Running Sage Intacct Construction? Test AP automation on bills you already coded.

Today a clerk or project accountant picks the vendor and codes each bill line to a project, a task and a cost type. When an invoice bills against a PO or subcontract, the bill can be converted from that commitment, which carries the commitment's document number into payables. Before anyone posts, someone checks what is left on the commitment, how much retainage to hold, and whether the vendor's paperwork is current.

For the test, AI reads copies of invoices your team already posted and writes each one up the way Intacct would hold it: vendor, primary document, lines and retainage, with the reason for every code it chose. It saves nothing in Intacct and pays nobody. Your reviewer sets each draft beside the bill your team actually posted and marks every difference.

Three dimensions, in a fixed order. The Construction subscription switches on the Project, Task and Cost Type dimensions, and Sage's help says they can't be switched off again. Intacct calls your jobs projects and your cost codes tasks. A task belongs to one project, and a cost type can't be chosen until the project and its task are known. So a cost code that exists on one job can be missing on the next, and a cost type your team uses everywhere may not sit under that task. The draft codes only to combinations present in your export, and names each line where the task or cost type your team would expect isn't set up on that project.

Commitments are primary documents. Intacct's term for the PO or subcontract an invoice bills against is the primary document: the originating order that later documents are converted from. Each transaction life cycle allows one, and its document number follows every converted transaction, change orders included. Change documents add to or alter the quantities and amounts on it. The draft names the primary document behind each bill, totals its change documents to show what is still open, and marks a bill that asks for more than that.

Vendor compliance stops payments, not bills. Vendor Compliance comes with the Construction subscription but has to be turned on. Its compliance definitions check each tracked document by receipt or by expiration date, and decide whether a gap blocks payment or only shows a warning in Accounts Payable. The check runs when bills are paid, against records kept for a vendor or for a single commitment. A bill can post cleanly and still stall at the check run. Each draft reports what your exported compliance records say about that vendor and that commitment, so your reviewer sees the stall before it happens.

Lien waivers Intacct generates on its own. With primary document workflows on, Intacct generates lien waiver compliance records tied to an AP bill, or an AP payment, for a commitment. Your team prints or emails them, marks each received once it comes back signed, can mark one as the final waiver for a commitment, and can withhold later payments when a signature never arrives. Since the 2025 R2 release, an identical extra waiver can be generated for a secondary vendor when an invoice is created, and on joint check payments or on every payment. The draft lists the waivers each bill would raise, a joint check payee's included.

Retainage is set on the transaction definition. AP retainage is switched on in Accounts Payable configuration and again on each Purchasing transaction definition. A release creates an AP retainage release batch and the bills that go with it; since 2025 R4 a bill shows a Retainage release details tab naming that batch, and 2026 R1 added a Release retainage button on the primary document that frees a minimum share across every line still holding retainage. So when a sub asks for its retainage back, the draft points to the primary document instead of coding an ordinary bill. Your reviewer, usually the AP lead or project accountant who knows your Intacct setup, looks hardest at task and cost type pairs, the primary document picked, retainage on sub billings, and vendors whose compliance would hold up payment.

With a yes against the success criteria, new invoices get the same drafts for about 30 days.

A person on your AP desk approves, corrects or returns each draft before anything is entered in Intacct. Approved bills go in the way your Intacct administrator chooses: typed from the draft, or brought in through an import your company already runs. Payment runs, compliance holds and retainage releases stay where they are today, with your team.