seen organizations: 

• Build hundreds of entities because their legacy system had hundreds of tax entities — only to discover later that dimensions would have delivered better reporting at a fraction of the cost. 
• Fail to set up cost codes and cost types deeply enough for job cost reporting to function properly. 
• Choose the wrong dimension (Class vs. Department vs. Location) to carry reporting responsibility, resulting in broken dashboards and manual work. 
• Run out of indexing space in a dimension because they underestimated the volume of dimensional IDs necessary to properly track their data. 
• Create customers or vendors at the wrong level, causing duplicates and inconsistent reporting. 

In every case, the root cause was the same: configuration decisions were made without the context of the historical data.  

When you map the data first, you design Sage Intacct to receive that data cleanly, accurately, and without surprises. Instead of forcing your data to fit a configuration that wasn’t designed for it, you design the configuration around your data. This prevents thousands of potential import errors and helps your project stay on schedule.  

Bonus: Mapping First Also Helps You Decide What to Bring Over 

Some companies assume they need more of their historical data than they actually do. When they see their legacy data from all their entities mapped out in a single spreadsheet and they can see their actual usage patterns from the past five, 10, or 20 years, they can make smarter decisions about what to bring into Sage Intacct. Migrating only what they need can save costs on the implementation and prevent clutter.   

The Bottom Line: The Order of Operations Determines the Success of Your Implementation 

Sage Intacct is incredibly powerful — but only if you configure it the right way. If you’re preparing for a Sage Intacct implementation and want the clarity that only a comprehensive map of your legacy data can provide, we’d love to help. 

Request a Quote or Schedule a Strategic Exploration call to see what your historical data can reveal — and how early mapping can set your entire implementation up for success.