This video interview was originally posted on SMB Group Spotlight.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3oDggLhOw4&w=425&h=350]
Laurie: Hi, this is Laurie McCabe from SMB Group and today I’m here on the SMB Spotlight at Salesforce’s Dreamforce 2014 Conference. I’m talking to Aaron Harris, who is the Chief Technology Officer for Intacct. Aaron, thank you for sharing time with me today. Can you tell me a little bit about Intacct, who you are, what you do?
Aaron: Sure. Thanks Laurie. Intacct is a cloud accounting and finance solution that we have designed for small and medium-sized businesses. We’ve taken a best in class approach, so all of our resources are targeted at building just what the accounting and finance team needs, the general ledger, payables, receivables. We’ve got a strong relationship with Salesforce, so if you’re using Salesforce we’ve got a very nice native integration where Intacct and Salesforce synchronize data and processes and it’s a beautiful way to get your front office and your back office working together.
Laurie: So what are you highlighting here? I know you have an announcement about some new collaboration capabilities with Salesforce. What’s going on with that?
Aaron: That’s right. So at Dreamforce this year we are announcing Intacct Collaborate. What Intacct Collaborate does it takes Salesforce Chatter and extends it into Intacct so that your sales and your marketing and support people who are using Salesforce today and who are collaborating on Chatter are using now the same network that the accounting team, the finance team, project managers are using on the backend. So there’s one social network, there’s one collaborative network across the enterprise for the whole organization to work on.
Laurie: Good. It sounds like that makes it easier for everybody to feed information into the whole financial process.
Aaron: That’s right. There’s a lot pieces to it. Obviously there are some great stories, right? I’m a sales rep, I’ve got a deal that I want to get done, I need to get a 10% discount approved on that deal. In the old world I’d write an email to the CFO, the CFO doesn’t know anything about what I’m talking about so the CFO has got to go do some research. She responds to the email, there’s lots of back and forth, none of the communication is captured, right? So it slows down the sale, it adds frustration, there’s no log to what happened. So in this world that all happens via chatting and collaborating, and it’s all in real-time, it’s all captured, it’s all part of the record. We also see this being useful within the accounting and finance team, getting them to collaborate over some of the more tricky business processes. I was talking to a CFO the other day who said 20% of finance transactions are exceptional, they’re complex. And we spend 80% of our time on those 20% of the transactions, the exceptions. We have to find out what’s going on, what do we do? Having Collaborate allows them to not only more efficiently communicate about these transactions and these exceptions, but it generates a log that you keep the communication around the transaction.
Laurie: I know Intacct is really aimed at small and medium businesses, but that’s a very diverse audience, so what segments of the SNB market are really the sweet spot for Intacct?
Aaron: Sure, so there’s really two categories of customers who are choosing Intacct. The first is companies who have outgrown their first accounting product, usually it’s QuickBooks. They’ll outgrow it when they need to automate processes that are manual. Perhaps they’re now a multi-location business and it’s just too difficult to aggregate or consolidate data across the locations. It might be that the reporting tools available in QuickBooks don’t give them kind of insight that they need, which product lines are the most profitable, which of my professional services engagements are losing money and which are making money? This kind of insight is just not possible in some of the low-end products. Or it may just be that this is a growing company that expects to go public, they need to have proper controls in place, they need to have a certain way they’re going to get through their Sarbanes–Oxley audits, so they need a product that will help them…
Laurie: Even if you’re preparing to be acquired or something like that. If you sell the business you would need that.
Aaron: Exactly. You need a product that cannot just assure external auditors that you’re following these controls, but that allows you to provide the evidence that you’re doing it.
Laurie: And that’s about half of your customers are coming from that.
Aaron: About half. So the other half are people who have embraced the cloud. They love Salesforce, they love some of the other cloud products. They can see that with Salesforce they’re getting constant innovation, it embraces mobile technology. You know what I’m talking about.
Laurie: Yeah, they just want to be able to do things on the fly, they way they want, on the device of choice.
Aaron: And no more headaches about hosting the infrastructure, that’s security, right?
Laurie: No, they don’t want to mess with that.
Aaron: So they want to take their accounting and finance processes and modernize them to the same extent as they already have sales and marketing. So they’re choosing Intacct not just because it’s cloud and it gives them the same advantages they’re getting through Salesforce, they’re also choosing it because it’s fully integrated with Salesforce. They’ve got the full front office/back office integration, data synchronization, process integration.
Laurie: It takes the integration headache away too.
Aaron: That’s right. No more disconnect in the process.
Laurie: So how can a potential customer or prospect learn a little bit more or better evaluate whether this might be a good fit for them?
Aaron: The easiest way is to go to our website, go to www.intacct.com. There’s a number of things you can do there, but maybe the easiest is just to get a trial.
Laurie: So you do still offer a free trial? I think a lot of them don’t anymore
Aaron: We do. We’re very proud of our product, we think it’s very easy to use, so get a trial. We actually walk you through how to learn more. It’s actually a really nice way to learn about Intacct.
Laurie: That’s great. Well Aaron, thank you again for sharing that information with me about Intacct. I think it will be really valuable for a lot of small and medium businesses out there. Have a great rest of Dreamforce.
Aaron: Thanks Laurie.
Laurie: Thank you.