BlackLine vs. Sage Intacct vs. Xero

BlackLine is great for centralization and standardization of Recs, great for reporting and ease of controls documentation. It is not a full fledged automated GRC platform but what it does do with Recs and GL recs is exemplary. The use of the automated Data Loads for both GL and Subledgers is fantastic.

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It depends on the scale and nature of the organisation, but for a business like ours, i.e. a medium sized business with several entities operating in more than one location with different currencies, I think it is a very good fit. It is relatively easy to get to grips with and provides a good level of functionality.

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The only time I wouldn't be suggesting it is to consultants or solopreneurs. I think it's too overwhelming unless you are experienced or have a background related to finance. So it's not that the product isn't powerful, it's that it can be too powerful. For all other size businesses it really is what you need to use to make life simple to track everything in your business. It definitely saves me time by having it all in one place and not multiple spreadsheets etc

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• Segregation of duties - allows for a formal way to ensure that there is a separate preparer/approver for a given task or reconciliation.
• Provides visibility - having account reconciliation data in one place has automated processes that were once very manual, and involved multiple team members aggregating data.
• Streamlines communication and status of close - having all tasks in one place, in the same format gives us the visibility needed to manage our close process, and know the status of items that are still pending and open for action. This was previously a game of telephone between staff, managers, and leaders, and now has been automated via tasks.
• Automation/Optimization - BlackLine provides a lot of opportunity to automate certain reconciliations based on thresholds, rules, and templates. This allows the team to use that time for researching actual issues, and keeping our balance sheet reconciliations clean.

• Excellent roll-up reporting of various categories of expenses across multiple depts. Data is not siloed when we want to find all revenue sources across business entities, for example, or even down to details such as what is spent on "discretionary" expense elements.
• Coding nomenclature is flexible and makes sense across business areas. Again, this allows for both more effective capture of data and with reporting slices and iterations.
• Sage Intacct's open architecture (availability of APIs and already existing hooks) has made integration with other system tool-sets easier than we would ever have thought.

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• The bank feed integration makes reconciling transactions easy
• Once you load a template for your invoices, every client gets a professional looking invoice
• Bill paying and tracking of payments is also easy; you load your bill into Xero, pay it through the bank, and when the transaction is completed it comes through on bank feeds. If you need to query when a bill was paid, it is all there in Xero

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• The Reporting Module does not provide any FRA reports. Variance reporting is Limited.
• FRA, To trace from GL balances imported to the Variance module can be difficult, as you need to map the GL balances to the level in the Var Module. This is a manual offline process. Would be good to have reporting that provides the link.
• Matching Module - Intransit, when scheduling, you cannot pull all the unmatched transactions; only the current period.
• Match Sets: if you have a chance to a live match set (e.g., filter at DS), you can't update the Match Set; you have to rebuild. It would be good to be able to amend and not rebuild.

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• The budgeting module is archaic. It needs to have more application features, including tracking changes made throughout the year.
• The creation of reports is complicated and lacks sufficient filtering options during the process.
• The Purchasing module should be more flexible, allowing users to add change orders to an existing PO rather than creating a new one.

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• Having different email addresses for different parts of a customer's business (eg invoices and statements to different places)
• Easily seeing the text of emails that have been sent through Xero
• More easily archiving old pay items. Our HR software updates rates when awards are updated which means a lot of old pay rates are in the system and they have multiple clicks to archive each one. Clicking the ones to archive in bulk and then just click archive for all would be much more efficient.

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BlackLine has made our finance team more effective and accurate. Our current ERP system is unable to do any sort of financial activities currently being done with our BlackLine licenses. Prior to BlackLine everything was done manually through Excel and stored in binders. There was no option for a paperless process. We are now 100% paperless in our close process, freeing up time, space and saving money on office supplies.

Sage Intacct is continuously evolving and increasing it's functionalities. I am excited to attend conferences to learn what is in the roadmap for future releases. Additionally, using Sage Intacct allows me grow as a professional, I am really enjoy the knowledge that I have within the product to be able to share my experiences.

