Intacct Review

An Independent Intacct Accounting & Financial Software Review

Intacct Data Center Hosting

Intacct's primary data center is located in a Savvis Tier IV colo facility in San Jose, California, with a data center failover location managed by SunGard in the Philadelphia, PA area. Savvis is a Gartner Magic Quadrant ranked leader and a highly reputable data center provider. Unfortunately, the Savvis to SunGard link is not an active/active configuration, thereby imposing data transfer delay and increased cut-over risk in the event of service interruption. Nonetheless, SunGard is also a highly recognized hosting provider.

As an ERP cloud solution, Intacct has attained both financial certifications and cloud or SaaS industry certifications, including SAS 70-Type II, PCI-DSS and claimed adherence for accounting pronouncements SOP 97-2, SOP 98-9, EITF 08-01, EITF 09-03.

Intacct's most significant independent data center attestation is the SAS 70 (now replaced with the SSAE 16). This certification is helpful to publicly traded companies seeking conformance with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) section 404, however, may provide little assurance of information security, uptime availability or disaster recoverability. The SAS 70 is not prescriptive, as more comprehensive data center certifications such as the ISO 27001 are, therefore, the breadth and depth of the testing is highly variable and up to the particular examining CPA. For SaaS buyers concerned with information security and uptime assurance, we suggest you review the SAS 70 report to validate the level of assurance actually tested.

The version release schedule is quarterly with bug fix point releases occurring monthly. All updates are automatically pushed to all client instances simultaneously, however, normally delivered with a configuration setting of turned off—giving administrators the choice of when to turn on new features. Customers are alerted in advance when new releases are about to be pushed or maintenance is required.

Service Level Agreement

Intacct has a good SaaS uptime history, a key metric when evaluating SaaS business software solutions: 99.992% in Calendar Year 2010. The company's Service Level Agreement (SLA) prescribes a minimum uptime of 99.8% (excluding scheduled maintenance and outages caused by circumstances beyond their reasonable control) and in the event of disaster claims that no more than two hours of data will be lost. The company states it backs up data locally every 30 minutes and transfers data to a backup facility every two hours. More precise business continuity criteria such as time to recovery or Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) are not stated, however, the company fail over to SunGard as a business continuity partner suggests that if the California data center becomes inoperable, backup applications will be operational within 24 hours from SunGard's disaster recovery facility in Philadelphia.

The SLA is partially backed with a financial guarantee. Failure to achieve the 99.8% uptime service availability will allow 10% credits to customers for each percentage point below the availability target, up to 50% of that month's subscription fee. At the time of this Intacct review, the company has achieved a prior 12 month average uptime of near 100% (excluding scheduled maintenance and service windows).

Intacct does a good job at making their uptime statistics publicly available and transparent. The company displays data center downtime and uptime delivery metrics at its SaaS system status online website. And unlike many SaaS ERP and CRM vendors which limit their display to the prior 7 days or prior 4 weeks, Intacct displays monthly availability for the prior year. Interestingly, the SaaS status page displays connectivity (ping) reporting from locations around the world (U.S., UK and China), however, only indicates that this global status monitoring is "Normal", without any definition of Normal. More meaningful global criteria such as IP network latency, jitter and packet loss are far more critical in understanding global performance, and should be investigated by any potential Intacct buyer located outside of North America.

Intacct Software Pricing

Intacct pricing consists of a monthly subscription fee determined by the number of users accessing the Intacct accounting software, the number of business entities managed, and the number of advanced Intacct modules used.

The subscription billing cycle is yearly, not monthly. The minimum user quantity is one, so no business is too small for Intacct. Each user is allotted a maximum data storage capacity of 15GB; exceeding that amount incurs an extra charge. Some basic training is included within the monthly subscription fee. Intacct also offers a biannual Health Check Evaluation to review your software utilization, evaluate your current needs and propose ways to get more out of your accounting system and increase your software technology payback.

Intacct pricing for smaller businesses who are often replacing QuickBooks begins at about $400 per month. Midsize and larger companies with higher numbers of accounting software users, and who are often replacing on-premises software systems like Microsoft Dynamics or Sage, typically spend from a few thousand to $10,000 or more per month. Additional charges, such as $6000 per year for the Salesforce.com integration, 10% of the annual license fee for a sandbox environment or data migration services, will also apply.

Customer support is included in the SaaS subscription pricing—and includes both call center support (limited to North American working hours) and an online portal for self service support. For additional fees, customers can procure extended support service programs of Premium Support (24 by 7 support) or Premium Plus Support (with a dedicated technical account manager).

Next - Intacct Company Viability Review >>