Intacct Winter 2009 - Convergence for QuickBooks Graduates

As those of you who've been following this blog know, one of our key strategies here at Intacct is to make it a "no-brainer" for companies that have outgrown QuickBooks to graduate to Intacct.

We've been working hard with our Business Solution Providor Partners (aka our VARs) to take reduce the cost, time and risk of graduating from QuickBooks to Intacct - and to offer really compelling business value for making the move.

The first part of this project was to work with our VARS to develop migration tools, work out a rapid implementation methodology, and create best practices industry templates for QuickBooks graduates. It turns out that the methodology and industry templates are the most important part of the graduation process- the reason companies graduate from QuickBooks in the first place is to upgrade / professionalize their financial processes, introduce automation, streamline operations, go international, become auditable, etc.

So we've put a lot of focus with the partners on creating a process that makes it fast for QuickBooks graduates to upgrade their financial processes, and I'm even more excited about the growing library of micro-vertical versions of Intacct that our partners are creating. An really cool feature we have for VARs now is that they can package up their industry expertise to create custom vertical industry versions of Intacct that they can re-use over and over again for new clients.

We've also made some significant changes to Intacct Winter 2009 focused on user experience, user productivity and effectiveness. The goal was to make all of our users delighted and more productive with our user interface, but in particular to help QuickBooks graduates through the process of moving up to a system that inherently has much more depth and complexity.

We spent a lot of time on a new configurable menuing system that adapts to the users role and preferences. We added a really cool new favorites bar (written in Adobe Flex for you techies out there) that slides in and out and provides one-click access to a users favorite screens, business processes, customers, etc. We also added "Google-like" search - simple one click search to everything across the system. Another cool innovation are graphical process maps that show the user what their company's processes look like to help them navigate through the system. All in all it works together very well to make the system much faster to navigate around in, much easier to understand and much faster to find exactly what you need to get your job done.

So together there are four new things that have come together in Intacct Winter 2009 to make it much faster, less expensive, more productive and higher value to graduate from QuickBooks to Intacct. Faster migration via automated tools, a fast and value added implementation methodology, micro-vertical industry templates with built-in best practices and new features for higher user productivity and superior user experience.

The result of the convergence of our fast growing VAR community and these new product features is that we can offer an even better solution for QuickBooks graduates, and we can offer it faster cheaper than ever before. A year ago the cost of a basic Intacct implementation was around $10,000. Today our VARs are offering graduation from QuickBooks for less than $2,000 - an 80% improvement. Plus with all the new best practices industry content what you get for $2,000 today is increasingly higher value than what $10,000 would have brought you a year ago. So it's cheaper and better.

Where I see this going, and where I think the most value is, is in an ever increasing library of micro-vertical versions of Intacct from our partners. I'd like to see a marketplace of hundreds of certified industry versions of the product that are tailored across a wide array of micro-verticals and company sizes. For the partners, this provides a way to monetize their intellectual property by getting paid for their domain expertise. For customers, this means a very inexpensive way to get a massive head start of a best practices financial system implementation for their vertical.

I see this in a way as a convergence of SaaS and Web 2.0 community ideas. SaaS is mostly focused on industrial strength business applications and technologies delivered over the Web. But the community idea - in this case bringing together a community of VARs and other experts to develop a pool of intellectual property that can be deployed on top of the SaaS applications in the form of microvertical templates and best practices - well that's more of a Web 2.0 community or marketplace thought that I think has lots of possibilities.