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In addition to the matters covered in this review, my reason for renewing this product is that Xero's functionality and the constant updates that the company provides, makes the software even more business friendly. The software therefore builds a brand loyalty among customers.

BlackLine could use a little work in getting around the system. The interface is not without its issues including lots of scrolling up and down and a lack of using the entire screen. Importing of the initial setup data could be better defined and reimporting data to add additional fields could pose an issue of overwriting data in a negative way.

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The ease of use as a seasoned user is wonderful; however, new users struggle to adapt to the program efficiently. Better training videos--all in one location--would be beneficial. The use of a "sandbox" environment is a great tool for new employees or for the fiscal department to test certain journal entries or other transactions to verify accuracy of data.

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As a standalone software, it allows users to fulfill most of the basic functions (e.g. transaction input and report generation) simply and conveniently. It also allows for multiple APIs to help augment various tasks that accounting-adjacent (e.g. claims processing). The cloud based model and portability to mobile devices allows tasks to be carried out in a more convenient way.

We never experienced an outage with BlackLine. The only time the system was unavailable was during planned outages for updates and upgrades usually Friday evening after 6pm pst until Saturday morning at 6am pst.

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There has only been one occurrence where Sage Intacct was not available to me, however I had already been working a number of hours trying to get a project completed. It honestly allowed me to step back and take a much needed break.

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We have been actively using and 100% Xero based for our ecommerce accounting practice for over 4 years. There has on been one real outage for more than 5 minutes. Xero was open and transparent about the outage, what they were doing to resolve the issue, and provided 15 minute updates. Showing how they care about their customers and partners. Plus, showing that their customers care too, were understanding, and went surfing or in our case took a nap. Couldn't run our business without Xero as a partner.

On month ends we get complaints about delay in journal postage

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As fas as integration is concerned I don't feel this slows Sage Intacct down at all. However, sometimes I do feel it takes some larger reports more time to load due to all the detail. As well as, I "move very fast" in my motions so sometimes I double click on fuctions too quickly and the system seems to think that I have a duplicate request.

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On a good day, things worked but after upgrades, things began to slow and or not work at all at times. I coined the moving circle while I waited as the "Xero Wheel of Death". Sometimes it never stopped and force quitting was necessary.

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Our issues have been few and far between, and have usually been very niche, requiring an extensive review process on both our end and BlackLine's. BlackLine worked with us every step of the way to get them resolved, but because of their nature, they can take longer than a day/week to resolve.

Only a few times have we had to reach out to support, and every time we did, we received a relatively quick response and a solution was found fairly quickly. Only once was there an issue that took longer than a week to resolve, but it still did eventually get solved.

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Always respond and keep issues open until you are satisfied with the result. Generally good responses, in the past, I had some support responses that were really basic and really annoying. They type where "have your tried restarting your computer" style of answers. Well, of course, I went through all the basics before contacting them. Duh, but I suppose not everyone does. Otherwise, it would be a 10. The last year has shown a marked improvement in the support responses however.

It’s impactful to be F2F

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I have taken in person training classes at several of the annual Sage Intacct user conferences. It is very interactive and the trainers are very easy to follow and understand. They are great at getting everyone in the class involved. They also make sure everyone has learned to task before moving to a new one.

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The format was great; someone was there to ask questions or help if you were stuck.

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Trainings are available for all topics on the BlackLine U portal. These were incredibly helpful when first starting with BlackLine to get the hang of it. Trainings are useful for any module. I have personally used this to teach myself how to use the tasks and variance modules, which are now fully utilized by my organization. The support team is also very helpful in training our team on anything additional we have needed.

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The free training is very minimal. For what we pay for the service, I would like more training. We end up training new users in-house because the provided free training is not nearly comprehensive enough. That being said, the training provided, for the material covered, was adequate and relevant for the given topics.

