Intacct Software Review

An Independent Intacct Accounting & Financial Software Review

Intacct is a cloud-based accounting software application delivered in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Founded in 1999, the company is one of the early SaaS business software pioneers and over the last decade has acquired over 5,000 global customer organizations, representing over 30,000 users.

The company is based in San Jose, California, and has a software development location in Bangalore, India, along with a growing business partner ecosystem of resellers, integrators and accounting firms. In fact, Intacct has become the preferred accounting software system of the American Institute for CPAs (AICPA).

The Intacct accounting software and financial management solution is designed for small- and medium-size businesses (SMBs). The accounting software is largely horizontal in nature—satisfying SMBs seeking deep accounting system functionality regardless of industry. However, Intacct also offers industry specific accounting software for the following vertical markets:

• SaaS & Software Companies–which includes features for contract management, revenue recognition (including SOP 97-2, 98-9, 81-1 and EITF 00-21, 08-01, 09-03), deferred revenue, renewals and an efficient quote-to-cash process.
• Professional Services–designed to streamline and automate the capture of all billable and non-billable time and expense, reduce revenue leakage, maximize billable hours and bring visibility to project-based cash flow.
• Business Services–integrated project accounting/cost accounting permits advertising, marketing, staffing and other business services to track cash flow management, cost containment and profitability to a project or service level.
• Accounting Firms–Intacct's first focus, the SaaS financial software is organized to ease multi-client bookkeeping and similar write-up work while providing clients online access to a shared web portal.
• Non-profits–designed for charities, trade and membership associations, cultural institutions, charter schools, and faith-based organizations who deal with cross fiscal periods, immutable transactions, fund accounting, encumbrance accounting and absolute accountability for the stewardship of funds.
• Hospitality–this accounting software solution aids hotels, restaurants, tourism venues and other businesses in the hospitality industry in tracking revenues and expenses by property, by service line, by vendor and possibly by customer.
• Healthcare–this financial software edition leverages both cost accounting software and the multi-dimensional general ledger to align financial reporting with the key dimensions of a healthcare business, such as revenue, profitability, managed costs (reimbursements) and expense by location, department, procedure, physician, carrier or vendor.
• Wholesale Distribution–which includes a simple procure-to-pay process, price management (i.e. economic order quantities) and inventory management with multi-location (warehouse, stockroom, bin, etc.) reporting and flexible costing methods.

One of the primary target markets Intacct pursues particularly well is organizations that have outgrown the smaller accounting packages (such as QuickBooks, Peachtree, MYOB, and even Excel spreadsheets) and require more sophisticated accounting functionality. Often these smaller accounting systems cannot automate business processes, integrate with legacy systems, deliver the right information reporting, consolidate multiple entities or accommodate growing numbers of concurrent users. Small businesses which grow, and require a step up to a more sophisticated accounting system or ERP system, provide a vast and global market for Intacct. Further, growing small businesses have to carefully manage cash flow in order to support that growth, and are therefore often positively predisposed to the SaaS model—in order to avoid up front capital expenditures, accelerate the time to value and keep IT resources to a minimum.

The Intacct accounting software and financial management base modules include the following:

• Financials and Accounting: General Ledger, AR, AP, Cash Management, Expense Management
• Intacct Purchasing
• Vendor Management
• Intacct Order Management
• Intacct Insight: A Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Project Management suite

Additional financial modules include: Multi-currency, Global Consolidations, AvaTax (sales tax management), Inventory, Revenue Management, MAX for Salesforce.com CRM, Web Services and Project Accounting.

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