Sage Intacct financial reporting infrastructure
How Rackson's 154 Intacct reports are actually built — account groups, the real EBITDA formula, location groups and dimension structures, and what breaks when the P&L structure changes.
This documents how Rackson's Sage Intacct reports are actually built — the underlying structure that the P&L review sits on top of. It exists specifically to answer: what happens, and what breaks, when the client requests a change to how the P&L or balance sheet is organized.
Source: Rackson_RRS_RCY_Review_Process.docx section 48. A companion reference workbook, Rackson Intacct Financial Report Guide - RRS & RCY.xlsx, exists on SharePoint and documents the inventory below — several screenshots on this page are from that reference workbook rather than a live Intacct screen, and are labelled accordingly. See Intacct report guide for the full listing.
Full report inventory — 154 reports
| Report family | # of reports |
|---|---|
| Income Statement, Actual vs. Comparison Reports | 20 |
| Income Statement Trend Reports | 9 |
| Balance Sheet Reports | 8 |
| Cash Flow Reports | 3 |
| Side by Side Comparison Reports, Corporate and Consolidated | 14 |
| Region, District, and Location Comparison Reports | 34 |
| Store and Location Trend Reports | 12 |
| Budget Reports | 17 |
| Board and EBITDA Package Reports | 26 |
| Labor and Prime Cost Reports | 8 |
| Audit and Reconciliation Reports | 3 |
| Total | 154 |
Account groups — the backbone
Every balance sheet report (detail and summary) and every income statement (both "basic" and "board" versions) is built off the same underlying GL account groupings — not off the report itself. Change the grouping once, and every report built on it changes.
The documented hierarchy
From the reference workbook's IS Basic GL Groups tab:
G3 - Net Income
(also aliased as G3 - Adjusted EBITDA (Non-Board) and G3 - Net Operating Income)
└── G2 - Gross Profit
└── G1 - Net Revenue
├── G1 - Gross Revenue
│ 41000 Food Sales-BK · 41100 Food Sales-DHC
│ 41300 Food Sales-Cinnabon · 41400 Food Sales-Popeyes
│ 41500 Non-Food Sales
├── G1 - Comps & Discounts
│ 48000 Chargebacks/Voids · 48010 Discounts
└── G1 - Cost of Sales
50100 COS-Food · 50120 COS-Sand Prep/Salad
50150 COS-Other Food · 50200 COS-Condiments
50300 COS-Soda · 50320 COS-Shakes & Drinks
50350 COS-Alcoholic Beverages · and moreWorth confirming. The chart of accounts includes Food Sales accounts for Cinnabon (41300) and Popeyes (41400) in addition to Burger King and Dave's Hot Chicken. Confirm with the engagement lead whether these represent additional concepts inside the current relationship, co-branded/dual-brand locations within RRS, or legacy accounts no longer in active use — the engagement is otherwise scoped to RRS and RCY only. Tracked on Open items.
Navigating to an account group
Open the report you're trying to update (e.g. a balance sheet), go to Edit, go to Rows, and click the small arrow next to the account group/subgroup you want to change, then choose View.
This takes you to the same account group screen, just anchored to the report you were already looking at.
From the account group edit screen, use the specified-accounts filter/dropdown to add the GL account you want included. Individual accounts or ranges are both supported.
Basic vs. board income statements, and the real EBITDA formula
| Type | Behaviour |
|---|---|
| Basic (no "board" in the name) | Runs off a single Net Income account group and stops there. |
| Board | Adds sections below net income to build up to an Adjusted EBITDA figure, with all of the specific add-back accounts shown. |
Why EBITDA is built the way it is
Sage Intacct's report writer cannot sum across rows within a single column the way a spreadsheet can — it can only combine column plus column.
Live Intacct confirms the exact mechanism. The account group named "Comp - EBITDA" — displayed on reports as "EBITDA," with its total line displayed as "Total EBITDA" — has a Structure Type of "Computation" and an actual formula of:
G3 - Net Income + G1 - EBITDA add backsIn other words, EBITDA is literally built by adding one existing account group (Net Income) to another (a group that itself just lists the specific add-back GL accounts) — not a spreadsheet-style SUM.
This was a deliberate choice, not a limitation the team is stuck with. Showing the actual GL accounts that make up each add-back is treated as a control — so anyone can see exactly which accounts are included in the EBITDA build-up and challenge or adjust it account by account, rather than trusting an opaque single number no one is reconciling.
Because the Adjusted EBITDA build had to be added to both the board and the basic income statement formats, both structures now include it. Confirm this stays true if new board sections are added in future.
What breaks — and what doesn't — when the P&L structure changes
| Change | Risk |
|---|---|
| Moving an individual GL account from one existing account group/subgroup to another (e.g. Cost of Sales → Comps & Discounts) | Low. Does not require reformatting every report that uses that group. |
| Adding a brand-new subtotal/account group, or restructuring an existing subgroup | High. Resets formatting on every single report that references that account group — spacing, underlines, and blank/heading rows all get wiped out and must be manually rebuilt, one report at a time. |
Screenshot first. Before making a structural change, take a screenshot of the Format tab (rows and totals) for a report that already looks the way you want, so you have a reference to rebuild every affected report against afterward.
Always preview in PDF, not HTML. After making the change, pull each affected report as a PDF to check formatting. HTML preview does not reliably show blank rows/spacing the way the final PDF/Excel output will — so formatting problems can be invisible in HTML and only show up once the report is actually delivered.
