Intacct Software Review

An Independent Intacct Accounting & Financial Software Review

Finance and Accounting Software

Intacct's finance and accounting software modules are clearly the SaaS solution's strength. The core accounting suite—General Ledger, AR, AP, Cash Management and Expense Management—is particularly strong with deep configuration options, flexible setup and impressive feature sets.

Through automated billing and cash collection management processes, Intacct allows organizations to close faster when approaching the end of an accounting cycle, improves the lead to cash cycle, optimizes cash management, and improves transparency and compliance by providing visibility into the business. The accounting modules follow common sense accounting standards, making it easy to use and customize. Its accounting focus makes the software's breadth and depth formidable.

For the medium-size customers, the option of multi-entity or subsidiary accounting is available. This is where a separate entity might need a different set of books for accounting purposes, due to its individual or localized requirements. The multi-organizational books can then be consolidated into the larger head corporation, with the system performing multi-currency consolidation and inter-company eliminations. And unlike some competing SaaS financial solutions which perform a 'soft' consolidation—which is really just a one-time consolidation report—Intacct can also produce a 'hard' consolidation entity for an improved audit trail, point in time reporting and the ability to make adjusting entries to the consolidated entity.

The vendor management module includes templates that allow organizations to breeze through common accounting system management tasks, such as request for quotations, receivers, vendor returns, purchase orders and adjustments, and others. The ability to customize a base template through workflows allows full customization, which is achieved by mapping business processes to the software to offer an end-to-end sourcing-to-payment cycle. All these features are tied back to their respective G/L accounts through the financial module.

Due to aligning themselves with the AICPA for partner and resale purposes many small accountants use and resell Intacct. Having accountants as accounting support professionals may cause initial conflict as their independence may be jeopardized by the financial gains of reselling or recommending a software product or problems downstream as they may not understand the IT and business process operations of either the software or your business other than from the accounting perspective. This may also lead the customer in a direction where their ERP application is not configured optimally because business processes are not correctly mapped to the procure-to-pay cycle, for example, or important functionality may be omitted as part of the original setup process. Accounting software vendors have vary mixed results in using CPAs as partners and resellers. Vendors such as Sage have found some success, while vendors such as Microsoft shy away from this approach.

Distribution and Supply Chain Management Software

With respect to distribution and supply chain software, Intacct offers an integrated suite of inventory, sales order and purchase order software modules. In reality, this solution is more of a light distribution suite as compared to a more full featured supply chain management software solution. Since the distribution software suite is tightly integrated with financial accounting and project accounting, the inventory management module can assign inventory to multiple locations, locations within locations, allow for inventory adjustments, transfers, damaged goods, inventory receipts, scrap or spoilage, and shippers. Through the flexible business process engine, new templates can be created or altered from the existing set to fit specific organizational needs.

The order management module allows organizations to create customer quotes, sales orders, back orders, invoices, returns, credit and debit memos, and other order management functions. A nice feature Intacct offers is pricing flexibility, where a company can assign different cost structures to inventory types and discounts over multiple accounts for a specific customer or group.

For additional supply chain management and inventory functionality, Intacct partners with SmartTurn, a SaaS warehouse management system (WMS) software. However, for organizations that require deeper supply chain functionality and control Intacct may not be suitable. While an integrated third party solution such as SmartTurn can be viable, additional supply chain solutions would be required for demand planning, transportation management and other key supply chain functions, and most small and midsize businesses do not want to inherit the multi-vendor implementation, integration and support challenges for this type of sophisticated solution.

Manufacturing Software

Manufacturing features do not reside locally within the Intacct software but can be covered through a partnership with other vendors, as the application programming interface (API) is available for integration purposes. As mentioned with multi-vendor supply chain management solutions, the effort, costs, risks and maintenance of such a multi-vendor solution should be carefully considered.

Human Resources & Payroll Software

Human resources (HR) and payroll feature sets do not reside locally within the Intacct application, but several of the vendor's partners, such as ADP, Avalara, CompuPay, Paychex, and others, can provide these features. The packaged integration is very simple and normally transfers text files (i.e. CSV) to the General Ledger. None of the payroll partners include integration to the project accounting module.

Customer Relationship Management Software

Intacct does not develop a CRM software system, but instead partners with Salesforce.com. Intacct offers an AppExchange certified integration to deliver a seamless exchange of prospect, customer and inventory data between the CRM and accounting software system.

On the downside, Intacct has extremely sparse packaged integration with any CRM software vendor other than Salesforce.com; although a packaged integration is also available for Microsoft Dynamics CRM through partner LBMC Technologies. On the upside, if you are a Salesforce.com customer, Intacct has a uniquely strong integration that is well tested, well supported and mature. The tight integration closes the loop between sales and finance and streamlines the quote-to-cash process. Intacct was one of the first integrated SaaS accounting systems to work with Salesforce.com—giving it an early lead into the large and expanding Salesforce.com customer base. However, newer competition for that Salesforce.com customer market has emerged from Accounting Cloud, Compiere, and FinancialForce for customers seeking core accounting software, or from Salesforce.com partners such as Kenandy, Less Software or Resilinc where a distribution suite or supply chain management software is also needed.

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