From the Governor’s Cup to the Iron Bowl to the Okefenokee Oar, the Southeast loves its rivalries. Now, businesses get to see a new rivalry heat up—The Cloud Bowl. What is the Cloud Bowl? The Cloud Bowl is the battle for supremacy between two of the major competitors in cloud accounting—Intacct and NetSuite.
15+ Years of History
This rivalry began in the late 1990s, with NetSuite founded in 1998 as NetLedger, a web-hosted accounting software created as a business suite for small businesses. Intacct joined the competition less than a year later, founded in 1999, also as an accounting solution for Small and Medium Businesses.
Limited Suite vs. Best of Everything
Since its founding, NetSuite recruited to be an inch deep and a mile wide. As the name suggests, NetSuite is the complete suite of solutions: ERP, CRM, PSA, E-commerce, and more.
Intacct, on the other hand, created its application to be the best of the best in its class. A solution based strictly on accounting, the company has built the application for integration, bringing in best of breed outside solutions to meet the exact needs. From E-Commerce to Point of Sale to Customer Relationship Management, Intacct is built to integrate and scale with the best.
If you’re making a choice based on Total Cost of Ownership and R&D, this one’s for you. Both vital factors to cloud solutions, Intacct is noted for its four releases per year, all focused on improvements to accounting software. NetSuite? NetSuite offers fewer updates (reported to be 2), not guaranteeing any of them to be focused on the solution you need.
If you restrict yourself to a software suite, you restrict yourself to the results of a single vendor’s R&D investment. With Intacct and a best-in-class strategy, you can:
- Tap into more innovation. Take advantage of an entire ecosystem of best-in-class solution providers that invest 10 times as much in R&D.
- Get the best of everything. Every department in your organization has the freedom to choose the application that best fits its specific business and technology requirements.
- Integrate anything. Because Intacct is not a suite, the priority is making it easy for you to integrate your solutions with Intacct. It’s so straightforward, more than 75% of customers have integrated Intacct with at least two other applications.
Getting Started and Keeping it Running
Whether you are looking at recognizable costs: Implementation, Training, Subscription, and the like; or opportunity costs: Time lost during training, downtime, or the implementation time that averages twice that of Intacct; the Cloud Accounting Institute estimates that Intacct has at least 26% lower total cost than NetSuite.
Quite a big difference, especially when one will eventually focus solely on the enterprise (see NetSuite’s scathing ad that slams rival SAP).
Productivity and Reporting
Your software has to make the grade. A little known fact is that NetSuite offers only 3 standard dimensions for tracking key data, while Intacct offers up to 8 standard dimensions, with up to 5 additional user-defined dimensions available.
Up to Thirteen Dimensions of Data Tracking, or Three? Your Choice. Intacct empowers finance teams with full business visibility, delivering timely management insights that help you adjust and improve execution of your strategies. Further, with the Intacct release of Performance Cards, you can track your data even more efficiently and measure its true effect on your business.
Customization or Constant Hassles?
Intacct supports customized workflows for paperless processing, along with multi-ledger financial architecture flexibility, and formal controls for close and consolidation processes. Intacct easily generates consolidated AR and AP aging reports across multiple entities, in addition to financial statements.
By definition, a software suite requires ongoing maintenance, including database administration. Intacct requires no database administration, but only user management.
NetSuite’s Aggressive Enterprise Mentality
As mentioned earlier, NetSuite recently went after SAP in a big way. Taking a full Wall Street Journal ad, NetSuite said “Maybe someone should get fired for choosing SAP.”
This marks an aggressive focus and an apparent strategy that is enterprise-only. Do you really want to choose a software that, within 5 years, may not even care about your business? Or, for all intents and purposes, would you like a solution that is built for your business now, and can scale to meet the needs of your business in the future?
Odds Makers Support Intacct
Yes, NetSuite is bigger. Yes, they have realized growth. But at what cost? Intacct has been growing rapidly, acting as the option that can handle anything from a church down the street to a multinational ecommerce solution that handles millions of transactions per day.
Intacct has proven that it can match up with the biggest competitors in its market—Sage, Dynamics, and others—it now looks to take down its Most Important rival: NetSuite.
With the breadth of external integration and the depth of internal improvements, Intacct is poised to take down NetSuite.
Who has Already Chosen Intacct over NetSuite?
A recently acquired client had this to say about their move to Intacct:
We evaluated Intacct, NetSuite, and SAP’s Business ByDesign, and chose Intacct because it offered the most impressive set of financial applications that were also the most cost-effective and easy to use. We also liked that Intacct provides and supports the best integration with our Salesforce.com CRM applications, and felt Intacct offered a solution that fit our needs today, while providing the flexibility to scale with us as we grow.
—VP of Finance and Corporate Development
When we evaluated Intacct and NetSuite, we felt Intacct was better suited to meet our needs in several key areas, including multi-entity/multi-currency management and advanced revenue management. We were really impressed by Intacct and determined it offered us the best mix of functionality along with a lower TCO and higher expected ROI than competing solutions.
—Executive VP and CFO
Take your pick. We are so confident that you’re going to enjoy Intacct, we are offering you a no obligation free trial. For 30 days, you can try this solution. If you like it, we can help you make the most of it. If you don’t, you walk away and choose whatever you feel is best for you.