Intacct Corp., a provider of online professional accounting and related business solutions, has announced its latest enterprise-class application.
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The application, called Intacct Multi-Entity Console (M-Console) is specifically intended for organizations and companies that have franchises, constituents, and subsidiaries in different geographical locations. And it’s Mac friendly, Intacct representative Wendy Bednarz told MacCentral.
The Mac compatible Intacct system is an enterprise system made on the Internet for small to medium sized businesses. It’s not a redesigned boxed software product. Though all Intacct software is located on servers, not desktops, the company decided early on to support the Mac, Intacct CEO David Thomas told MacCentral.
The Web based software runs on Internet Explorer and Netscape browsers on the traditional Mac operating system and Carbonized versions of the browsers for Mac OS X, he said. Intacct does in-house testing to ensure “100 percent Mac compatibility,” Thomas explained.
Intacct’s application lets both accountants and business managers to administer and map subsidiary companies to parent companies, to correlate subsidiary companies, financial data with that of parent companies, to automatically execute the actual consolidation, and to derive the consolidated financials “all securely and in real-time over the Internet,” according to Thomas.
The Intacct M-Console application lets parent organizations set-up and manage the accounting processes of their multiple constituents through a single interface within the Intacct system. They can keep these constituents securely connected using the same accounting system in real-time. In the past, organizations faced delays and complications due to the use of disparate accounting systems by each subsidiary or constituent, Bednarz said.
The M-Console scales to support an essentially unlimited number of subsidiary entities, and can be configured to manage other, nested M-Consoles that can be established in second or third-level hierarchies (such as the departments of a corporate subsidiary). The M-Console also features the built-in ability to enable central financial managers to impose certain organization-wide controls over individual business units’ accounting systems while preserving the necessary business unit autonomy.
Within this framework, central financial managers can create accounting templates that make it possible for them to set up standardized accounting systems for new business units. Or they can “clone” new accounting systems from existing ones when adding, for example, a new franchise location or a new branch office.
This flexibility further offers multi-entity organizations significant new financial management capabilities. For instance, as a completely online solution, the M-Console and the broader Intacct accounting system “dramatically” reduce the cost of setting up, interconnecting, and maintaining individual business units’ accounting systems, Thomas said. And the M-Console’s integration of subsidiary accounting systems facilitates the preparation, by central financial managers, of consolidated financial statements for their multi-entity organizations.
The M-Console’s Secure Slide-In feature lets M-Console users access the accounting systems of any constituent entity in real-time. Authorized users then can review and drill down into subsidiary detail accounts and source transactions while logged into the Intacct system (at any time and from any geographic location) without having to manage multiple sign-on requests or numerous browser windows, Thomas said. The M-Console further allows a central administrator to determine the specific business units to which an M-Console user will be able to access, thereby restricting access to only the appropriate central and business unit users, he added.