In the wake of Sage Intacct’s latest quarterly update, Grace Freeman, Sage Intacct Analyst at Percipient, shares her perspective on the value of the community behind it.
Since its launch, we’ve seen Sage Intacct bring a plethora of benefits to organisations across a number of industry sectors. Its cloud-native infrastructure, intuitive interface and out of the box functionality typically feature high in the benefits reported by customers, allowing them to automate and streamline processes.
However, it is its innovative modular design, with flexibility to add more functionality as needs dictate, which cements it as a true platform for growth. Behind this premise, is the Sage Intacct User Community, whose feedback not only fuels, but accelerates development of the platform.
Quarterly Updates
Sage Intacct releases four updates each year, typically containing around 20 different items. Crucially, these updates can include new features, functions, and improvements which have been suggested directly by those customers who form part of this community.
The Sage Intacct community is essentially a forum is a platform where organisations can form alliances with, and seek input and help from, other Sage Intacct customers. This learning can help unleash greater potential within the solution, taking accounting operations to a whole new level. But its real value resides in the fact that customers can leverage the platform to flag issues, make suggestions, and provide recommendations.
Much more than a space to share thoughts, the dedicated forum consists of a specific ‘upvote’ button to efficiently gage sentiment and consensus behind specific suggestions and trends, after which the most popular or pertinent entries are put forward for review by Sage.
Complementing this process, direct dialogue between Sage and Sage Intacct partners reinforces the relevance and prevalence of each suggestion, after which Sage addresses feedback and moves forward to create necessary changes and improvements for the forthcoming releases.
As well as being incredibly valuable in ensuring the platform is continuously meeting the needs of its customer base, it also empowers the industry to innovate and drive improvement across a range of areas.
Examples span a whole host of functionality, from implementing the VAT reduction in hospitality witnessed throughout the pandemic; to changing the remittance layout to promote greater clarity.
A relatively recent improvement which was ‘upvoted’ leverages AI for document scanning. This ability to instantly scan invoices and read key information not only creates greater automation and efficiency, but delivers much higher value for customers.
The latest release in February 2022 saw an enhancement around financial reports, in that users can now add notations, as a direct result of being suggested by a large majority of users.
True Collaboration
While it’s clearly impossible for every suggestion to be incorporated into newer versions of the software, those which are voted by a number of users typically become adopted and on average there are probably five additions directly from the community in each update.
Our customers frequently cite the community as a real value add, and feel empowered that their experiences are both understood and acted upon in the future direction and development of the software. The value this creates takes the traditional software provider-partner-customer relationship to a much more collaborative level, providing all-important agility to translate potential into reality in just a short window.
More than Software
Much more than a piece of software, Sage Intacct is very much cementing its position as a framework which is continually shaped by its very community to enhance and improve its capabilities. Not only do these changes come to life at the mere click of an ‘update’ button, but they facilitate a flexible, agile infrastructure which delivers truly modern capabilities to organisations. Through leveraging the community benefits of Sage Intacct fully, customers really have the power in their hands to supercharge their operations and adjust, adapt and react to new market dynamics as needed.
Sage Intacct Partner
If you would like to know more about Sage Intacct, you can sign up to one of our coffee break demos, get in touch via the website, or call us direct on 01606 871332.