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All of Xero's training is online and available for anyone (business owner or accountants) to learn and become experts in their system. There is a range of content from product training to real world webinars from their partners. Xero is beautiful accounting software and their training is the same.

You will have to meet up with your final users, approver, internal auditor and accounting policy holder. Everyone has to agree. When you have a well written process, workflow, policy, approval requirement, and control, your implementation process will be much easier

I would not use a thrid party administrator to implement your system, especially if you are going to be modifying the system at all. Use Intacct implementors as they will be able to better support you on any issues that come up after you go live.

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If it can be done, time the implementation near a new fiscal year so you can start clean. Otherwise, you have to go back and do historical data from the beginning of the fiscal year, which can be brain draining.

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I have not used any of the other products, but we did evaluate them during our discovery phase. BlackLine was the "Cadillac" of the product offerings. You could get a similar product, and maybe even at a lower cost, but we wanted the best of the best, and that's what BlackLine is. We wanted a product that we could grow into, rather than a product we would outgrow over time as our organization grows. We have only touched the surface with BlackLine so far, and we've already reaped the benefits.

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We evaluated Sage Intacct alongside many other options, but Blackbaud and NetSuite were the frontrunners. They all were cloud-based and capable systems, but for our team, Sage Intacct was the clearer choice for a few reasons.
First, usability. Our team has varying levels of accounting experience, and Sage felt more intuitive across those different levels. The others could be powerful, but it also felt like it required more technical depth to navigate day-to-day, which was a concern for a small team. Second, functionality out of the box. Sage Intacct had more of what we needed built in without requiring a significant number of add-ons, which kept the solution simpler and the pricing more predictable.
Third, nonprofit fit. Sage Intacct is purpose-built for organizations like ours, and that showed in the functionality available and the system's overall design. And finally, our implementation partner, RSM, was well-versed in Sage Intacct and gave us confidence that we would have the right support behind us. That partnership was part of the overall value of choosing Sage.

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Each of the products I listed had their own list of drawbacks, but the one thing they all had in common, which was right on top of that list of drawbacks, was ease of use. I struggled to get myself accustomed to each system and struggled, but when it came to getting a client to even try and use it was when the true struggle started. Just found it easier to make use of Xero from the very beginning.

Depends on the module

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After implementing BlackLine our company acquired another large company with multiple operations. We were able to use the COVID shutdown to bring them on board with BlackLine with little effort in the setup and training of the users.

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You can do a lot with this system and integrate it with a lot of your additional systems you use daily.

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I have yet to fully stress test the product given the size of the company where I am using it. I am sure as we scale to more customers, more vendors and more reporting requirements, I will have a better understanding of what it is capable of in terms of bandwidth and processing

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• Implementing bank reconciliation matching has taken more time than expected, creating an additional workload for team members.
• Increased visibility into the team's progress on close tasks and reconciliations, allowing for greater accountability.
• This allows our team to have a one-stop shop for all things close-related, saving us time with fewer status calls, trackers to update, etc.

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• Positive - It runs better than our old software when we all work together, rather than having to sign off on each other and deal with syncing issues.
• Negative - It's not as easy to go back to fix an amount, a date, etc. Sometimes, a very small mistake needs to be corrected by voiding and redoing the entire transaction.
• We can successfully sync other software we use with Intacct! It reduces workload when things are automated.

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• Xero is a basic accounting system that performs basic accounting tasks easily and accurately. For that, it provides a positive impact on our day to day accounting operations.
• Because of Xero's basic structure, I feel it lacks some of the sophistication that some users want and need. The ability to create unique custom reports would enhance the impact Xero would have on meeting business objectives by providing current and useful accounting information.
• In my opinion, Xero's lack of focus on their customers - their users - is a real issue with me. In my opinion, those of us that are in the trenches that work with the system on a daily basis have to deal with the shortcomings of the system with the knowledge that Xero support refuses to address the operational issues that make their user's lives difficult. I feel if Xero would focus on truly making their software better from a users point of view, it has the potential to be a great system.