Accruent acquired Lucernex in 2017 to boost its IWMS or asset management portfolio. Lucernex Lease Administration & Accounting is a real estate lifecycle management platform emphasizing compliant financial contracts and accountancy.
I believe Accruent is well suited for companies with a large amount of leased assets that need to be accounted for under the new accounting standard. Companies with fewer leases would not need an intricate tool of this size. It is suited for both real estate and equipment leases, which makes up the entirety of our portfolio.
Sage Estimating was initially created for the construction industry and many of its current users use it to estimate buildings, but it has adapted quite well for the oil and gas industry. If the user is willing to invest the time and energy to develop and maintain their database, I can see it working for any industry. It is very easy to adjust and adapt the database as estimating methods and project designs change. As an example, our accounting department sometimes changes the way projects are reporting in our accounting software. Because I can go through our 9000 line item database in a couple of days, I am always ahead of the curve and can report my estimates in the format they require.
Lucernex does an excellent job of listening to its customers to continue enhancing the product to make it the best in the industry and to continue to partner with their customers on this endeavor.
Lucernex's product is an intuitive product that allows its end users to customize and manager their own fields and pages to tailor individual company's needs.
The program has a fairly antiquated user interface such that someone working in it may not feel like they are working with advanced software.
Sage Estimating has absolutely no remote access capability outside running it in a Citrix/RDP environment so users have to be using a fat/full client vs. any hopes of access on a mobile device.
Sage's support of Estimating is adequate though frankly we rarely need it. Outside of more complex operations such as upgrades and installation problems the program itself is so straightforward that we do not usually have any "issues" and questions that are more about usability can easily be answered in online forums. We trust Sage's capability to answer these questions if needed but rarely use it.
The trainers were knowledgeable and engaging in presenting the materials, and their emphasis on important concepts was helpful (I would rate the trainers themselves a 9!). However, I do not believe there's anything we learned in the in-person training that could not have been taught via live web-classroom. Traveling a significant distance (in our case) to Austin, TX for only approx. 12 hours in the classroom was (in my opinion) not necessary, since the same material could have been presented via live web-classroom and saved us the expense and travel-time. I would encourage Lucernex to consider moving to a live web-classroom format in the future; an online live format would still allow for participation and questions from the participants while saving clients' time and money
I cannot recall exactly what other products we reviewed before choosing Lucernex, but one of the leading factors was how highly customizable the software was. We had previously been using Retail Lease which was an older program with buckets of data stored everywhere. During the data mapping process, we were able to easily find a home for all of this "random" data
Lucernex was able to complete our business objective to manage and process all of our Lease Accounting entries within the software.
Lucernex has enabled all of our departments to become better connected, work together to create synergies and transparency to better meet business objectives.
