Intacct Says Mash Up More, Worry Less

Intacct, like many veteran Web-based applications vendors that launched in the late ’90s, has had to wait a bit for the small and mid-sized business market to catch on to the benefits and reliability of hosted software. However, the San Jose, Calif.-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) accounting application provider has waited it out and is now gaining traction alongside arguably better-known vendors such as Salesforce.com and NetSuite.

Today the company unveiled Intacct Spring 2008, which is designed to offer new real-time Web-based dashboards, interactive reports, analytics, Web 2.0 mashups, disaster-recovery options and expanded customer assurances.

Intacct is aimed at the SMB market, but George Jaquette, the company’s vice president of product management, said it’s not for everyone. “It’s not a deep inventory solution. And we’re not experts in e-commerce.” Rather the service is aimed at businesses that “have grown beyond QuickBooks.” Jaquette knows a bit about QuickBooks users. Prior to joining Intacct six months ago, he was the group product manager for QuickBooks at Intuit.

While Jaquette said that Intacct doesn’t compete with QuickBooks, it does compete with NetSuite. However, he said, the big difference between the two SaaS vendors is that, “we focus on financial management. Our core is accounting, and we partner for the rest.” In contrast, NetSuite offers a turnkey platform offering accounting, e-commerce, CRM, ERPand other modules.

However, Jaquette added, Intacct’s mash-up capabilities make it easy to link and embed external applications, collaboration tools, financial resources, and news and consumer content. Because Intacct is open platform, he said, it’s easy to add any Web service to the dashboard with no IT programming help required.

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