Today Intacct, a provider of online professional accounting solutions, is officially announcing the launch of its enterprise-class, multi-company consolidation module. Company spokesperson, Wendy Bednarz, told MacCentral the features are “quite comparable to those of larger ERP systems.”
A companion application to Intacct’s enterprise-class General Ledger, Intacct Consolidation is an optional, integrated application that enables the customized, automated roll ups of multiple subsidiary companies into a parent company.
The price for users will be US$10 per month, per user with no-hosting fees, and $10 per month, per subsidiary. The subscription can be started and ended right from the Intacct subscriptions page, via the Web, Bednarz said.
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 company, to automatically execute the actual consolidation, and to derive the consolidated financials “all securely and in real-time over the Internet,” according to Thomas.
Fully integrated into Intacct’s core accounting system, the Consolidation application accommodates any configuration of subsidiary companies, including “flat” structures in which several subsidiaries are owned by one parent company and more complex structures in which either a shared equity ownership exists between multiple parent companies or holding companies own the parent companies.
The Secure Slide-In feature permits application users to securely review and drill down into subsidiary detail accounts and source transactions while logged into the Intacct system any time or place without having to manage multiple sign-on requests or numerous browser windows, Thomas said. The Consolidation application also features historical accounting-period and account mapping, which allows for subsidiary companies to be rolled into parent companies with differing close dates or year-end periods.
What’s more, it creates and maintains separate adjusting journals for consolidation entries to accommodate and provide a platform to separately correct or update journal entries for any consolidated company without compromising the integrity of the data within the General Ledger, Thomas said. A separate journal can be used for each subsidiary that is being consolidated in order to track the data from different subsidiaries independently of each other.
Intacct Consolidation is also the first online consolidation application to implement the concept of “default consolidating locations,” Thomas said. Until now, conventional consolidation applications identified transactions only by geographical locations without considering specific consolidation locations. Consolidation automatically assigns, or “tags,” transactions with specific, pre-defined consolidating locations, which are then hierarchically tracked in the consolidation process. During the application setup process, the Intacct system user specifies the default consolidating locations.