Note: In 2017, Sage acquired Intacct, though it has so far kept the Intacct name. You may see the software referred to as either Intacct or Sage Intacct.
Sage Intacct financial management software is specially designed for larger businesses. In this review we’ll explore what it can do, share what others are saying, and help you make an informed decision about whether it’s right for your business.
Sage Intacct Financial Management Software Overview
When it was on its own, Intacct described itself as “Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)” software—clearly aimed at larger businesses and is designed to work across multiple employees, functions, and processes. Now, post-acquistion by Sage, its website states that it’s great for anyone from startups to established public companies.
Intacct’s functionality covers many different areas and is considered “software as a service (SaaS).” It runs in the cloud – from a web browser – meaning there’s nothing to install or manage locally.
The accounts payable system makes it easier to manage multiple vendors and suppliers at once, while accounts receivable simplifies invoice collection and payment. Cashflow management lets you get a complete picture of finances across the business, together with account reconciliation. A ledger management system means you can quickly understand and manage all the financial transactions throughout your organization. That’s supported by in-depth reporting and dashboards, to make procurement and payment easier.
Intacct financial management is designed to be modular, so you can add other functionality as needed. That includes contract and subscription billing for automatic, recurring invoices and payments. Asset and revenue management is another option so you can manage contracts, understand business assets, and manage your inventory.
Related Article: Setting Up Subscription Billing for Your Business.
For much larger organizations, Intacct provides multiple entity accounting and global consolidation. Other useful options include project accounting and resourcing, tax calculations, time and expense management, and vendor payment services.
In short, Intacct financial management software does a lot. We’ll explore each of the areas in more detail below.
Intacct Clients
Intacct has many high-profile clients including TED, Indiegogo, Kayak, Hilton, Indeed, Meetup, Grubhub, and Wikimedia (creators of Wikipedia).
Intacct Core Accounting Functions
Intacct’s core accounting functionality is split into several key areas:
- Accounts payable
- Accounts receivable
- Cash management and reconciliation
- General Ledger
- Order management
- Purchase
- Collaborate
- Dashboards and reporting
Accounts Payable
Managing all of your upcoming financial commitments and bills can be extremely time-consuming. Intacct lets employees manage vendors across multiple areas. It automates the ordering, approval, and payment process to reduce inefficiencies and streamline workflows. Intacct displays approvals, payments, and reports in real time so employees and managers can track liabilities, bills, and the entirety of the accounts payable process.
Accounts Receivable
Collecting revenue and managing cashflow is one of the most important business operations there is. Intacct has fully-featured accounts receivable functions to make invoicing and payment collection fast and easy. There’s a strong focus on automation, including multiple options for creating and sending invoices, many payment options for customers, managing credit terms, and issuing reminders.
Intacct also integrates with customer relationship management (CRM) software so you can easily see the financial history of all your clients. It’s also integrated into all of your reports and general ledger, so you get an at-a-glance view of monies paid and owed at any moment in time. Tax calculations are included too, so you can easily understand how much you owe in sales tax. Additionally, Intacct lets you assign account collections for aging balances, together with deferred revenue and write-offs.
Cash Management and Reconciliation
It’s important to keep all your accounts in order, so Intacct provides a complete financial management and reconciliation service. You can see where cash is coming from and where it’s going, view balance and transaction trends over time, amounts owing and owed, and more. You can view transactions and balances across all your business bank accounts, credit cards, and other financial areas.
Easily transfer money between different accounts, business areas, cost centers, and subsidiaries. That includes multiple locations and entities, in multiple currencies and countries. Intacct links to your bank accounts to automatically input, classify, and reconcile transactions, significantly decreasing manual effort. It will also help you to identify unusual transactions and monitor your accounts for fraud. Cash management gives you the option to record payments that haven’t been made against invoices, such as “point of sale” transactions.
General Ledger
The general ledger brings all of your accounting, finances, transactions, and any other money-related functionality together. The general ledger is a great way to get visibility across your entire business, together with customizable reporting and dashboards. The real power of the general ledger is in handling multiple accounts and entities for different areas, locations, business processes, currencies, and more.
You can view business performance based on several different accounting standards including on a U.S. GAAP, IFRS, or cash basis. Ledgers and books can also be closed in multiple steps to make month and year-end reporting and reconciliation easier.
