The multi's matter

As a best of breed financial applications provider, one of the things we pride ourselves on at Intacct is our very deep financial architecture - we sometimes refer to Intacct a "multi-everything" system - which is shorthand for multi-dimensional, multi-ledger, multi-book, multi-currency, multi-scenario, multi-entity and so on. Each of these topics is likely worthy of a blog post on its own.

Taken together they are the key architectural underpinnings of a very deep and robust financial system.

One of the parts of my job is to work with the experts in ERP and financial applications at the leading industry analyst firms like Gartner and Forrester. Very smart folks like Nigel Rayner at Gartner who's whole business is centered around helping companies evaluate financial applications - and Nigel has consistently said to me that Intacct looks to him to be a lot like SAP in terms of the depth of our financial architecture.

Intacct has many years of experience in delivering very comprehensive multi-currency, multi-book, multi-entity and financial consolidation capabilities - these deep architectural features all work together to form the core of a very robust global financial system. This has led hundreds of multi-national companies with thousands of business entities to adopt Intacct.

The beauty of cloud computing is that we can quickly add new capabilities to our system and when we do so all of our customers benefit- while Intacct has supported multiple languages in the system for a long time now, this month we updated our all of our infrastructure to something called UTF-8. What this means in non-technical speak is that Intacct can now manage data in just about any major language being used anywhere around the globe. Above you can see an example of an invoice in Chinese that came directly out of the Intacct system that was made possible by our new UTF-8 upgrades.

Can you imagine how disruptive and expensive it would have been in the old software days to make a dramatic upgrade to the entire infrastructure underlying the production financial system across more than 3,500 customers? I can, I've seen it happen before. It takes years to complete and costs every customer time and money. But not in the cloud computing world - here at Intacct the upgrades to UTF-8 all happened transparently over a couple of weekends. Not one of the more than 3,500 businesses using Intacct need to do anything to take advantage of the new capabilities, their system just now supports many more languages.

I'm not aware of another cloud computing based multi-dimensional, multi-ledger, multi-book, multi-entity, multi-currency and multi-national system available today. SAP and Oracle's enterprise products offer these capabilities, but they aren't cloud-based and they cost millions of dollars to purchase and implement. An Intacct subscription is a tiny fraction of this.

Why I've always been excited about cloud computing is that it is a great democratizer - it makes enterprise-like functionality affordable and approachable for the mid-market. I think this latest and transparent addition of even deeper multi-national capabilities for the entire Intacct customer base is another great example of how dramatically better cloud computing is than the old way of doing things.