Accounting Seed vs. Viewpoint Spectrum

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.

Incentivized

The Installation team is amazing. They provide clear guidance at the beginning of the process regarding what is expected and what needs to be done. The implementation manager follows up monthly with you to make sure you are on track and if you need additional help. They are very helpful and responsive in resolving issues.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Job Costing - Viewpoint Spectrum handles job costing per project, per work order, per site, and gives us an up to date analysis of the project.
• HR - helps to keep all of the training certifications and HR incidents in a consistent and manageable order for all Managers to use.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Support isn't readily available. You can submit a ticket and wait days before it's picked up. Even critical issues (system outages) can wait an hour or two before someone responds.
• Large companies will feel limited. This product wasn't designed to handle large amounts of data, and performance seems to slow when there are more than 80 concurrent users.
• The new developments are limited. HR Management is less robust than a third-party product specializing in HR Management. Viewpoint Analytics is nowhere near as robust as Power BI or Tableau.

Incentivized

The product is working for us and the cost to implement a new system does not warrant the expense.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

There's a little bit of a learning curve, but once you've been working in the system for a while, it becomes second nature. I would say that out of all of the other software that I've personally used, Spectrum has been the easiest one to pick up and learn quickly

Incentivized

I've never seen Spectrum down

For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

The support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth

Incentivized

Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.

Incentivized

My only insight would be to take time in your implementation and training process; ours was six weeks from start to finish.

Incentivized

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.

I have previously used Sage Masterbuilder, another construction industry software. This has been a number of years ago. The company I am working for already had Spectrum and have been using it for as long as it has been around when it was known as Forefront. Based on conversations I've had with the personnel that were here at the time of purchase, Spectrum clicked off all the boxes they were looking for.

Incentivized

You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well

• 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.

Incentivized

• [In my opinion,] it takes at LEAST twice as long to do our jobs now.
• [I feel like] we are paranoid about something not being printed correctly because of [what I believe are] buggy text fields.
• [In my experience,] we still have to refer to a physical file cabinet with paper, even though a main point of switching was to go paperless.
• [In our experience,] screens can now be "locked", so we can't see something if our coworker is also looking at it.
• [I believe that] the financial hit our company took from this switch was astronomical. [In my opinion:] Beware!