Intacct offers a short video explaining how the software helps finance departments:
Order Management
Managing the order process, from estimate to quote to payment, is essential to effective revenue management and happy customers. Intacct automates the order process, from start to finish. You can setup your standard order process, and Intacct will involve the right areas at the right times to take the order from inception through to invoicing and payment. You can also get detailed reports on orders produced, fulfilled, and paid, together with the main drivers of revenue – whether that’s products, sales people, business areas, or something else.
Purchasing
Being able to purchase quickly, effectively, and at the right price is a key part of running a large and successful business. Intacct lets you customize and automate your processes for requesting, approving, placing, and paying for orders. It has built-in record keeping together with reporting to focus on how you’re purchasing against budget, whether you’re getting competitive quotes, and allows you to take advantage of special pricing. It also has built in requisition and returns management.
Collaborate
In larger organizations, accounting isn’t limited to the finance department. Intacct allows teams from across sales, services, finance, and more to collaborate on decision-making, business processes, approvals, or other activities where money is involved. Every transaction or issue in Intacct can have a full background from everyone involved so you understand the context and resolution of any problems. That includes specific accounts, invoices, journal entries, projects, purchase requisitions, and more.
Dashboards and Reporting
You need to access up-to-date, easily understandable financial information to see how your business is doing. Intacct provides a wide range of customizable dashboards and reports so you can get an overview or dig into the details of your business’s finances. You can get information on business drivers, revenue, profit margins, business areas, functions, cost and revenue centers, projects, and much more.
Reports are provided in real time, so you don’t need to wait until the end of the week, month, or year to understand all your financial metrics. You can easily see how business decisions are affecting revenue and the bottom line.
Interactive dashboards let you measure, monitor, and segment data according to your needs. Intacct also provides information beyond the purely financial—you can track and measure other operational data like customer churn, pipeline, stock levels, and much more. Dashboards can also be based on roles or business functions, so each stakeholder gets exactly the dashboard and data they need to make informed business decisions.
Optional Functions and Modules
As you can see, Intacct has a wealth of functionality built in. However, you can also add on various other extras and modules to tailor it to your organization’s needs. Here are the available options:
Subscription and Contract Billing
If your business relies on subscriptions or other recurring revenue streams, Intacct’s subscription and contract billing module can help you manage your finances. You can set up subscription cycles based on pro-rata’d usage, tiered pricing, or paying as products / services are used or consumed. Intacct lets you create recurring billing to match your business needs including non-linear charging, billing to milestones and projects, or to any other billing model that makes sense.
Intacct also allows detailed billing at a contract level so you can tie financials and cashflow back to discrete contracts and arrangements. Intacct lets you make real-time updates to accounting and billing for cancellations, usage, discounts, upgrades, renewals, and more.
Contract Revenue Management
Some customer and client contracts are naturally complex. When it comes to billing and revenue management, Intacct can deal with sophisticated billing and payment arrangements. You can set up schedules and templates in Intacct to bill or make payments according to the terms of the contract. Intacct handles both ASC 605 and ASC 606 and lets you automatically reallocate revenue and expenses, including expense amortization.
Fixed Assets
Managing business assets is about more than just depreciation. Intacct’s fixed assets module lets you track asset value, location, insurance status, condition, and more. Intacct links your asset registry with your ledger and purchasing process for end-to-end asset management. You can also apply multiple depreciation and taxation models depending on the assets you are tracking.
Intacct provides a complete asset management solution, including tracking assets, asset history, maintenance logs, key information, and more. All your data is backed up online, so in the event of a disaster you can get all of your asset information back quickly.
Inventory Management
Intacct provides a complete inventory management system for warehouses, shipping, retail, and more. Intacct works across multiple inventory requirements and configurations and allows you to track quantities, locations, values, and much more. The inventory system also integrates with your ordering and purchasing systems to allow for automatic re-ordering when stock runs low. Intacct also has a “smart reordering” function to adjust reordering quantities based on various criteria.
Multi-Entity Management
Intacct can manage accounts and finances across multiple business entities, functions, organizations, subsidiaries, and locations. It can be tailored to your business structure and can provide finance management on a hyper-local, regional, or global area. Intacct works across multiple currencies, which makes it easy to manage business finances around the world. Inter- and intra-entity transactions are easy to manage and track, together with reporting which gives visibility into every part of the organization.
