Intacct Winter 2009 - The World is Getting Flatter

It's been a whirlwind last few weeks here at Intacct as we've been heads down finishing up Intacct Winter 2009, a major new release that we are announcing this morning.

The highlights are big time improvements for global business management, a brand new financial consolidation, reporting and analysis application, new pre-packaged integration with QuickArrow, lots of improvements to our user interface designed to make Intacct even easier to use and more productive and new tools for ease of adoption that have let Intacct and our partners offer a 50% reduction in entry-level pricing and an 80% reduction in entry-level implementation costs.

Given my background coming from Hyperion and having worked on both Hyperion Enterprise and Hyperion Financial Management, which are both financial consolidation applications, I had a great time working on Intacct Global Consolidations over the last year - because the financial consolidation, reporting and analysis process is a one that nearly every company has to go through every month and is a natural to make better using the Internet and Software as a Service.

In my experience, most finance departments find the monthly close and financial consolidation and reporting process to be odious. It's manual, tedious, repetitive and off-line. And once you are done, you get to do it all over again the next month. Most companies handle it outside of the core financial system, because their old on-premises software financial systems were never designed to be connected together as part of a global network. This is the whole reason Hyperion (now part of Oracle), Cartesis (Now part of SAP) and Frango (Now part of IBM) came into existence - to bandaid over the disconnected financial systems in a typical enterprise.

The mid-market has it worse - most mid-sized companies use Excel or reporting tools like FRx and a huge amount of manual elbow grease for every consolidation. The result is that they go through this process as infrequently as they can get away with - it's not uncommon to see midsized companies consolidating quarterly or annually. That's an awful long time to go between being able to analyze how the business is doing, particularly in an economic climate like we are in today.

So last year we set out thinking about how can we make this process better using SaaS. And that's just what we did. Unlike in my days at Hyperion, at Intacct, because we are SaaS, we can assume that all financial data for every business entity, in every location and in any accounting regime or currency is always available on-line and real-time. So we set out to build a system where everything is always live and instantly available - from consolidated corporate data through regional rollups to local transaction details.

We embedded real time processing and automation for multi-entity and multi-currency accounting into the core of the Intacct Suite. We put in place infrastructure so different entities across the business can act both independently and be coordinated. Then we added an enterprise class consolidation application with high-end consolidation, compliance and reporting features on top of our Internet-aware real-time multi-entity and multi-currency infrastructure.

All together, this changes the velocity at which you can manage the business, particular for small and mid-sized enterprises. In Intacct Winter 2009, you can run financial consolidations on either a formal periodic basis or ad-hoc on-demand. You can start out analyzing consolidated financials and can drill live into any level of detail in any business entity. The system will make the appropriate financial adjustments and convert currencies behind the scenes in real-time as you go. You can view reports and analyses in any currency and change between currencies and locations automatically and instantly. And you can even run reports that look at details across many different business units - such as consolidated customer and vendor aging reports - and the system will do all required adjustments and conversions behind the scenes to make sure you are comparing apples to apples. All of this works on both financial and non-financial data, so you can understand operational metrics like employee productivity and how they relate to financial results anywhere in the world.

Financial consolidation, reporting and analysis is a business problem that was just made for SaaS because it is inherently a data collection and analysis process- in a flat world connected by the Internet, the days and weeks it used to take to run a consolidation and reporting cycle collapses into seconds and minutes.

It's hard to even contemplate thinking this way in my old Hyperion days, because the old on-premises financial systems never understood they could be operating in a live, interconnected way. Everything was based on periodic offline extracts once a month or once a quarter. Don't get me wrong- Hyperion was a great product - it's just the model is so radically different when you compare the old way of summary level monthly extracts to SaaS-enabled real-time consolidations and instant insight across the entire enterprise.

There is lots of other good stuff in Intacct Winter 2009 - with more than 100 client and partner driven features and enhancements, our new Intacct MAX for QuickArrow and with our partners new abilities to make it easier, faster and cheaper than ever before to graduate from QuickBooks to Intacct. I'll post more on these later, but for now I want to congratulate the Intacct development team on really great work in showing on the on-demand world can transform the processes of enterprise class global business management and financial consolidation.