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.
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M1
Score 7.6 out of 10
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M1, from ECI Software Solutions headquartered in Ft. Worth, is an all-in-one manufacturing ERP software solution, built for small and medium-sized discrete manufacturers.
(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.
The M1 ERP is tailored for small to medium organizations, offering good features at least in the components utilized by my organization such as customizable workflows, user-friendly dashboards, ability to process orders, and track the entire orders lifecycle. It also has good customer interaction features in the CRM part. It provides robust data security, and offers scalable modules to grow with your business. Implementation is not challenging if you don't have so many customizations in the software.
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.
Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.
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.
Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio
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.
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 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.
M1 is light years ahead in overall cost and proficiency. It allows so much more control and flexibility as compared to its competitors. When choosing M1 we went through many demos and M1 was the only ERP that met our needs and still does. We also control our own data which is a big plus for us.
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.
