Former Fortune 500 Corporate Controller believes Sage Intacct Excels for Non-Profits!
November 25, 2019
Former Fortune 500 Corporate Controller believes Sage Intacct Excels for Non-Profits!
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sage Intacct
Sage Intacct is used in our organization solely by the Accounting/Finance Department currently, which is two people (myself & my superior, our Foundation Fiscal Affairs Director). We use the system to book all of our accounting entry's and generate fiscal year-end audited Financial Statements. We manage various grants from national governments and other non-profit grantors, and the system allows us to track individual program/grant financials. We launched Sage Intacct in late 2017 and just recently have started using the Accounts Receivable Module. We are also using the Prepaid Module to handle our material prepaid expense accounting. Sage Intacct allows us to provide exceptional reporting to our stakeholders, external and internal. We are exploring the idea of broadening system access to our operations management for self-service reporting via dashboards, etc.
- #1) The flexibility of being able to use multiple dimensions & create custom dimensions and run nuanced reporting on pre-canned &/or custom dimensions that have been tagged to accounting data (i.e., we can slice and dice records in a lot of ways).
- #2) Sage Intacct is a very non-profit focused and driven product that caters a lot of attention to the system needs of non-profits.
- #3) There is a great customer support mechanism and online community resources to find system solutions and solve system challenges w/ Intacct Customer Technical Support or other system user colleagues in an online community.
- #1) Ability to customize the fields/dimensions that show up on printed journal entries. We use Accounts Receivable Project Dimension (which we have renamed to Program) extensively to delineate different grant financials, and it is a crucial metric for us, but we are unable to get that dimension of our accounting entries to show up on PDF, or hard copy printed entries.
- #2) There is no apparent pre-canned A/R Invoice Aging report available. It seems like it should be a standard report. Have Found Customer Aging Report but no aging report for individual invoices.
- #3) It would be nice to see Time & Expense module pre-canned timecard entry screens capable of handling percent of time input instead of hours. Our organization has staff report percent of time per pay period per program for labor allocation to various grants, etc. They do not report hours by program/grant to us. So for us to use a pre-canned time and expense module for staff to key their own time into the system directly, we would need to change our entire protocol and have staff track/calculate actual hours instead of estimating the percent of the time.
- Sage Intacct has made Accounting work less time consuming than our prior system. We can complete accounting faster and produce useful financial reporting quicker than before the system implementation. The Finance/Accounting staff, i.e., myself and my boss, have a life with work/life balance and weekends away from office :)
- Sage Intacct has elevated our financial controls immensely with the ability to add attachments to all our transactions, whereby we upload supporting documentation for all accounting entries. System implementation has made our auditors happy.
- The ability to drill down on financial data from macro to micro very quickly makes researching and reconciling financial data a breeze when, before Sage Intacct, it could be a very cumbersome process.
We have not implemented much in the way of automation features at this time, but we do utilize recurring entry's for deferred revenue write-down, and we do utilize prepaid expense module for prepaid amortization. Using these two features has helped us save time from manually keying entries and eliminates the risk of forgetting to book entry.
While we are subscribed to Time and Expense module, we have not utilized it at this juncture. We are very interested in exploring further use of multi-entity functionality and advanced capability for foreign currency handling. We have an office, and bank accounts in Tokyo, Japan but our functional currency is USD as we are a US Non-Profit that reports in USD but have significant accounting activity in foreign currency and do reimbursements and settlements in various Asian country currencies.
Sage Intacct is way more potent than Quickbooks and way more suited to org's with complex reporting needs and or desires to move the needle via Finance influence of organizational decision making. In other words, Intacct is suited to driving decision making, whereby Quickbooks better for just simple required accounting tasks in .orgs with no aim to gain powerful insight from advanced reporting and analytics.
I was a Fortune 500 Corporate Controller for nearly ten years before joining my current Non-Profit employer, and I love Sage Intacct way better than the field financials platform (which fed into Oracle) that my prior corporate employer spent a lot of money to produce in-house.
I was a Fortune 500 Corporate Controller for nearly ten years before joining my current Non-Profit employer, and I love Sage Intacct way better than the field financials platform (which fed into Oracle) that my prior corporate employer spent a lot of money to produce in-house.