The Product
Sage Intacct is a leading cloud accounting and financial software for companies of any size. Under the VP of Software Engineering, I am currently leading a team of designers and developers in creating a payment integration into the software that will allow users to process credit card payments on invoices and sales orders without leaving the platform.
Research
We began the project by attending the Sage Intacct 2019 Advantage Conference in Las Vegas to gather research. We learned about Intacct as a software, its user base, heard from Intacct users using competitor payment/collections solutions to understand their core motivations and needs within the world of Accounts Receivables. This research drove the creation of personas and journey maps.
Defining Direction & Requirements
Upon returning to the office, enthusiastic about creating a new, more robust solution for these users, we worked with a Sage Intacct technical consultant to understand the technical constraints within the software. Many discussions were had between engineering and design to sort through possible locations and ways to add our functionality that made sense for our users, development constraints, and project timeline. We finally identified all our integration points and got to work with laying out user flows, creating wireframes, gathering early feedback, and creating high-fidelity mockups.
Styling
Even though our integration modals are custom and can have any UI styling, we chose to stay within Sage Intacct UI guidelines in order to create an integration that feels seamless and native.
Points of Integration
Invoices
A key workflow within our integration is the ability to process payment directly on an AR invoice within Intacct. During technical discussions, we were happy to learn we could modify the footer of the native invoices with whatever we wanted. We placed payment buttons in the style of Intacct action buttons.
To accommodate multiple use cases, we allow users to take a payment with a card or bank account (ACH), or send the invoice to the customer via email as a payment request so the customer can view and pay off the invoice at their convenience via a secure web form.
We felt it was important to display this Email Pay option in two places, as a separate button on the invoice as well as on the process modal as a tab for convenience and visibility.
We felt it was important to display this Email Pay option in two places, as a separate button on the invoice as well as on the process modal as a tab for convenience and visibility.
Sales Orders
Another key workflow in our integration is the ability to run a pre-authorization or take a deposit directly on a sales order. We used a similar approach to the invoice screen.
Customer Profile
On the customer's profile, we took a similar approach again (for consistency) when adding functionality for individual customers. We added:
- The ability to add cards and manage saved cards
- The ability to send requests to customers asking that they add a payment method via a secure web form.
EBizCharge Custom Workspace
During our early technical discussions, we identified the ability to create a custom workspace or area within Sage Intacct to house our extra functionality that isn't possible to put directly inside of native screens within the software.
We created an "EBizCharge" workspace with a variety of features.
We created an "EBizCharge" workspace with a variety of features.
Transactions
On "New Transaction", we allow users to process payments on many invoices at once for a single customer. We tried to make this flow as flexible and clear as possible with robust filters, obvious indicators for editable fields, and repeated confirmation of the total payment amount.
Email Pay
Although Sage Intacct offers the ability out-of-the-box to email invoices to customers, our research found that their functionality is limited and our multi-faceted Email Pay capabilities would be beneficial to some users.

Send New Email
This screen allows users to select a customer, select one or multiple of their open invoices, and email them out for payment.
If their typical workflow is to send email payment requests out for many customers in one sitting, they can keep repeating this process of selecting invoices for multiple customers, and send hundreds of requests in one bulk action.
If their typical workflow is to send email payment requests out for many customers in one sitting, they can keep repeating this process of selecting invoices for multiple customers, and send hundreds of requests in one bulk action.
Pending Email Payments
Learning about how manual the collection process is for AR personnel with tracking and following up with customers who have received their invoices, but haven't paid yet, we were able to come up with beneficial features for "Pending Email Payments".
Users can clearly see:
Users can clearly see:
- When payment requests were first sent
- Which invoices are overdue and therefore highest priority
- Which customers have had reminders sent
- Whether customers have viewed the payment forms or not
Received email payments
We needed to create a UI where users can view the payments made by their customers via Email Pay, and apply them back into Intacct to mark those invoices as paid and update the general ledger. We kept design layout and visual indicators consistent with other screens.

Project Status
Development has begun for this project and I am currently working closely with development to ensure the layouts, states, and interactions we designed are executed correctly. During development, I believe it is important for designs not to stay stagnant. When small changes to the UI are made due to unexpected development limitations, I like for my team to update the designs so there is one up-to-date truth for what the end result should look and behave like. Setting these clear expectations allows for easier and more accurate q'aing of demo environments.