Red Wing Software headquartered in Minnesota offers a benefits administration and payroll solution, in their software CenterPoint Payroll.
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Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Sage Intacct is a cloud ERP system targeted at high-growth small and medium-sized businesses. Intacct includes applications for core financials and accounting, purchasing, order management, and financial reporting and business intelligence. It also integrates with 3rd party software like Salesforce.
CenterPoint Payroll has been excellent for our company, with approximately 150 employees. I can certainly see it being excellent for smaller companies and larger companies. I don't know if there is a size of company at which it would become difficult or limiting to use - I can't foresee any of the functions or features becoming limiting factors as company size increases. To a certain extent, I could see the robustness of CenterPoint being a bit more than what is necessary for a tiny company of less than 5 employees, but it would certainly be able to do what is required for them.
(Note: I do not give 10s to much of anything, there is always room for improvement.) Much has already been said about our very positive experience, I'll add some here. We investigated multiple accounting package vendor offerings over a 4-5 year period, but we had to get over the shock of solution pricing in general. Finally, we were convinced that you do get what you pay for. We were at the point where we understood that the price of excellence far outweighed the cost of substandard system performance. So after extensive due diligence in search of the best solution, Sage Intacct came out ahead. Several other (well-known, industry leading) solutions all seemed fall far short of what Sage Intacct offered, not only in functions and features, but also in their approach to implementation support. In the end, the decision to go with Sage Intacct was clear, and price faded as a primary decision point.
Custom, real-time financial reporting. I am able to streamline my reporting to pull in various account groups and calculations which save me time from having to do it in Excel.
Out of the box standard reports for clients who don't require as custom of reporting or even as a great starting point to build out reports.
Integrations with other platforms, such as Airbase, various banks, Rippling, etc.
The dashboard module is extremely helpful in my monthly review of various entities.
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.
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.
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.
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.
CenterPoint support is excellent! While I have not had to use them frequently, as the program is consistently stable and has few, if any, bugs, the times I have had to reach out to tech support, they have been excellent and have solved our issues quickly. They listen to our explanation of the problems, can dial into our system to see exactly what we're seeing in real time, and have always been able to quickly determine the issue, work out a solution, and help us through the process until we've got everything back in line. They are friendly, courteous, professional, kind and very knowledgeable of their products. This is absolutely one of the best things about CenterPoint - even though we seldom need it, when we do, they are always quick to get us through the issue.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We selected CenterPoint Payroll because of our dissatisfaction with ADP (and Paychex prior). We wanted a solution that we controlled internally, instead of having to be at the mercy of some huge company that saw us as a tiny fish in a big ocean. We set our company's configuration, add/define all of our own specific settings, profiles, etc. and simply process payroll. We print and sign our own checks, process our own direct deposits directly with our bank, and can handle our own business needs. When we were with ADP and Paychex before, both companies made promises to us that they simply were either unwilling or unable to fulfill. We have saved both time and money by doing our payrolls ourselves with CenterPoint.
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.
CenterPoint Payroll has saved us tens of thousands of dollars from our prior arrangement with ADP, while providing either similar or superior support.
Having payroll completely in our control has simplified a LOT of our daily routines - if something needs to be updated or adjusted, we do it ourselves instead of contacting someone at ADP and hoping that they can do it for us, then getting frustrated when they haven't.
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.
