Last week I had a briefing from Dan Druker, SVP Marketing from Intacct (more here) on their forthcoming winter release and a review of their 2009 performance. First a recap of the past year:
- 80% quarter to quarter growth in Q4
- Over 3300 customers with over 30000 users
- Massive uptake from accounting firms with their AICPA tie up (more on that here)
- 99.98% uptime across the year
And now onto the product launch. Winter 2010 sees major moves in three main areas – dimensions, revenue management and employee participation. Looking at each of these in turn:
Dimensions
To allow for wider analytics to be run within the application before a fully fledged BI application is needed, Intacct has now has 12 completely customizable reporting dimensions within which users can generate reports. This gives very granular control over performance planning and reporting. Druker told me that they have customers who come to them with 60000 line excel spreadsheets that they are using to run the reports they need – dimensions will enable to do this within the application and in real time, without needing an external spreadsheet or a data warehouse.
Intacct partners are already using dimensions to build vertical specific offerings – for example allowing restaurants to report based on menu item, location or server or perhaps a not for profit group to report by program, activity or contribution source.
Revenue Management
Druker asserts that many more businesses today are experiencing complex revenue situations with various allocation, deferral and recognition issues. This, along with the more stringent reporting and compliance situation means accurate and compliant reporting is very difficult.
Intacct revenue management allows flexibility in terms of rules and schedules for different revenue classes and flows this through to forecasting, analysis and audit
Employee Participation
Until recently, generally only accounts department employees utilized Intacct. In an effort to increase the stickiness of their product, Intacct is rolling out various pieces of functionality that will encourage employee use of the product/ Specifically they know provide for:
- Workflows for purchasing and expenses
- User customizable workflow processes
- A more flexible UI built on Flex that allows for contextual menus and “bookmarking” or reports for quick reference
- Dash boards
The employee participation is priced at $10 per user per month which is competitive with other expense management or purchasing management offerings.
Summary
Intacct is moving up the food chain – this latest release sees some pretty powerful functionality that will see it both broaden it’s role within existing customers and also appeal to customers larger and more complex than it’s existing pool – along with the AICPA partnership, vertically customized solutions tailored with the aid of the new dimensions feature should see them pick up significant momentum.
[..] As always with these kinds of conversation, there was the inevitable product pitch. Rather than go through the details,check out Ben Kepes analysis of the highlightswhich include: multi-dimensional attributes applied to the GL, advanced revenue recognition management and extending the reach of the accounting app to employees beyond the finance department. They’re all valuable additions that make sense in the context of a SaaS application. [..]
[..] As always with these kinds of conversation, there was the inevitable product pitch. Rather than go through the details,check out Ben Kepes analysis of the highlightswhich include: multi-dimensional attributes applied to the GL, advanced revenue recognition management and extending the reach of the accounting app to employees beyond the finance department. They’re all valuable additions that make sense in the context of a SaaS application. [..]