Accounting Seed vs. FinancialForce Accounting

I wouldn’t recommend Accounting Seed to enterprise companies. However, Accounting Seed is the best cloud accounting tool for small and medium-sized companies that are yearning to automate accounts payable and receivable, inventory management, and invoice customization in one integrated platform.

For accounting systems, users and/or evaluators often want to see some type of matrix or "heads up" comparisons of specific features and functionality of a system in key areas such as: 1) General Ledger 2) Order to Cash cycle 3) Purchase to Pay cycle 4) Cash management 5) Inventory and/or Cost Accounting (Projects/Jobs, etc) 6) Revenue Recognition 7) Fixed Assets management 8) Budgets 9) Tax 10) Reports and Analysis It would be great if this kind of matrix existed to be filled in by reviewers so that others could benefit from their perspectives about the applications and how they address or handle the specific features/functionality. With respect to FinancialForce, the company has found that nearly all the key features it needed were available from the application.

• Accounting Seed is an affordable accounting solution
• It offers many features making it an ideal accounting solution for business
• The software integrates well with Salesforce
• The software comes with a friendly User Interface

• User interface is more modern and user-friendly than other software
• Dashboards allow for good visual interpretation
• Reports are able to be customized to better fit users' needs

• Custom reporting seems cumbersome, but it could just be that we need better instructions, more examples, maybe some more canned reports. My company needs the ability to compare multiple years, and more than one budget in a report - we start with an approved board budget and then we reproject each quarter.
• Non profits need to print financials by restriction level - this has also been very awkward - all the data is there but I have to piece it together in an excel spreadsheet every time I want it.
• In general, the materials needed for non profits is not as accessible as it could be.

• Since SalesForce was not made with accounting in mind, building FinancialForce as a module on top of SalesForce gives problems because the overarching architect of SalesForce cannot facilitate all the accounting requirements.
• The FinancialForce integration team was not very good, and did not help us set up our FinancialForce very well. Their customer support is also lacking and takes a long time to respond and troubleshoot our problems.
• FinancialForce doesn't actually build financial statement reports. We were only able to run a trial balance, and we had to build the statements ourselves in Excel.

The company has now converted its legacy, "home grown" operations system and built it on the force.com platform, and the integration between it and FinancialForce is deeply entrenched. No other application would be able to replicate this functionality, and the company will be able to scale and leverage the force.com platform as it grows.

It always works well. We've never had programming issues. Never. It is easy to customize. The system can grow with you as your business grows and changes. Being cloud-based you can work from anywhere. It is intuitive. You have all the features of Salesforce, like workflows, that work perfectly in Accounting Seed. Having that full integration with Salesforce allows you to see all our data in one platform

Change management is always an issue, but the evidence of the application's usability is that both long-time employees (used to the legacy systems for many years) and newer employees have been able to learn the system and improve their business processes.

Unless the internet is completely unavailable - which has not happened yet - the application is always accessible. Since FinancialForce is built on the force.com platform, it's uptime is tied to Salesforce security and system performance standards

If Visualforce pages are enabled, they sometimes slow down the load time.

We seldom have had to use their support but when we have, they have been responsive and actually were able to answer our questions in a simple, nontech language. You don't have to be a programmer to talk to them!

The response time for FinancialForce is exemplary. Immediate acknowledgement of the support request by automatically logging a case/ticket on the provider side, then less than 24-hour follow up by a support team member with specific questions, information or resolution for the issue.

Through its Xtra login website available to its customers, FinancialForce offers a complete set of online, video tutorials, training and documentation. Each tutorial is "bite-sized", meaning it imparts instructional, step-by-step information in 2-3 minute narrated videos. For a particular cycle or process, like invoices to payments for example, each tutorial builds on the last so that the user can get a complete picture of the steps and process in less than 10 minutes.

The company decided to run parallel for three months in order to soften the impact of the change from the legacy "system" - which users had been interfacing with for over a decade - to FinancialForce. While not recommended, this did provide time for the in-house "super user" team of 2 people to become completely familiar with the application, and thus provide hands-on training and be a resource for the users who would be processing the daily accounting transactions.

Honestly, Accounting Seed was the only one I focused on when looking to switch from our existing program. It showed in the partner app store and stated it was created native to SalesForce. As I read through it's capabilities, cost, etc., I knew it was the right choice.

Compared to other accounting software FinancialForce Accounting has its good and bad aspects but overall it is a good option. Reporting directly from FinancialForce Accounting can be difficult to do, but standard accounting tasks are straightforward and not time-consuming to complete in FinacialForce Accounting. In addition, it has a few very useful tools and capabilities, such as the multi-currency multi-location capabilities, that are difficult to match

• Business users save time sending payments to suppliers and reimbursing employees since it is just by one click.
• The three-way POS match ensures that figures match on orders and invoices before paying suppliers.
• Capturing data on reports that are not submitted, approval times, and policy exceptions.
• Expense management and time tracking enable us to view the exact time taken to complete projects and the exact amount that should be paid.

• Beneficial to easily be able to track impact of fluctuating currencies.
• Integration with Salesforce.com reduced/elimintated manual entry which saves various colleagues time.
• Increased visibility over the entire sales cycle because of the integration between Salesforce.com & FinancialForce Accounting.