NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
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Webexpenses
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Webexpenses is a global provider of online expense management software to businesses of all sizes across 70+ countries. The software is used across all industries, including retail, finance, technology, construction, and not for profit. Features of the Webexpenses desktop and mobile app include cross-platform auto-sync with: Google Vision-powered OCR receipt scanner Petty cash management Automatic policy compliance Corporate card automatic…
This product is well suited for an organization that is focused on client services, project delivery, time tracking, expense reporting, and revenue recognition. From a pure project management perspective, this product is not as feature rich as say Microsoft Project Server. For organizations that are looking for detailed complex project plan and resource management (along with resource leveling, etc.), this is probably not the best suited product
The website often crashes as I’m saving an expense and comes up with an error, logging me out. It can be very annoying! It’s really easy to use though and is simple when adding receipts for each expense (easier by phone than website however). After you’ve submitted an expense, the way they show up is strange and they are no longer all under on claim and instead, appear separately which makes it confusing when trying to refer to individual expenses
Netsuite OpenAir PSA is highly configurable and has a large ecosystem of assets to work with.
Tasks are easily designed to automate processes in your business workflow.
OpenAir is designed in such a way that it can communicate and receive information from external systems without having to re-engineer your systems to make them work if you are following standard business practice.
Compared to QuickArrow, setting up reports to reflect the data accurately seemed to require a bit more consultant time and collaboration. Getting the numbers correct is essential, so budget extra time for this iniative. We also learned that certain calculations can not be displayed in the executive dashboards. Ask these questions upfront to ensure your dashboards are complete for your needs (again, working backwards in the preparation stages).
Compared to QuickArrow, NetSuite OpenAir PSA falls short in the resource management capabilities. UI, flexibility, and scheduling options all could be improved. This is on their roadmap, timeline yet to be defined. Scheduling is vitally important to our company and this is THE area where we feel is the applications weakest. However, the application does provide everything critical to scheduling and provided the elements we needed in order to be successful. We altered our scheduling process accordingly.
During our System Administration 3 day online training, when a question was asked about detailed functionality, sometimes the trainer would share..."Yes, OpenAir has a configuration for that. Just inquire with your consultant and they can flip that flag in your instance." The responsibility for obtaining these special application configurations was placed on the System Admin [in training] to ask and to take notes. If your company needs the application to work a certain way, speak up and ask your OA consultant. There seems to be MANY flags that can be flipped in the background to allow for the system to meet your needs. My complaint is that these are not published, rather made available if one inquires.
OpenAir is able to generate invoices directly and we strongly encourage using this feature to keep everything housed under one application. However, this did not work for our organization and we leveraged a financial integration. A bit of a pioneer integrating with Softrax -- the integration works well, however is quite fragile. We do receive appropriate support when needed, but would prefer the integration to be a bit more stable. We recommend integrating with their stated supported financial systems, as staying the course will likely net a more stable integration.
Expense claim feature when it comes to travel and when we have to create in terms of KMS driven it should auto-capture the dates. This can be improved and there is the scope for improvement.
More tabs can be provided in petty cash expense so you need not type.
It all depends. We are still looking at moving our consultants to Oracle PAC, in order to get our financial systems in line (we use Oracle Financials currently). We are feeling a lot of pain with integration and segmented systems.
Ultimately,it depends on how much pain is felt there. OpenAir has given us a path to follow on from QuickArrow. I foresee either moving onto Oracle PAC by end of calendar, or staying on OpenAir.
OpenAir to Oracle integration is not easy. From a reporting and process perspective, there’s been pain from being in different systems
There doesn't seem to be anything in the market at the same price point that is better, however if there is an interrupter in the market that provides better value, then we would heavily assess the cost of change to see if we should move on to the alternative offering.
In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
It is easy to manage users, account creation and departments. The reports have important information and for my users and accountants it has been an easy assimilation tool for people of different ages.Which makes it easy for older users to train new users. It is a great tool and has helped us a lot.
There was an unexpected system issue that caused us to have to postpone a user training session at the last minute. Our Webexpenses trainer was not aware that it was going to occur.
The performance is great. Pages and reports load quickly. The data export/import from Webexpenses to our financial software, ACS, is not user friendly, mainly due to ACS import steps
As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
The support for the initial setup was great, but since then we have only had to contact support once when we had problems uploading credit card files. The help we received at this time was not good and we ended up trying various things until we resolved the problem ourselves. The online support tutorials are good, but searching for a specific issue is difficult.
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
Our trainer spoke very quickly and went through the training material quickly. Since this process was new to us, we missed some important information. We would have benefitted from further training with report generation as well. She did provide a recording of the training, but again, she went through the material very quickly.
It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks lacks the ability to show progress draws, approved changes, and pending changes on a given project where OpenAir excels.
I would have to say that Webexpenses does not stack up well in comparison to Expensify. If given a choice, I would choose Expensify for the best user experience and mobile / desktop being more seamless. It accomplishes the same thing but has a more modern, minimal, and streamlined feel to it.
Previously you would have to manually scan expenses using a photocopier and have them signed and then put them in an envelope! Big time saving so Consultants can focus on selling.
Accounts departments require less capacity as its all automated.
Good tracking of expenses through the dashboard for managers.
