Best Cloud Accounting Software
How Do These Popular Solutions Measure Up?
When exploring cloud-based financial software for your business, it can be challenging to get a clear picture of how your options compare to one another.
At Cargas, we believe it’s vital for you to understand the differences between the leading solutions providers. As a Sage Intacct partner, we feel it’s our obligation to help you assess your choices so you can make the best decision for your organization.
Right now, let’s take a look at three popular cloud accounting solutions—Sage Intacct, Oracle NetSuite, and FinancialForce.
How Oracle NetSuite and FinancialForce are Different from Sage Intacct
Oracle NetSuite
Both NetSuite and Sage Intacct offer the convenience and connectivity of a cloud-based solution. A major point of differentiation between the two is that NetSuite’s accounting module is one piece of a broader suite solution, whereas Intacct is a best-in-class accounting solution.
How can this impact your business?
NetSuite’s all-in-one approach puts customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and accounting modules all on a single platform. The modules are designed to work together as an entire suite, and integration capabilities are limited. That might not give individual departments within your organization the advanced solutions they need.
With Sage Intacct, however, the software is laser focused on providing the financial capabilities your accounting team needs and is designed to integrate with a broad range of other software applications (including the most robust CRM and ERP solutions on the market) to support your other departments. Using Sage Intacct’s marketplace of existing integrations or the software’s open APIs, you have the opportunity to use a combination of solutions that will best fulfill your needs.
Another difference is in the frequency of software upgrades that the solutions offer. NetSuite provides bi-annual upgrades to push out new features and enhancements to customers. Sage Intacct offers quarterly upgrades to ensure businesses have new capabilities and improvements often.
The time to implement an accounting software solution can vary depending on your organization’s size, the number of users, and the complexity of your business’s needs. The basic software implementation for NetSuite may take between 6–8 months. Typically, we can implement Sage Intacct within 6–8 weeks.
FinancialForce
FinancialForce is essentially an extension of the cloud-based Salesforce CRM to give Salesforce accounting and ERP capabilities.
With FinancialForce, you are tied to Salesforce. While this might be an ideal fit for Salesforce users, businesses using a different CRM would need to convert to Salesforce to use FinancialForce. And companies that use both Salesforce and FinancialForce would need to switch to a different CRM if ever they want to change their accounting solution.
By offering FinancialForce, Salesforce takes a similar approach to NetSuite by aiming to cover your entire business needs in one platform. As we mentioned before, all-in-one solutions may satisfy some of your accounting and financial requirements, but they may not have the breadth of functionality that you need. For instance, FinancialForce’s single ledger structure limits flexibility and scalability.
Conversely, Sage Intacct, as a stand-alone product rather than an extension of an existing platform, is focused on providing the most advanced financial management and reporting features. It has a versatile ledger that allows you to use dimensions that add contextual information to your transactions and simplify your chart of accounts.
Also, with a multitude of integration possibilities, including one to Salesforce CRM, Sage Intacct allows organizations to use other robust platforms and get optimal functionality to satisfy their CRM, ERP, and other needs, too.
FinancialForce offers quarterly software upgrades, as does Sage Intacct. The two platforms also require about the same amount of time for basic software implementation.
Learn More and Contact Us to Discuss Your Needs
For side-by-side comparisons of Sage Intacct (the only financial management solution endorsed by the AICPA) and these other popular accounting software solutions, review our comprehensive comparison reports:
Let’s Chat
Still have questions? Get in touch with our expert team of software professionals.