Intacct Extends Leadership in Cloud Financial Management With Intacct Winter 2010

01/27/2010

Latest Edition Features Powerful Multi-Dimensional General Ledger, World-Class Revenue Management and Improved Productivity Via Cloud Collaboration

Intacct, the leader in cloud financial management and accounting applications for businesses and CPA firms, today unveiled Intacct Winter 2010, the latest edition of the Intacct financial management system.

ebizQ received the following:

Intacct Winter 2010 furthers Intacct's strategy of making best of breed, world class financial management capabilities affordable for small and mid-sized businesses and leveraging cloud computing to provide organizations with unmatched productivity, collaboration and business visibility. Intacct Winter 2010 showcases an enhanced multi-dimensional general ledger which allows companies to capture, plan, report and analyze detailed business information in real time. In addition, the release contains a brand new advanced revenue management application that dramatically reduces costs and improves compliance. Intacct Winter 2010 also includes a new employee purchasing application now packaged together with employee expense management for cost effective deployment across an organization.

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"The new capabilities in Intacct Winter 2010 democratize world-class financial management functionality by making it accessible and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses," said Betsy Bland, vice president of product marketing for Intacct. "Intacct Winter 2010 showcases how superior applications, coupled with extensive automation and collaboration, all delivered via cloud computing sets a new bar for productivity and value."

Enhanced Multi-Dimensional General Ledger

Providing timely, accurate financial information to decision makers is the key mission of any finance department, but this is also an area in which traditional financial management software falls short. Legacy financial software often lacks modern, built-in capabilities to support key business information. This has historically driven finance toward manual reporting using spreadsheets, cumbersome third-party financial reporting and analysis tools, and expensive data warehouses. Each of these workarounds introduces errors, saps productivity, adds costs and decreases organizational agility.

With the Winter 2010 edition, Intacct has delivered an enhanced multi-dimensional General Ledger that captures and organizes granular financial and operational business data and delivers extensive real-time reporting, planning, and analysis capabilities. The expanded Intacct General Ledger supports up to 12 hierarchical dimensions, so every transaction in the system can be captured, reported and analyzed with up to 12 key business drivers. All of Intacct's financial management applications and reporting and analytic tools have been enhanced to support this new underpinning of rich, detailed multidimensional data.

The enhanced multi-dimensional general ledger makes it easy for companies to manage their business more accurately and in much greater detail than ever before. For instance, software companies can track and analyze recognized and deferred revenue and profitability by customer, customer type, product, project or geography. Services-based businesses can measure project profitability, total hours by project and actual versus estimated results by project or customer. Restaurant operators can scrutinize food and beverage costs and margin by menu item, by location and by server. The possibilities are endless.

Intacct Winter 2010 delivers significant business value by enabling both GAAP and operational reporting and analysis without the need for additional tools -- saving tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars per year by avoiding the need to implement or maintain third-party software. Finance department productivity is increased by eliminating manual reporting and spreadsheets, saving the equivalent of one or more full time employees. The entire business becomes more agile and productive, since all decision makers have instant, interactive access to real-time data to make better decisions -- for a $20 million company, a 1% operating improvement corresponds to a $200,000 annual return.

"LarsonAllen services clients in a wide range of vertical industries and Intacct's enhanced multi-dimensional general ledger enables us to better service our clients by providing reports and deep operational analysis that were extremely hard to provide in the past. The added general ledger dimensions are critical for our clients in industries like not-for-profit or healthcare that have very complex and specialized reporting needs," said Abraham Mathew, senior consultant at LarsonAllen, an Intacct CPA partner. "In the past, we would have had to export the data into Excel spreadsheets and rework the information to create these types of advanced reports, which introduces extra layers of complexity and work. Now we can complete the operational reporting and analysis from directly within Intacct."

World-Class Revenue Management

Businesses across a wide range of industries are improving profitability and increasing customer satisfaction by focusing on establishing long-term relationships with their clients. For example, telecommunications companies bundle cell phones with service contracts, media companies provide discounted set top boxes with cable subscriptions, retailers offer field service contracts with major appliances and software companies combine software licenses or SaaS subscriptions with implementation services.

