Acumatica vs. Certinia FM Cloud vs. Salesforce Maps

I think it’s a great product. I think it’s very customizable, which is a big plus.
For manufacturing, it’s excellent because of creating the inventory, turning it into an actual product to sell, and also tracking the status of each process within that system.
I can’t think of any areas where it’s not suited, because otherwise we would be looking for something else or making changes, and at this time, we’re just growing with the system.

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.

This is best suited when there is territory management at the field or rep level. One can easily distribute the area/ locality, balance revenue, and optimize sales/outcome. However, this may be less appropriate for organizations that operate entirely on remote sales or for those where geographic location does not matter.

Incentivized

• Particularly well is just the ease of it being able to be used. We're coming from Sage, that's the product that we used before. Sage was limited, five people could get into the system at a time. Acumatica is unlimited.
• The amount of information that's so easily accessible has made us more efficient, more productive, and it just makes for an easier workday when everybody can see the same information real time.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Drilling down from the map point, to account/work order/opportunity.

Incentivized

• Acumatica's open API is very powerful but doesn't get integrated cleanly across every external system, challenge arises with integration of legacy systems
• Some of the platform feature's requires third-party add-ons or custom developments like advance finance report & BI.
• Sometimes it gets glitch in the system leading slower processing speed

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• They just restructured their pricing model and we are ending our contract because of it - you have to pay for 10 users.
• The crossover with accounts and contacts are hard to map.
• The window sizes when navigating the maps are difficult to work with.

Incentivized

We are highly likely to renew because Acumatica has become the foundation of our ERP strategy replacing another ERP system with a more flexible, scalable platform while improving governance, planning, and operational visibility. Ongoing stabilization, roadmap investment in IBP and automation, and strong alignment across Finance and Operations give us long‑term confidence in the platform.

Incentivized

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.

The processes are very intuitive and easy to use. Whether you are entering AP bills, timecards for payroll, or AR invoices, the processes are similar and easy to use. The drill-down capability is also a huge plus as you can easily toggle between different modules without having to leave the screen you are in and navigating through a menu to get the information you need. We found that the standard reports out of the box are lacking. Our implementation did not go so well and when we were finally ready to run financial reports, it was both disappointing and frustrating to discover that the P&L was highly summarized and to get a detailed report required having to do a lot of formatting myself. I was able to figure it out on my own, but when our financials were already delayed getting published, I did not really have the time to spend trying to figure out how to build my own P&L.

Incentivized

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.

It aligns well with business needs. We clearly get productivity gain, and its seamless integration with Salesforce makes things easier. The ability to visualize things and performance geographically helps us to make better decisions. It also saves us lots of time and effort and increases efficiency.

Incentivized

It's always available.

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

there have been some performance issues

Incentivized

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

I would rate the overall support for Acumatica an 8 out of 10. The support team is generally responsive, knowledgeable, and helpful when resolving issues or answering questions. Documentation and community resources are also useful. However, response times can occasionally vary depending on the complexity of the issue or support queue, which slightly affects the overall experience.

Incentivized

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.

Support was comical. It was barely available and the few times I did get help the language barrier was extraordinarily problematic

Incentivized

Very helpful for end users

Incentivized

Online training has gone away. Need to bring back the webinars. Live webinars are so benficial to training new employees.

Incentivized

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.

I'd say the partner selection is critically important. I think the software is very easy to implement. It's very customizable to your business. Finding a partner that will work with you to understand your business and your needs is the critical piece to make sure that the system goes along with it.

Incentivized

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.

Having used Pastel for a long time in the business, it lacked certain features, or the system was not probably setup for our business needs and requirements at the time. It was also not 100% cloud based and needed to be used through remote desktop which had its limitations. Zero just had 10% of what our business needed.

FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing has more features, more useability, and manages higher numbers of customers. The systems I have used in the past are easier to navigate but couldn't handle this number of customers.

Incentivized

Allows for many more contacts to be loaded into the map.

Incentivized

No, annual invoices are fine. I do like that unlimited users are included.

From my understanding, the P.O. module is not very robust, at least the last time I inquired about it. At the time, it had a one-to-one match, with one invoice for one P.O. and that isn't practical for many businesses. I don't believe it would be an easy system to use for sending out invoices, if we had thousands of retail utility customers. We do a small number of invoices because we sell wholesale power, not retail, so we only Invoice the municipality. Not each utility customer.

They are very responsive and knowledgeable about the product. If the rep doesn't have the ability to solve the issue, they quickly get someone else involved to assist us.

• We are able to send automated notifications through business Events, which ensures that information travels seamlessly and without the possibility of someone forgetting an email.
• We save time being able to read our demand and level it against our current inventory qty on hand and our supply to make better strategic decisions when purchasing.
• Better our business and see our pitfalls that were once hidden in our factory by establishing an On-Time Delivery system within a generic inquiry that uses data that is readily available in Acumatica.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• For the first time, we were able to see donors on a map which was life-changing.
• Its allowed us to target donors on trips and other email campaigns when we haven’t been able to before.

Incentivized