Sage Intacct Planning: Rethinking Enterprise Budgeting
From locked hierarchies to a system of editable layers
Brief
Enterprise financial planning tools have a structural problem. Logic, assumptions, and hierarchy are traditionally coupled together — meaning any meaningful change to a plan's structure requires tearing it down and rebuilding from scratch. For FP&A teams managing complex, multi-dimensional budgets across departments, entities, and scenarios, this is a serious operational constraint.
Sage Intacct engaged our team to redesign the core planning experience for their enterprise customers — financial analysts, FP&A leads, and CFOs managing advanced budgeting, forecasting, and scenario modeling across large organizations.
The goal was to move from a grid with embedded logic to planning as an editable system of layers.
Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) teams are the engine behind a company's financial decision-making.
In large enterprises, this means managing hundreds of accounts across departments, geographies, and business units. Their core workflow: start from a locked approved plan, build versions to test assumptions, promote approved changes back into the baseline.
The problem: most enterprise planning tools are built like spreadsheets: rigid and unforgiving. Restructuring a plan broke the model. Logic lived inside individual rows, not at the system level. FP&A teams spent more time maintaining the tool than doing the analysis it was supposed to enable.
Challenges
The existing system had two interlocking problems, one visible to users and one baked into the business model. From the user side: hierarchies were locked after initial setup, scenario logic was embedded directly inside plan lines, and any structural edit triggered a full rebuild. Auditing logic across versions was difficult and error-prone. FP&A teams were spending time managing the tool instead of the plan. From the business side: as enterprise customers grew in complexity — more dimensions, more entities, more regulatory requirements — the system's rigid architecture became a growth ceiling. Governance requirements around approved plans conflicted with the need for faster what-if cycles. Performance degraded as plan size scaled. The core design problem was not a UI problem. It was an architecture problem.
My Role
Senior UX Designer, embedded across two product teams. Working closely with product managers and in consultation with the VP of Product and FP&A domain experts, I contributed to defining the layered planning architecture — the new create-a-plan flow, structural editing patterns, and the logic and assumption layer.
On the design system side, the existing Sage design system wasn't built for a product of this complexity. Intacct Planning was the most data-heavy interface in the entire Intacct suite — requiring far more component states, interaction patterns, and data grid granularity than the base system provided. I extended it significantly: introducing component-driven and token-based workflows to engineering, and building out the grid cell components and interaction patterns needed to support the product's scale.
What I did
The solution was to decouple planning into independently editable layers. Instead of a monolithic structure where hierarchy dictated modeling, the new system separates concerns into five distinct layers: Plan Structure, Models, Drivers, Global Formulas, and Versions. Each layer can be edited without forcing changes to the others.
The approved base plan acts as a stable, locked source of truth: the operational baseline that finance leaders depend on for governance and reporting. Everything else operates around it, not inside it.
Versions function as controlled sandboxes. FP&A teams can test scenarios, adjust structure, and refine assumptions in a version without touching the approved plan. When a version is ready, it goes through a review and merge workflow — changes are promoted deliberately, not accidentally.
At the logic layer, three distinct tools give teams the flexibility they need without forcing them to break structure. Drivers are editable assumptions that influence calculations — a price per dose, a headcount growth rate. Models define how a metric is calculated — cost equals units produced multiplied by cost per unit. Global Formulas are reusable adjustments applied consistently across multiple plan lines, such as applying a 3% inflation rate across all cost accounts.
Each of these is designed to operate independently of the others. A driver can be updated without touching the model. A global formula can be applied without restructuring the hierarchy.
Structure itself is also editable — either inline directly in the grid for quick additions, or through an advanced drawer for more complex changes. This distinction matters: it keeps simple tasks lightweight while still supporting the kind of structural complexity that enterprise finance actually requires.
Results
The new architecture shifted how FP&A teams work with planning tools in measurable ways:
Scenario cycles that previously required structural rebuilds now reduce to parameter tuning. Logic is centralized and auditable across versions.
Structural edits are fully decoupled from financial assumptions, meaning a reorganization no longer invalidates the model.
Cross-team collaboration became safer: teams can experiment in versions without destabilizing the base plan or creating governance risk.
From a grid with embedded logic, to planning as an editable system of layers.
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