How Criterion Streamlines HR and Accounting Processes for Sage Intacct Users

Whether you're already leveraging the robust capabilities of Sage Intacct or just exploring its potential, it's crucial to recognize its role within your tech stack.

Sage Intacct excels in handling financial data and offering comprehensive insights into various aspects of your business. However, it simply isn’t made to handle the intricacies of modern HR and payroll processes.  Organizations in any vertical market would benefit from using Criterion and Sage intact.  However, nonprofits and construction companies, where job costing and labor allocation have distinct requirements, this is a big challenge.  

If you work in these sectors, your general ledger may have thousands upon thousands of lines. To simplify time tracking, process payroll, track job and labor costs, and ensure proper GL management, you’ll need a specialized solution that seamlessly integrates with your ERP.

Enter Criterion HCM — a cloud-based Human Capital Management platform built to address the complexities that businesses face every day. By integrating Criterion with Sage Intacct, you can harness the power of your HR and accounting teams like never before.

Here’s a closer look at how you can streamline your payroll and accounting processes with this integration.

What Is Criterion HCM?

Criterion HCM is a premier Human Capital Management solution meticulously crafted for seasoned HR professionals. We provide an intuitively designed interface that’s also completely configurable. That means you can tailor the user-friendly system to meet each of your unique needs.

Unlike comprehensive ERP cloud systems such as Oracle or SAP, Criterion focuses exclusively on producing great software to streamline your HR, payroll, and talent engagement processes. Criterion integrates with best-in-class financial products like Sage Intacct so you can build your ideal tech stack with affordable and intuitive software.

The backbone of Criterion’s seamless integration is our API architecture. This facilitates connections not only with well-established financial systems like Sage, but also with any third-party software — HR solutions that are best in class (Benefit Carriers, Background Screening, Wage and Salary solution).

Challenges of Traditional ERP Integration and Operation

Navigating the intricacies of job costing and labor allocation is no small feat — especially since labor and payroll processing are often the most significant expenses for companies. This is particularly true for organizations where payroll and accounting demand a meticulous attention to detail. In these industries, the need to share detailed labor information with accounting goes beyond wages. It also includes benefits, commissions, imputed income, and more.

For instance, you may run a nonprofit where you need to track labor against grants. Maybe you have union workers who earn different wage rates depending on where they work each week. Maybe you just have a complex pay structure, and you need to account for where that money is going each month. If you’re managing these complex payroll and accounting processes in spreadsheets, it’s probably costing your organization a lot of time and money. You need a way to effectively connect the dots between your payroll and HR systems and your ERP.

However, traditional file-based integrations often fall short. Rather than providing the sophistication needed to truly connect these departments, they tend to cause more trouble than they’re worth. Plus, they tend to be more expensive (with huge costs per employee) and often put a significant strain on your IT team to set up and maintain.

What’s worse, these integrations tend to be unreliable and fraught with synchronization issues. If you’re already using a file-based integration like this, can you really trust that your data is always accurate across platforms? Do you constantly need to sync data manually or wait for data to sync during a certain timeframe? If so, you’re not alone. Without using a REST API, many ERP integrations are sluggish, cumbersome, and prone to errors, which further complicates the task of maintaining data integrity.

Criterion HCM leverages the power of REST API to allow for seamless, instantaneous data syncing between platforms, regardless of the scale. Whether you have dozens or thousands of employees, the cost of using this API integration remains the same. You don’t need to worry about synchronization issues, either. The data is completely connected all the time.

Let’s look at how Criterion HCM achieves this transformation, offering enhanced efficiency, accuracy, and operational excellence with Sage Intacct.

What Can You Do With the Sage Intacct/Criterion Integration?

By integrating Sage Intacct with Criterion HCM, you open a spectrum of possibilities for your organization. Here are several ways companies can use this integration:

Instantly Send Your General Ledger to Your ERP

When running payroll in Criterion, the integration streamlines the flow of general ledger data back to Sage Intacct. You not only capture wages but also the fully burdened cost of each employee. With this, you gain complete access to the comprehensive expenses, including benefits, commissions, and anything else you choose to track between these platforms.

With Criterion, GL data is created instantly after each payroll cycle. Once verified by your payroll team, your accounting department (and other stakeholders) can access that labor and wage data in real time. This allows for a fully-connected view of your expenses and more accurate reporting across departments.

Bidirectional Data Sharing

We’ve built this integration to provide a dynamic flow of data between both applications. For instance, you can send employee information from Criterion to Sage Intacct, then send customer and location data back from Sage into Criterion. This bidirectional movement extends to projects, jobs, and several other cost centers with granular control over how the data is connected. This configurability allows you to customize the integration to meet your unique business needs.

