What is IES (Intuit Enterprise Suite) for Nonprofits?

Wednesday, September 25, 2024

If you tried QuickBooks Online years ago, you might have the impression that your organization is too complex to use the system. The outdated reputation of the software is that it can be used only for small shops. But the Intuit team is turning this reputation around by introducing new products like Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES).

IES is a new tool for mid-market organizations, offering more advanced features that can be used for larger organizations. You might be wondering how this impacts your nonprofit. And that’s what we’re here to answer! We’ll walk through some of the new features offered through IES, explain how you might use those features for your nonprofit, and discuss which nonprofit organizations may benefit from this accounting system.

What is Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES)?

IES is a new product released by Intuit for larger organizations, with new features that solve for more complex situations than their other products. While IES is not specifically designed for nonprofit organizations (newsflash, neither was QuickBooks Online!), nonprofits can still use it to handle some of their more complex accounting needs.

Many organizations deal with complicated accounting issues like tracking multiple grants, endowments, and other revenue restrictions unique to the nonprofit world. This means that accounting software needs specific features to handle these types of issues (and it never hurts to have an accountant who specializes in nonprofit accounting). IES includes features designed to help organizations handle these types of complexities.

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How does IES compare to Other Accounting Software for Nonprofits

IES vs. QuickBooks Online

QuickBooks Online (QBO) is a standard accounting system designed with small businesses in mind. It should be noted that there is a QuickBooks for Nonprofits product. But there are very few notable differences between that product and QBO. The basic functionality is the same but they do use some more nonprofit-centric terminology such as “donors” rather than “customers” and “pledges rather than “invoices.”

QBO and IES both offer a core number of accounting features including:

• Income and expenses tracking
• Cash flow tracking
• Reporting for financial statements such as your
  • Statement of financial position (balance sheet)
  • Statement of functional expenses
  • Statement of cash flows
  • Statement of activities (income statement)
• A general ledger
• Journal entries
• Bank reconciliations
• Bill management
• Project features

QBO (or QuickBooks for Nonprofits) has accounting functionality appropriate for many organizations, especially those that don’t have as many grants and other restricted funds that need to be considered.

The general ledger, revenue and expense tracking, and automations can be used for basic financial tracking. However, QBO tends to have a less built-out projects feature, which is best used to track grants and other restricted funds.

Donors or grantors may choose to restrict funds so that those funds are used for a specific purpose and for that purpose alone. Nonprofits must consider this unique aspect of nonprofit accounting when they encounter these restrictions and especially when they encounter several of them. If you have many restrictions, you’ll need software that can track them in order to remain compliant with grant requirements and accountable to donors.

IES offers more comprehensive projects features, which can help with grant and restricted fund management, providing new functionality such as:

• A new project manager role
• Project-specific reporting
• Project monitoring

All of these features can be used to better understand restricted funding, helping organizations better understand their spending and how much funding is left as a part of each restricted fund.

In addition to grants, larger organizations with several chapters or subsidiaries may find that the multi-entity component of IES software can manage. For organizations with multiple entities, you no longer need to organize your reports separately. With Intuit Enterprise Suite, you can pull reports and analyze financial information for each entity separately or as a whole organization.

This multi-entity feature will offer options to analyze:

• Consolidated financial statements
• Inter-organizational journal entries
• Inter-organizational transaction eliminations

Plus, all transactions and reports for multi-entity organizations can be handled from a single login. You won’t be required to obtain multiple licenses in these situations with IES. You can simply use a drop-down menu to view information about the parent organization and any subsidiaries from a singular dashboard.

IES also offers additional reporting options that help you further break down data, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the next section.

IES vs. Sage Intacct

Another feature that is less robust in QBO that has historically lead many organizations to solutions like Sage Intacct is comprehensive reporting. While solutions like Sage Intacct provide robust reporting tools such as P&L per project, QBO has historically lacked features for these more complex insights.

