Thanks to everyone who attended Wednesday's panel discussion in which Keith Karnes, President of BTerrell Group, and I compared and contrasted the two accounting software products BTerrell supports. We have 23 years of experience with Sage 300 ERP and nearly 4 years of experience with Intacct. If you were able to join us, we hope you learned a lot. If you had to miss it, these are some of the key points that were made.
Both products enjoy great architecture.
Intacct occupies the top tier cloud architecture characteristic of multi-tenancy. Keith explained that multi-tenant applications cost less to maintain, deploy and support because every action spreads across the entire user base. It's just like the economies of scale enjoyed by a multi-tenant office building that enjoys better rates on utilities and more effective (and higher level) maintenance.
Sage created Sage 300 ERP using n-tier architecture, which was way before its time. This means that the user interface, business logic, and database layers are all separate, and a new technology in any of these components can be implemented without rewriting the other two. We founded CodePartners, our sister company, on the advantages provided by this superior technology. Note that Sage can continue to economically adapt Sage 300 ERP to work with the latest and greatest technology tools because of this great architecture. You should not ever see Sage 300 ERP listed on any sunset list of products within the Sage portfolio.
Keith and I discussed the cost and timeframe of implementation between the two.
Sage offers both the subscription and perpetual license models. Furthermore, clients can subscribe to Sage 300 ERP as an on-premises application or as a hosted application. When hosted, one may choose Sage or any qualified third party for hosting services. Intacct customers subscribe to their software. As a pioneer in accounting software as a service, Intacct has sales, provisioning and support nailed because it's the only thing they do. Nobody has better hosting business practices than Intacct, and clients benefit greatly from their leadership in this area.
Finally, both programs enjoy excellent integration and customization opportunities.
Intacct's web based API exposes the core Intacct objects to other applications for direct access. In our office, we created a direct bisynchronous transaction link between a web based payroll processing application and Intacct's General Ledger. To pass transactions between the two, one has only to write a payroll check and click on a web form button. No importing...no exporting...no CSV files to save and then use!
Sage communicates with other programs just as nicely. The n-tier architecture makes all business objects available to other applications to call. This includes both other on-premises applications as well as web based applications. Once again, our sister company CodePartners began out of the simple value proposition provided by fully integrated financial workflow.
Thanks again to those of you who were able to attend today's panel discussion.
If you missed it, you can watch the recorded version here.
If you would like more information, please don't hesitate to let us know.
And, remember to sign up for next month's informative session co-sponsored by Sage Sales Tax, which we'll present on April 23rd!
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