There are not a lot of competitors to compare this product with, but ActiveDocs holds its own as a very useful software for the need. I recommend doing a demo to see how the process works, but it's rather streamlined and easy to create a template and produce a document from it.
It's a great tool that works well to automate processes and, once set up, reduce admin time on things like tracking the approval process. However, it can be challenging to initially set up because it requires an understanding of the process in the first place. We have a team of business analysts who work for us so one of them was assigned to understand our own internal processes and then set up the relevant workflows. I think without this we might have struggled. We also each use the expense receipt feature which is great. You can in a receipt and using OCR the expense forms are automatically populated. You do need to manually check it but this saves a lot of time in filling in forms. As we now have a workflow in place it is straightforward to submit your monthly expense report for approval straight afterward. The document tracking feature is good too - who has seen, worked on, or needs to see the document. It means we were able to stop using Slack.
Very good usability overall. Any user can pick this up and run with it. HotDocs, the closest competitor, has similar end-user usability, but from a designer of templates perspective, ActiveDocs definitely has the edge in this regard. I would recommend this for any company that mass produces documents from templates as deliverables.
DocLink is VERY user-friendly! The daily functions are easily taught to non-financial individuals. It's easy to understand and easy to manipulate with a simple, functional layout. The Administrative module is not too complicated, but it would be more effective if there was a more thorough "help" section or an online forum for users. All of my knowledge is self-taught, trial and error, but it would be helpful for a new user to have an online resource to address questions or issues.
The software overall is very excellent. It responds quickly and produces documents well. The integration with systems makes data input easy. Questions can be designed to allow further expansion of template creation/customization. The rules section is very useful for complicated If/Than/Else style templates. Although experience and training help, the software is very user-friendly out of the box.
DocLink is quite reliable and effective. Scanned documents are easy to read with very slight loss of integrity. Pages load quickly with occasional lag loading very large files. We use DocLink with MS Dynamics SL, and the two systems perform well together without much interruption or ambiguity in the process. One issue we have is in relation to the number of licenses and issues we have when a session will not close upon exit, thus suspending an available license rendering it unusable. Although very infrequent, IT has had to manually "end" a session to clear the license.
ActiveDocs can be a considerably complex product because your use cases can be potentially endless. In our experience, when we have come across a problem or issue with the product ActiveDoc's support has always responded to our queries within 24 hours. Support is only provided via email in 95% of cases. Each year your support and maintenance includes support hours. These are used when you contact support and your issue is not found to be a bug or problem with the product (completely fair and understandable). When we've identified or discovered bugs (mainly with the latest version of Word) it is patched by the next release. They typically release about 4-5 updates per year.
In relation to other software that have a functionality similar to ActiveDocs, they don't even compare in relation to the interface, I didn't use all the software available on the market, but the ones I used and I can compare, ActiveDocs is without a doubt the best among them. We really likes the interface.
Document sender u can only send one at a time, doclink sends mass emails all at once and can archive all your documents, making it a complete solution.
Now set up it has significantly reduced admin time for everyone. I would say on average 1-2 hours per month per staff member spent on expense forms and submissions.
Cancelled paid version of slack as no longer needed.