Intuit Enterprise Suite is designed to close this gap and create a solution that is more competitive with these comprehensive features available in Sage Intacct. Because Sage Intacct is specifically designed with nonprofits in mind, it offers several reporting features that make it easier to comply with grant requirements. For example, Sage Intacct offers:

• Budget vs. actual reports per grant
• Reporting and filtering by grant details
• Grant classifications in transaction reporting
• The ability to tie time sheet entries to specific grants
• Task and grant tracking dashboard
• Marking transactions as reimbursable during the transaction reporting process to account for reimbursable grants.

Some of these features are possible in QuickBooks Online, but they’re not as robust. For example, you can track time sheet entries to grants through the Time Activity tab of the projects tool in QBO. And you can see the specific transactions per grant in the Project Transactions tab.

Project reports available through QBO Projects are limited to:

• Project Profitability
• Time cost by employee/vendor
• Unbilled time and expenses

As you can see, these QBO features are not nearly as robust as the Sage Intacct ones, but IES is working to solve that.

IES will offer more reporting options by project, including:

• Project status
• Project cost by vendor or project
• Project cost details
• Time by employee and project
• P&L by project

As IES is not designed specifically for nonprofits, their reporting terminology uses the word “project” more than “grant,” but, in effect, these are synonymous for nonprofits using the software.

IES also offers deeper insights into reporting that goes past projects and grants. Their multi-dimensional reporting options allow organizations another level deeper into reports, providing a level deeper than the standard organizational profit and loss statement.

With multi-dimensional reports, your organization will be able to understand profit and loss information by various attributes, including:

• Location
• Fund Restrictions
• Fund Balances
• Grants
• Department
• Donor Type
• Business Unit
• Revenue Type

With this configurable solution, your organization can create up to 20 custom dimensions with five levels of hierarchy. You can also get a granular view of this data by tagging line items, accounts payable and accounts receivable transactions with your custom dimensions.

IES also carries over the user-friendliness of QuickBooks, a long-admired feature of the QuickBooks system. Some consider this system easier to learn than Sage Intacct, although the setup for IES will require more time and energy than that for QuickBooks.

Other Features Available Through IES

Unlike Sage Intacct, IES is not designed specifically for nonprofit organizations. However, the features we’ve discussed already are very useful for nonprofits of a certain size. The software does offer a number of other features that some nonprofits may find useful but are not as applicable to the general nonprofit industry. These features include:

• Multi-entity management
• 20+ dimensions with multi-dimensional reporting
• AI-generated P&L projections and budgets
• Budget collaboration through task assignments

While these features are not necessary for the nonprofit industry as a whole, some organizations may find that they’re useful.

Common Nonprofit Questions About IES

Your nonprofit may have some questions about this software past simply what it offers, pertaining specifically to how it’s used for nonprofits like yours. These are some of the common questions we’ve heard from other nonprofit organizations like yours:

Why move from QBO to IES?

If your nonprofit manages lots of grants (over 5) and find that the QBO offerings don’t offer features to help you manage all of that funding, IES could be the solution to help you manage it. If you operate using fund accounting and have lots of restricted assets, this could also help you manage those funds and maintain compliance with GAAP accounting standards.

What organizations will benefit most from IES?

Organizations that will find IES the most beneficial will be mid-sized to large nonprofit organizations with multiple restricted revenue sources. Generally, those organizations with greater than $3 million in annual gross revenue may find this product most useful to organize their finances.

How much will this product cost?

The price of IES has not yet been released at the time of this article's publication. However, it’s safe to assume it will be more expensive than a standard QuickBooks Online subscription. How it compares in cost to Sage Intacct is currently unknown.

Final Thoughts

Intuit Enterprise Suite is still a brand-new product with many more details to come. Please check back often as we’ll continue updating this article as we learn more about the software.

IES combines the user-friendly interface of QuickBooks Online with the complexities of Sage Intacct. It’s a great option for nonprofits that need to manage many grants or have a level of complexity that cannot be solved in QBO alone.

If you have further questions about this software or want to know if it could be the right solution for your organization, feel free to reach out to Jitasa’s accounting team. As we work with nonprofits of any size and with a multitude of accounting complexities, our knowledgeable staff can point you in the right direction for this accounting system. Request a quote today!

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