The management, recognition and deferral of revenue for these multi-element arrangements is complex and governed by a wide range of accounting guidelines such as SOP 81-1, 97-2 and 98-9 and EITF 00-21, 08-01 and 09-03.

Intacct Winter 2010 features the general availability of Intacct Advanced Revenue Management, a new application that delivers world class revenue management capabilities at SMB prices. Designed to support companies with even the most complex multi-element arrangements, and streamline formerly manual tasks like allocating recognized and deferred revenue or tracking Vendor Specific Objective Evidence (VSOE), this new application delivers superior functionality, comprehensive automation and simplified compliance -- all at a price point one-third to one-tenth the cost of legacy on-premises financial software.

Highlighted features in the new Intacct Advanced Revenue Management include:

• Support for setting prices, including support for Vendor Specific Objective Evidence (VSOE), Third Party Evidence (TPE), and Estimated Selling Price (ESP)
• Real-time reporting and analysis to help establish estimated selling price strategies
• Automation of the allocation and control of the timing of revenue recognition for each element within an arrangement
• Maintenance of multiple price lists and ratios to simplify tracking, reporting and auditing
• Built-in support for latest accounting guidelines, plus the continuous innovation offered by the cloud computing model to ensure timely adoption of future guidelines.

Intacct Winter 2010 delivers extremely high return on investment for organizations that are subject to revenue management guidelines, with a typical payback of less than one year. Finance department productivity is increased by eliminating spreadsheets and manual processes, saving the equivalent of one or more full time employees. Increased revenue capture via automated renewal processing and billing can generate up to 5% more revenue from existing subscription revenue streams. Financial closes happen up to three to five days faster because no manual intervention is required. Furthermore, audit costs are greatly reduced, saving tens of thousands of dollars per year and greatly reducing the chance of financial restatement.

"The ability to manage and automate the allocation, deferral and recognition of revenue from within Intacct makes my life much easier and provides significant value to Vovici," said Hanne Dietrich, revenue manager at Vovici. "I used to have to create extremely complex Excel spreadsheets that were cumbersome, time consuming, and increased the potential for errors. By eliminating those spreadsheets and automating our processes, Intacct's advanced revenue management capabilities save me around a week's worth of time per audit. In addition, our auditors can easily test the numbers since the reports are pulled right out of the Intacct system. This means they trust the numbers and that speeds up the time it takes to complete each audit -- slicing several days off the length of our audits, simplifying compliance, and providing considerable cost savings back to the company."

New Web-Based Financial Processes

Traditional financial management software is like a walled garden, accessible only by finance and accounting staff and often only from within the walls of the corporate office. To improve productivity, businesses must unleash their financial system to make accurate financial and operational information easily accessible to all decision makers and must automate their most widely used manual processes by deploying paperless, web-based systems.

Intacct Winter 2010 includes a new, easy to use employee purchasing application now packaged together with web-based expense management for cost effective deployment across an organization. Employees, contractors and other workers can now quickly and securely create and submit expense reports and purchase requisitions anytime and from anywhere they have an Internet connection. Managers and finance staff receive automated e-mail notifications that their approval is needed and can log in from anywhere to review and approve submissions, or can send back requests for more information. Multiple levels of approvals, detailed audit trails and customizable workflow processes ensure control, audit ability and compliance throughout the process.

Because the entire system is real-time and web-based, cycle time is reduced, accuracy is improved and costs are minimized. According to recent analyst studies, moving from manual, paper based processes to an automated, web-based system like Intacct can save as much as $25 per employee transaction processed. For organizations with even modest volumes of expense reports or purchase requests, the cost savings by moving to cloud computing and Intacct are significant.

"Since deploying Intacct, we have dramatically streamlined our financial processes and improved productivity -- from automating workflow to the elimination of duplicate data entry," said Aaron Goin, finance director at Faith Promise Church. "We have gone from spending 40 percent of our time entering data down to only 5 percent. With Intacct, we are able to increase our operational efficiency and keep the required number of staff low, which saves the church $50,000 or more a year in salaries and benefits."

Pricing and Availability

Intacct Winter 2010 is available immediately. Pricing begins at $400 per month. Employee access to the system, which now includes Intacct Insight Dashboards, reporting and business intelligence, plus expense management and purchase requisitions, can be added for just $10 per user per month.

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