The Intacct Advantage in Professional Services and Software Firms

Professional Services and Software companies have different problems than the rest of us. Without even getting into VSOE (Vendor Specific Objective Evidence), firms that have a lot of their sales work such as client, price list and contract maintenance done in a CRM system such as Salesforce, often have the issue of having to rekey those client addresses, contract details, and sales order specifics into two separate products. They also have to maintain price lists in both areas-which is difficult and introduces data integrity issues. People sometimes don't key the same piece of data into two systems identically-especially if the people are two different people.

Many accounting products offer web services now. It's not just SaaS products. What Intacct does that is unique is that they ensured that the integration was done and worked well between their solution and one of the leading CRM providers-Saleforce. This means that not only can you check off your list that these products can integrate (where you or your consultant has to create the integration), this means that they already do integrate in the most common areas where a professional services or software organization would want them to.

The first slide shows how most professional service and software firms manage their businesses. They have a CRM system and an accounting system. You could think of this as the "Before Intacct" model. Please note that price lists, contacts, and customer master information is maintained in two different places.

This second slide, or "After Intacct" slide shows that key items such as Price List and Customer Master (includes contacts) are sharing this data in real time through real time integration between the two products.

If you work for a Professional Services organization and you are not even to the point in the first screen capture-meaning you may still be doing your quotes in Excel-this solution is even better. And if you work for a software firm that sells software, maintenance and services bundled together where you have revenue recognition challenges, Intacct is a product you should seriously consider. This product has both the horizontal capabilities of a solid mainstream product that has been endorsed by the AICPA but also the vertical features you probably need if you are in the software business. This is true even if you only sell software and have the revenue issues. If you have a staff of consultants rather than a challenge-Intacct becomes even more valuable to you with its cloud access from most computers and most devices.

So consider the value of a software product that does the following things for you:

• Process automation to increase your profitability
• Real time, consistent information in the cloud
• Don’t need IT to manage finance infrastructure
• Superior multi-entity, multi-currency, and financial consolidation for improved visibility
• Business visibility & control

As a professional services firm that uses a product we like very much, we have made the move to Intacct. Why? 225 maintenance plans to track, a remote workforce that does not enjoy slow terminal service or VPN connections for their timecards and expense reports are the main reasons. We also don’t want to have to keep upgrading our own hardware, our database versions, our server operating systems, our client operating systems, or our own customizations each time we upgrade a version of what we use. Why disrupt your business when you can keep working productively? Why keep buying hardware when the rest of the world is ridding itself of that IT burden?