Intacct: Winter 2013 just rearranges the deck chairs on the titanic

So I've been going through the new reporting in Winter 2013 release for Intacct. It looks a lot prettier, but the functionality is, so far as I can tell, not significantly expanded. Note to Intacct: If you want to be in the big leagues, or even the NetSuite leagues, you need to improve your reporting capabilities. The current reporting capabilities just don't cut it.

Struggling against Intacct reporting

So I've been struggling with Intacct reporting for the past few days. To put it bluntly, it's hard to get what you need out of the budgeting system. Note: I've successfully wrangled data at five or six companies using a variety of financial tools ranging from Great Plains to Oracle. I've written monthly reporting packages for three companies, one of which is public and the other two large private companies.

Intacct is by far the worst reporting that I have seen in any financial software, and I have seen many. Even Quickbooks has better reporting than Intacct.

The reporting managest to be:
1. As complex as enterprise level specialty reporting tools
2. Far less powerful than enterprise tools.
3. Far less powerful than other mid-market accounting systems reporting tools.
4. Painful.

For example, i want to download Budget data in the same format as the GL download. Possible? not so far as I can tell...

I can't see why someone would pick this software to run a business.

Getting around Intacct's reporting limitations.

So one thing that I have learned is that Intacct is really useless for financial reporting. So how can we get a workaround? Here's how I did it.

1. Create a custom GL download. Pull a couple of years into Excel.
2. Create a seperate lookup based on the GL chart of accounts account that looks to your SEC type accounting statement.
3. Create a sumifs statement in Excel that looks up the desired start date, end date, SEC reporting line and possibly business unit (from some other lookup table you have created).
4. Profit.

Intacct: Where is the documentation?

This week, as I have mentioned in previous posts, I am using Intacct accounting sytem and ERP for the first time. I will note that my client has a full-featured system and runs a good size business on it.

My first task is to design some custom reports.

My impression? This is an afterthought. And the documentation is...sparse. Why am I seeing the values in my report propogated down the rows? What is deciding how the columns are interspersed? There is nothing in the documentation to help me.

Using Intacct for the first time

First Impressions.

1. This is the slowest SaaS system that I have used. Subjectively, it is far slower than Salesforce.com and far slower than the other dozen or so systems I have run.
2. The custom reporting tool isn't ready for prime time.
3. Did I mention that this is slow?
4. Custom reporting - you can't duplicate columns. It isn't intuitive (from someone who has worked in FRx, Hypeiron Essbase and other systems full time for five years).

Intacct makes me scream and run right to the nearest Microsoft Dynamics Partner.

Full disclosure: I have no relationship wiht Intacct except as a user, and no relationship with any Microsoft Dynamics ecosystem member except as an ex user)