Highspot vs. Sage Intacct vs. Xero

Great for delivering insight on which personas are engaging with the material shared. If I've had multiple meetings with personas, but they have not engaged with my proposal, I'm now able to understand the priority of our partnership and how it ranks within their other initiatives.

Sage Intacct is well suited for below areas 1) Integrations with third party applications 2) Contracts module for billing based on milestones and Direct Invoicing 3) Customer communications for Pending Invoices/ Dunning 4) End to End Procure to Pay module for vendor payments 5) Bank reconciliations by integrating with Bank Portals Sage Intacct is less suited for 1) Prospective MEA Allocations 2) MEA allocations during Partial cancellation of contracts 3) Past due reminders for customers 4) Exchange rate history is not available in Intacct.

Incentivized

I am a massage and physical therapist. We are not a fancy business but business admin can take a lot of time and effort. Xero came recommended to me by colleagues in the sector. You raise invoices, you get paid. and you pay your bills. These are all daily scenarios for most businesses and Xero does this particularly well. Since my accountant can query my records directly, this greatly saves on bookkeeping time when it is time to do the company returns.

Incentivized

• Outlook Plug-In is very easy to use and allows users to easily access Highspot content
• Highspot provides instant feedback when an email is opened and data about the length of time the reader spent in the document.
• Overall ease of use. Highspot is very easy to use and navigation is very intuitive.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Repeating invoices (most of my business is monthly recurring invoices) - it does these very well.
• Reporting - particularly being able to dig into the different lines of the P&L statement.
• Tracking categories - I assign a category to every line of every invoice so it's easy to see how much has been sold of each type of service every month and year, and compare them to previous periods.

Incentivized

• I feel one area is in Search - probably this is the one area where AI would assist.
• Sometimes it can be confusing when sending someone a document that is in "my content" which people don't have access to, when I meant to send them the version of the content from the general area.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Multiple addresses for singular contacts.
• Limit unit price decimals to 2 digits, currently shows 3 or more after the decimal on invoices.
• Discounted rates for multiple entities within the same group e.g. if you have a group of 3 or more companies looking to move to Xero, incentivize those clients with discounted monthly rates.
• Easier way to reconcile loan accounts across multiple entities.

I love Highspot, it saves me a ton of time every single day. I like how my correspondence looks professional and I know what I'm sending is accurate and company approved. I'm able to add it to an email template in seconds and choose multiple brochures if it fits the information the student wants or requested. I can also customize templates to make them company specific when appropriate

Incentivized

Sage Intacct continues to well-satisfy our needs and is an easy-to-use product. Service reliability has been excellent. The ability to integrate Sage Intacct with best-in-class companion products that handle expense reporting, budgeting, etc... makes Sage Intacct an excellent value. We continue to be extremely well-satisfied with the results and performance of our experience using Sage Intacct.

Incentivized

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.

I use Highspot every day. It is basically my go-to spot to find anything I need to know about the product, like pricing and internal processes. It also helps me provide value-added emails to my prospects with extreme ease. Without Highspot I would not have the current success that I have right now in sales.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I have not needed any customer support until now, I guess this is because they work on a proactive maintenance of the platform. We have an internal team working with Highspot so if I need help I go to my internal team not directly to Highspot. I have never heard any complaints.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

From an investment perspective, Highspot was very reasonable in price for both the main platform and the LMS. The ease of use and management seemed to be a lot less than some of the others we looked at. If we had a more robust solution, I could see where there could be value in what the others offered, but for what we needed Highspot checked all the boxes.

Incentivized

We felt the 2nd best alternative to Sage Intacct was Aplos, then Blackbaud. However, there were some issues: > Overall functionality - All of our initial business requirements were fully met with Sage Intacct, which was mostly similar to other offerings. Where Sage Intacct distinguished itself was in its business model, what we would end up with after implementation that would stream-line our organization. > Open architecture - APIs for our other specific software tools were already part of Sage Intacct and others did not have the robust existing offerings and did not make clear how we would build such hooks. > Pricing - Sage Intacct ended up the best price, with the software and implementation support bundled into one annual price. Our multi-year agreement was also the best price, through negotiations / iterations. > References - We contacted references for each vendor in consideration. Church/non-profit Sage Intacct users spoke and understood "our language" and were incredibly positive about their experience with Sage Intacct. References provided by other vendors missed the mark in terms of a business match, which doesn't bode well if those are what is offered.

Incentivized

MYOB has always seemed well behind in the functionality. We recently discontinued our DEAR subscription due to astronomical increase in subscription fees. While Xero doesn't do as much in terms of inventory management we can manage without that function for the lower price.

Incentivized

There is so much that we have yet to learn with and about Sage Intacct, I am excited for the future.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Highspot has created more efficiency within our Sales team as reps no longer have to "hunt" for up-to-date collateral
• Highspot helps us understand what collateral gets deals in pipeline
• Highspot aids in new employees getting ramped easier and faster with one location to review training content

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• 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.