For example, some companies will enter new jobs into Sage Intacct and set up the integration to feed that data back into Criterion for precise labor tracking. The detailed labor data from Criterion then returns to Sage, enriching job cost reporting within your ERP.

TIP: Using Criterion in conjunction with Sage Intacct's powerful "Dimensions” feature can enhance financial analytics by connecting job costs with employee and payroll data.

Connect Employee Data With Your ERP

The integration also allows you to transfer employee data into Sage Intacct instantaneously. When hiring a new employee in Criterion, this data triggers connections in Sage automatically, assigning the employee to the right cost center and GL area without any manual effort — no matter how many cost centers you have. Where before it may have taken several hours to set up a new employee for proper accounting, the entire process is streamlined with Criterion and Sage Intacct working together.

This dynamic data movement also works when assigning jobs and tasks or tracking time. When you assign a job to a specific employee and they track their time in Criterion, the integration can automatically highlight the employee’s assigned tasks, so they can only track time against their allocated work.

You can also connect employee pay rates with your ERP to gain a clear financial picture of each person’s compensation. This makes budget considerations easier and total compensation reports more accessible to employees and management.

Combine Position Management With Key Financial Data

Leveraging Sage Intacct with Criterion’s position management functionality, businesses can easily align hiring with budgetary constraints.

For instance, suppose you have a new project that requires 10 new positions. When you set up these positions in your organization chart in Criterion (with the relevant wage rates and benefits packages), you can send these hiring requests to accounting instantly. This facilitates approvals and budgetary considerations during the hiring process, so that all your recruiting decisions align with your budgetary constraints.

The primary benefit is efficiency as you connect different departments within your organization. By allowing data and approval to seamlessly transfer across systems, you can achieve your goals much faster.

What Else Can Criterion Do for You?

These capabilities are just a hint of what is achievable with this integration. We provide you complete access to the API and backend tables, empowering you to configure the system and integration to precisely match your business needs.

Beyond the Sage Intacct integration, Criterion HCM offers a comprehensive suite of benefits that empower organizations to manage their toughest challenges.

Manage the Complete Employee Life Cycle

Criterion HCM handles all of your employees "from cradle to grave." The platform streamlines applicant tracking and interviewing with automated workflows. Ensure a thorough evaluation of all applicants and make informed hiring decisions with custom question sets used by all hiring managers. The software also documents all hiring decisions and conversations, allowing for complex reporting on equal opportunity, DEIB, and more.

Once you make a hiring decision, the transition to immersive onboarding is completely streamlined. With the click of a button, you can trigger custom workflows that guide new employees through checklists, paperwork submissions, and custom training programs. Automated performance review workflows, manager notifications, and documentation ensure a structured approach to employee development throughout their tenure.

Process Complex Payroll

If you work in construction or related industries, you know the complexity of handling payroll for union employees. Criterion HCM excels in handling complex payroll scenarios, including payroll rules for multiple unions with varying locals and prevailing wage rates, and adherence to multi-state laws — even multiple countries. You can even use Criterion to manage multiple entities and departments with a single sign-on (SSO).

Simply set up your preferred rules, and let Criterion handle the rest. Automated payroll processing provides your team with accuracy and efficiency, with zero payment delays.

Integration With Any Third-Party Program

Criterion’s open API allows you to integrate the platform with any other software you choose, including project management software like Procore. Criterion offers seamless data flow, connecting project data with employee/payroll data for detailed labor allocation. Sage Intacct  can also be integrated for a more complete financial picture of your organization. This is exactly what Bayley Construction used to manage payroll and job costing on a large scale for a multi-state, multi-union workforce.

At Criterion, we’ve developed a ton of integrations already — but we're always building more. Criterion can even work with custom, in-house software exclusive to your organization. Our goal is to help you create a unified data landscape and break down silos so you can use your ideal tech stack and achieve your goals.

Discover an HCM Built for ERP Integration

Elevate your business operations with an HCM designed for seamless ERP integration. By bringing Criterion into your organization, you allow your teams to do more than ever before, much faster. Enhance your understanding and responsiveness to critical aspects like accounting, labor cost allocation, hiring, budgeting, and more.

As a modern HR professional, you need sophisticated software that can handle complexity. But you also need an interface that doesn't require a Ph.D. to use. Criterion offers both. We’ll work within your existing tech stack to provide a solution that fits your unique business needs.

Experience the transformative impact of Criterion by connecting your ERP to the heartbeat of your business: your people. Book a demo to see how you can integrate Criterion with your ERP to improve operations at every level.