MIP Fund Accounting™ is a configurable fund accounting solution. The solution includes functionality for fund accounting, procurement, budgeting, payroll, human resources, timekeeping, fixed asset management, grant management, and dashboards for nonprofits and government agencies.
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PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
I do like the check register, it is easy to access. It is also easy to access information for bank reconciliations but some entries are difficult and I have had ongoing issues with duplicated entries. Those situations coming at times when I am not really sure how I have duplicated an entry and they are somewhat intimidating. It is also somewhat difficult to delete or void erroneous entries or those that need to be otherwise corrected. I do understand that it is accounting software, but feel again that it could be a little bit more user friendly, at least from a fairly "new" user's standpoint!
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
General Ledger processing, including journal entries and reports
Ability to download all reports directly to Excel and PDF formats
Use of Grant codes to enable grant reporting by month/quarter/year
Ability to have multiple departments and consolidate into groups for reporting
Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable cannot be out of balance
Multiple ways to use the product including Cloud and Classic options, Visual menu or Standard (Top of screen) menus to select processes, many options we are not using in our simple organization
We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
With the payroll process, if there is an error in sending the stubs through email, there is no option to resend without a restore. That really needs to change.
Being able to void encumbrance at the same time as a PO would be an incredible time saver.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
My company is pretty dug into our current day-to-day systems that serve our operations (ServTracker, Kantime, MicroMD). Without MIP Fund Accounting, we would have no choice but to figure out a way to consolidate those three accounting/operations programs into (ideally) one program, which is basically impossible if we want to salvage any historical data. MIP Fund Accounting is a great hub to bring all those pieces together in a palatable form.
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I have used this system for about 12 years now and I still learning how to use it. It always surprises me how there is another report to learn to achieve my data reporting goals. It is great to have a system that you have used long enough to feel comfortable with but also a system that allows you to learn new ways to report and enter data into the system
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
I have rarely encountered any issues accessing MIP Fund Accounting over the years. On the rare occasions when availability was interrupted, the reasons were always found in-house when using the on-premises version. Since we have migrated to the MIP cloud, we have had no issues with availability. Any maintenance or updates are always communicated to us and are usually done outside of business hours.
This software is really good as you can run reports for various funds by Revenue Code or Grant code to capture all the data you need for specific revenue streams. Like I said before, this software is amazing for the tracking of grants if you set up your chart of accounts up correctly.
I have not reached out to MIP for technical support; however, their website offers great help resources so I can solve an issue on my own. Another team member reached out to MIP for support and was helped quickly. The transition process took longer than expected due to a lag in communication.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
There are no specifics on what happens if you make one choice or another to know which is the best selection. This is true for JVs and AP. In training we were not given specifics of what happens when one possibility is selected over another.
Denise O'Malley provided training for the HR module when we added it to our system. Denise also gave us a demo of the EWS module which we were able to see that it would not meet our needs. She was very kind about and understanding regarding the functions we needed with a time clock system.
Don't waste your time with MIP. There are plenty of other softwares out there that will do the job better. Do your homework. Get references from actual users. Make sure that what you choose will truly integrate. Make sure that there is local support. Get training. You will be glad that you passed this one by. Trust me.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
The HRA used RealPage (I'm not sure if it is actually the one listed above), and it did not work well. I'm not sure if it wasn't set up well, designed for larger property management companies, or just not good software, but it did not suit our needs at all. We chose a different property management software and MIP for our accounting. We used Quickbooks for Heartland Lakes, but as our business is expanding and we needed a better true fund accounting software, we chose AccuFund to start with, but it was difficult to get set up how we needed. We did not trust the information we were getting out of it, and it wasn't easily customizable to what we needed. We canceled that software and chose MIP.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
The flexibility to create certain features are helpful and are designed to be easier on MIP Accounting Cloud. It has been easier than the MIP Accounting classic version. I may have not fully utilized the software to deploy across multiple departments other than generating revenue reports or expenses. As well as developing budget worksheets for our departments. Which are great as it is, but have not gone farther than that.
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