Practical workflow for a larger change. Because the same underlying account groups feed potentially dozens of saved reports — up to 34 for the Region/District/Location comparison family alone — first pull a list of every P&L report that will be affected and use that list as your own checklist while fixing formatting one by one.
Balance sheet reports (only 8 total) are much lower-risk for this kind of disruption than income statement or board changes.
Location groups and dimension structures
| Concept | Definition |
|---|---|
| Location group | A named list of specific store locations. The raw building blocks. |
| Dimension structure | A hierarchy built by grouping location groups together — e.g. a "region" dimension structure is made up of several "pod" location groups, and each pod is made up of specific individual stores. |
The "Used in a Structure?" column
The reference workbook's Location Groups tab lists every group configured in Intacct, with a "Used in a Structure?" column flagging whether each is actually wired into a dimension structure (and therefore feeding live reports) or is an orphaned/legacy ("boneyard") group.
Real examples from that list:
| Group | Notes |
|---|---|
| BK Stores and Corp | All BK Open Stores & Corp — not used in a structure |
| Brd Grp - Base / Cleveland / Closed / NYC | All "For Board report," all used |
| Corp Depts - RRS / RCY / RRS RCY | The last displayed as "G&A" |
DHC Region 01 + pods DHCR01P01 / DHCR01P02 | DHC = Dave's Hot Chicken, i.e. the RCY side |
| District - closed / District - DHC Close | — |
| Entity Group | Rackson - All Entities |
| FLAME Stores · Odyssey (Odyssey BK Stores) | Legacy acquisition-era groupings |
| New York - BK Only | — |
| Operations - North (North Operations) | Naming pair the team wasn't confident was still accurate or in use |
| R01P01 through at least R01P04 | The RRS pods |
"FLAME Stores" and "Odyssey" correspond to the legacy "base and flame store" acquisition-related groupings — both tied to older acquisitions and generally not the groups to use for current-day allocations. Check the "Used in a Structure?" column before spending time on one, and don't assume every group in the listing is still actively maintained.
Annotation practice going forward. Actively-used groups are being annotated in their Description field with a short note on why they exist and what report(s) rely on them — specifically so a new reviewer doesn't have to guess or reverse-engineer old naming conventions.
New-store setup is manual, one group at a time
When a new store opens (or an existing store needs to move between pods/districts), it must be manually added to every relevant location group, one at a time. There is no bulk or automatic "add to all" option.
A location group set to pull in "all members" of an entity will include locations with zero activity, which can clutter reports that are supposed to auto-hide blank rows but do not always do so reliably.
Moving a store between pods
The dimension structure and everything built on it reflects the change automatically once the underlying location groups are updated — you do not need to touch the dimension structure itself for a simple store-to-pod reassignment.
Building a report on a dimension structure
For example a regional side-by-side:
E.g. the current-period actual-dollars column.
To split that single column by a dimension structure — as opposed to expanding by time period, which is used for reports showing multiple months across the columns instead.
Choose Dimension Structure when you want the report to show a level of the hierarchy — e.g. pods within a region — rather than every individual store.
"All Levels" is the simplest, safest setting when you want the lowest level of that particular structure (e.g. pods) without having to separately test which specific level number corresponds to what you want.
Each region-specific report is hard-coded to one specific dimension structure. To stand up a new region's version: duplicate an existing regional report, update the hard-coded dimension structure reference to the new region, and confirm the underlying location groups already exist.
The report itself doesn't need to be rebuilt from scratch.
District Comparison ("DC") reports — a different report type
A small number of saved reports — identifiable by "DC" or "District Compar…" in the name — are built as dimension-based report structures rather than the standard account-based structure used everywhere else.
| Structure | Rows are |
|---|---|
| Account-based (standard) | Account groups |
| Dimension-based | Locations / dimension groups |
This choice is set on the Report Info tab when the report is first created.
There are only a handful of these in Rackson's report library, so this is a minor exception to be aware of rather than a major part of the day-to-day workflow. But if you open one and the row structure looks unfamiliar, this is why.
Cash flow reports
There are exactly 3 cash flow reports. Cash flow GL groups are simpler and more classical account groupings than the income statement side.
Mechanics: the report starts with full net income detail, then layers in "CF-" prefixed account groups representing the balance-sheet-driven changes (changes in working capital accounts, and so on). It calculates a net change in cash from those groups, adds it to the beginning cash balance (itself pulled from the actual cash account group), and solves for an ending cash balance.
Required check when publishing this report. Always tie the report's calculated ending cash back to the balance sheet summary's cash balance, and separately confirm the calculated net change makes sense given the beginning and ending balances.
A miscoded entry can throw off the net change shown on the cash flow statement without necessarily being obvious anywhere else.
Known limitation. This report doesn't generate many client questions in normal periods. The one recurring exception is around large asset dispositions, where the client has wanted sale proceeds shown separately from the associated gain/loss rather than netted together. Intacct's standard report format does not support that presentation — this has been an accepted limitation rather than something to engineer around.
Related
- Intacct report guide — the full 154-report listing
- Intacct account groups — the complete GL group hierarchies
- Intacct location groups — every group and dimension structure
- Report distribution and scheduling — how these reports get delivered
- P&L review process — the reports in use