Summary overview—Accounts Payable

About AP summaries

Summaries are collections of the same type of transactions, grouped together and posted to the General Ledger using the date determined by your summary frequency. The individual transactions in a summary are processed immediately.

The Summaries page in Accounts payable shows AP supplier invoice, adjustment, and manual payment summaries that Intacct created automatically or that you created manually.

Until you or the system creates a new summary, no line items appear in the Summaries list page.

Summaries can be either opened or closed. When summaries are open in Accounts Payable, you can add and pay AP supplier invoices. When designing an accounts payable process, the system administrator can give access to the pages involved with managing AP supplier invoices, but not opening or closing summaries.

You can reopen closed summaries as needed.

Closing or opening a single summary doesn't automatically close or open related summaries in the subledger period. To open or close related summaries, go to the Open AP Subledger or Close AP Subledger pages respectively.

How summaries are created

Summaries for AP supplier invoices are created in two ways:

  • Automatically, by Sage Intacct at intervals you select
  • Manually, by specific summaries you create and name to handle special situations

Automatically created summaries

Sage Intacct can automatically create summaries so that a summary always exists for AP supplier invoices and other payments as they are entered throughout the day. Automatic summaries are created according to intervals chosen by the administrator, such as daily, monthly, or one per transaction. Automatically created summaries are not editable.

You set the frequency of automatic summary creation on the Configure Accounts Payable page. Transactions are posted in real time, regardless of the summary frequency you select. The summary frequency determines how transaction postings are grouped in the General Ledger, rather than when they are posted.

Intacct uses the internationally accepted date format of YYYY-MM-DD24:MI:SS for all automatically created summaries. Using a standardized date format in the summary title ensures that transactions are always grouped or matched to the appropriate summary. This removes the risk of posting errors due to a date format mismatch.

Manually created summaries

A manual summary is useful when you need a special summary for specific AP supplier invoices. You can use whatever date format your company prefers when you enter a summary manually.

If you have a list of transactions saved in CSV (comma-separated values) file format, you can import it to Intacct. When you specify a BATCH_TITLE for an imported transaction, Intacct creates a summary named using the title and the CREATED_DATE, then assigns the transaction to the summary.

You can also add a transaction to a manually created summary during data entry, when the Summary frequency for that transaction type is set to User-defined. This option is available for AP supplier invoices, adjustments, and manual payments.

Manually created summaries are editable.

Multi-entity, multi-currency companies

If your company is a multi-entity, multi-currency company, Intacct recommends you set the system to create summaries automatically, so that the system creates consistent summaries with the correct base currency. If you create manual summaries, create them at the entity level, or restrict one summary to one entity so that the summary contains one currency. Do not create top-level, manual summaries.