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Looking for a new financial management system? It’s a big decision. Your choice will shape the way you manage your finances and make strategic decisions for years to come, so it’s essential you pick the right one.
When it comes to best-of-breed financial management, two names come up frequently: Sage Intacct and QuickBooks. Both are established platforms, but they serve distinctly different needs.
Sage Intacct is a highly customisable, modular, cloud-native financial management solution. Built by finance professionals for finance professionals, it delivers powerful automation and multi-dimensional reporting that scales with your organisation.
Primarily a cloud-based accounting solution, QuickBooks offers several packages for different business requirements. Where Sage Intacct focuses on growing medium-sized businesses and enterprise-level financial management, QuickBooks prioritises essential bookkeeping features – like invoicing and expense tracking.
Mid-large businesses and multi-entity organisations
Small businesses, sole traders, and single-entity organisations
Cloud-native
Cloud-native
Multi-entity consolidation, dimensional reporting, project accounting, general ledger
Invoicing, expense tracking, basic reporting, payroll integration, time tracking
Scalability, business-wide visibility, multi-currency support, powerful automation
Quick setup, user-friendly design, affordable pricing, intuitive bookkeeping
8-12 weeks (standard configuration)
1-2 weeks (Simple Start package)
Extensive API, enterprise-grade integrations
Basic integrations with popular small business tools
Mid-large businesses and multi-entity organisations
Cloud-native
Multi-entity consolidation, dimensional reporting, project accounting, general ledger
Scalability, business-wide visibility, multi-currency support, powerful automation
8-12 weeks (standard configuration)
Extensive API, enterprise-grade integrations
Small businesses, sole traders, and single-entity organisations
Cloud-native
Invoicing, expense tracking, basic reporting, payroll integration, time tracking
Quick setup, user-friendly design, affordable pricing, intuitive bookkeeping
1-2 weeks (Simple Start package)
Basic integrations with popular small business tools
Sage Intacct and QuickBooks offer many of the same key features, differing mainly in scope.
Sage Intacct's general ledger uses a multi-dimensional structure that lets you tag transactions with a range of attributes, such as department, location, or project. Not only does this give you greater reporting flexibility, it also removes the need for a complex chart of accounts. It also handles multi-entity consolidations seamlessly, giving you a unified view of business finances.
The general ledger in QuickBooks covers essential functions like journal entries and account reconciliation. However, it lacks the multi-dimensional capabilities and automation required for more complex financial structures.
Sage Intacct streamlines AP and AR workflows through built-in automation. The platform captures invoice data and routes approvals automatically, while providing full visibility across the AP cycle. On the AR side, Intacct automates invoicing and collections to accelerate your cash cycle.
QuickBooks offers manual AP and AR functionality, covering things like creating invoices, tracking bills, and recording payments. This is more than sufficient for businesses with simple payment workflows, but the lack of automation becomes cumbersome as transaction volumes increase.
Sage Intacct lets you create unlimited budgets, forecast and reforecast quickly to respond to changing conditions, and manage budgets collaboratively. The platform's sophisticated scenario analysis helps you predict how different events might impact your business – transforming budgeting from a reactive exercise into a strategic planning tool.
The basic budgeting functionality in QuickBooks allows you to create and track budgets against actuals. However, it lacks the depth and flexibility needed for sophisticated financial planning or complex budget structures.
Sage Intacct gives you real-time visibility of cash flow and liquidity for accounts and entities. The intuitive design makes it easy to connect to secure bank feeds and use reconciliation tools to match transactions and detect discrepancies. Flexible dashboards let you track cash positions across entities and currencies, giving you the insights to make faster, more informed decisions about working capital.
QuickBooks’ cash tracking feature connects seamlessly to your bank feeds, allowing you to categorise transactions easily. As such, it works best for businesses with straightforward cash management needs. To put it another way, if you deal with multiple accounts or currencies, you’ll be better off with Intacct.
Sage Intacct's multi-dimensional reporting lets you drill deeper into granular insights and tag transactions with custom values, giving you the flexibility to analyse data from virtually any angle. The platform's interactive dashboards provide real-time insights, whilst the custom report writer enables you to create sophisticated reports without IT assistance.
The QuickBooks reporting library covers basic financial statements and business metrics. However, as your reporting requirements become more sophisticated, you'll likely find the platform’s lack of customisation options restrictive.
Both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks allow you to automate key finance processes, reducing manual effort and streamlining workflows. The biggest difference is in the scale of the respective platforms’ automation capabilities.