Project Accounting
Large project management can be very complex. Intacct allows program offices, project managers, and stakeholders to carefully manage and understand project budgets. You can get an idea of the true costs of past projects, manage actuals and estimates, track progress to project plans, and lower costs by streamlining project budget and approval processes.
Tax Management
Intacct allows you to manage, track, and pay sales tax and VAT. Intacct automates tax calculations at the point of estimate, quote, or sale so the customer understands exactly how much they are going to be invoiced. Intacct works with Avalara to continually update tax rates, bands, and details as they change around the world.
Time and Expense Management
If you bill clients for time worked or expenses incurred, you need a reliable and accurate way to track resources. Intacct provides time and expense management so employees can enter how long they have worked for a client, together with any expenses incurred while working on a task. That means more efficient project accounting and reduced cost leakage.
Vendor Payment Services
Sending and receiving payments can take up a huge amount of administrative time. Intacct’s vendor payment services let you simplify billing and payments across all your vendors, suppliers, and customers. You can automate check printing and mailing, simplify credit card processing, and make ACH and bank transfers easier.
As you can see, Intacct can be customized to your business needs. Although it will take some effort to tailor Intacct to your business structure and processes, the savings in time, effort, resources, and money could be considerable.
Other Sage Intacct Functionality
Intacct also provides several other functions including:
- Mobile application—you can log into and manage Intacct from your smartphone, tablet, or other mobile device.
- ASC 606 and IFRS 15 ready—Intacct can handle these upcoming changes to accounting.
- Salesforce integration—Intacct features deep integration with Salesforce’s suite of products.
- Pre-built integrations—Intacct works with dozens of other SaaS products.
- Customized integrations—Intacct can easily be configured to work with other applications.
- Customization—Employees can customize the look, feel, functionality, and flow of Intacct to support their working practices.
- Professional services—Intacct provides dedicated professional services for advice, support, installation, and migration onto their platform.
- Learning center—Intacct provides online courses, hands on learning, virtual classrooms, and several other ways for users to learn the platform.
- Support—Intacct provides dedicated support to all users.
Intacct Reviews
Intacct is well regarded by its users, consistently receiving high marks on different software review sites.
G2 Crowd
2,000+ reviews, average of 4.5 out of five stars
G2 Crowd users generally love the software. Reviewers praised the reporting functionality, the way it integrated with their business processes, how easy it is to set up, the implementation team, and many other areas. One user said the reliability is excellent, with no noticeable unplanned downtime and very flexible configuration options.
Reviewers didn’t have much to say about any downsides with Intacct, although some mentioned it could have better integration with other accounting software and didn’t like the fact it doesn’t have built-in payroll.
Software Advice
370 reviews, 4.19 out of 5 stars
Again, software Advice reviewers had good things to say about the software. Some praised how easy it was to learn, while others mentioned it’s built in help features and intuitive interface. Reviewers found it easy to set up, with an intuitive user interface and helpful apps.
Some people did mention that the costs involved with implementing and paying for the software are high. Intacct doesn’t publish pricing on its website, so that’s something you’ll need to consider if you’re interested in the software.
Trustradius
2,100+ reviews, average of 8.8 out of 10
One Trustradius reviewer put it well, “We are currently using Intacct in a multi-entity, multi-currency, global environment to manage our software sales, professional services, partner/re-seller relationships. Intacct is currently being used in more than 8 countries in 10 + currencies.” The only real downsides mentioned are that Intacct’s quarterly software updates can sometimes lead to issues, but they are generally resolved quickly.
Conclusion
The choice of whether Sage Intacct could be right for your business really depends on what you need. If you’re a smaller business, you will almost always be better off with a simpler accounting solution like QuickBooks, Zipbooks Accounting, Wave Accounting, or something similar. If you’re a larger organization, perhaps with multiple entities or working in multiple regions, Intacct could be a good solution.
It certainly has a vast and impressive feature set, and its customizability and integrations mean you can tweak it to work with your business processes. Reviewers also really liked the software, with many reporting that it significantly streamlined complex financial management. Look at everything Intacct has to offer to decide if it could be right for you.