Sage Intacct's is purpose-built for finance teams. It accelerates everything from invoice approvals and allocations to period-end close. By contrast, QuickBooks automates routine bookkeeping tasks like recurring invoices and bank categorisation. This works well for simpler operations but requires more manual intervention as processes grow in complexity.
As you’d expect from any financial management solution, Sage Intacct and QuickBooks offer user-friendly reporting tools. As with many of the features and benefits, the difference lies in the level of sophistication.
Sage Intacct is ideal for finance teams that need agile, self-service reporting. Its multi-dimensional analysis lets you spot trends and issues quickly across customers, projects, or departments. While QuickBooks’ reporting tools aren’t as extensive, its intuitive design is perfect for simple data analysis and day-to-day finance management.
Simplicity lies at the heart of both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks.
Navigating core workflows is straightforward in Sage Intacct. The intuitive interface organises processes – like accounts payable and general ledger – into clearly defined modules. This reduces the amount of time you’ll spend digging through complex menus. QuickBooks prioritises accessibility, using clear navigation menus and step-by-step transaction workflows that enables teams to manage everyday bookkeeping tasks with minimal training.
Intuitive APIs make it easy to connect Sage Intacct and QuickBooks to your wider tech stack. The key difference between the two systems is how they handle growth.
Sage Intacct's multi-entity capabilities mean you can add new businesses, locations, or divisions in one system – with automated consolidation and cross-entity reporting built in. QuickBooks lacks this native multi-entity functionality, requiring you instead to manage each entity as a separate subscription and consolidate financial data manually.
The easiest way to decide which platform is best for your business is to understand how businesses actually use them.
With its modular design and extensive capabilities, Sage Intacct is best suited to finance teams that need depth and flexibility. Typical use cases include:
Small businesses and sole traders rely on QuickBooks for essential accounting tasks. This includes things like:
Depending on the complexity of your solution, it can take a few months to design, configure, and launch Sage Intacct. An experienced partner can complete a standard Sage Intacct implementation in as little as 8-12 weeks.
QuickBooks doesn’t take as long to implement due to its more limited capabilities. The Simple Start package takes 1-2 weeks to launch, on average. That includes everything from connecting your bank accounts to importing the necessary finance data. Bear in mind that QuickBooks’ Essentials, Plus, and Advanced packages will take longer.
Whichever platform you choose, you can rest assured that both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks take data security and regulatory compliance seriously.
Sage Intacct employs a range of enterprise-level security measures, including role-based permissions, real-time system monitoring, and data encryption. The platform also provides comprehensive audit trails that track every change to your financial data, showing who changed what and when for greater transparency.
Security in QuickBooks is similarly robust. 128-bit SSL encryption protects data in transit, automatic cloud backups minimise data loss, and always-on audit trails track every login and transaction change to give you complete visibility.
Aside from security, Sage Intacct and QuickBooks comply with a range of data security and privacy regulations:
As cloud-based solutions, both Sage Intacct and QuickBooks use subscription-based pricing models.
A yearly subscription to Sage Intacct Essentials, the company’s entry-level package, starts at £6,750 for one business entity and two users. However, Sage Intacct is modular by design. It adapts to your requirements – rather than the other way around.
This means pricing is often bespoke and how much you spend depends on numerous factors, including number of users, number of entities, type and number of modules.
As the solution is tailored to your needs from day one, implementation costs are typically greater. However, this also means that you start to realise the benefits sooner.
QuickBooks is available from £16 a month for the Simple Start package. It offers a limited feature set, meaning it’s only really viable for sole traders and small businesses that need support with VAT, income tax, and self-assessments. There are more comprehensive packages available for larger or growing businesses. For £115 a month, QuickBooks Advanced offers automated reminders, cash flow insights, data backup, and other useful tools. However, you'll need a separate subscription for each entity.
The choice between Sage Intacct and QuickBooks ultimately depends on where your business is today and where you're heading tomorrow.
Sage Intacct is the clear choice when you need sophisticated financial management capabilities. At the other end of the spectrum, QuickBooks is perfect for small, single-entity businesses with limited users, basic reporting requirements, and modest growth plans.
Many businesses start with QuickBooks and migrate to Sage Intacct as they grow. The key is identifying when your current solution is holding you back rather than moving you forward.
If you're wondering whether it's time to make that transition, get in touch with Datel. As an award-winning Sage Intacct partner with over 40 years’ experience helping UK businesses get the most out of their finance solutions, we're on hand to support you on every step of your journey.
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Find everything you need to know from feature and implementation to use cases and success stories, in our handbook.