Acumatica vs. M1

If they were looking for a little more sophistication out of the box from QuickBooks and we're not gonna do a lot of customizations at all that I think your system is fine if you're gonna customize it to operate in your unique environment, I think your system due to the upgrade process is highly complex to maintain long-term.

The M1 ERP is tailored for small to medium organizations, offering good features at least in the components utilized by my organization such as customizable workflows, user-friendly dashboards, ability to process orders, and track the entire orders lifecycle. It also has good customer interaction features in the CRM part. It provides robust data security, and offers scalable modules to grow with your business. Implementation is not challenging if you don't have so many customizations in the software.

Incentivized

• We're excited on how it links everything together. So our current system, we have a hard time, if we're in a service ticket, being able to easily go back to an old service ticket of that customer and it's so many clicks away. And with the side panels we're very eager to be able to in the same screen click and have the information that we need.

Incentivized

• Allows for component parts to be scheduled independently through the plant
• Once parts are built, it is easy to duplicate/reuse parts across they quoting and ordering modules and customers
• If used properly and consistently, M1 will provide accurate job cost analysis to determine estimating, training, efficiency and other issues.

Incentivized

• Manufacturing suite. You have all the time. So for the Manufacturing edition, you're able to have negative issues that are unlimited and are not balanced into a job that needs to be improved. The mobile app itself for warehouse picking and management sets the default item to one. This is not how most warehouses that I've ever worked at operate. Bomb hierarchy and respectful of child elements. These are nitty gritty elements, but these are kind of down-and-dirty items that need to improve. But overall it's pretty good.

Incentivized

• Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
• We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
• Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.

Incentivized

We aren’t going to switch at this point! It’s a great system and we are looking forward to realizing the full potential of the system once we can find a VAR who has a bench that can support us.

Incentivized

I give it an 8 because it is very intuitive and easy to use for day to day work. I find it more difficult to create general inquiries and financial statements than it seems that it should be. It's not very intuitive in those areas.

Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio

Incentivized

It's always available.

there have been some performance issues

Incentivized

We used Acumatica Support directly for the first year or so. Overall it's pretty good, but sometimes the support staff wasn't educated on the customizations we had, nor was I as the Customer as I couldn't remember which things were customized and which things were out of the box, so when there was an error, there were some misunderstandings.

Incentivized

Support has been great and timely

Incentivized

It was on General Inquiries and it's just a complex topic.

They taught us the basics and we were able to be pretty self sufficient on the day-to-day operations.

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

Well, we decided to go with Acumatica and I believe it was a really good decision. The VAR was a big part of that as well because of their insights and knowledge, but I just felt Acumatica was the right fit for us in size and it had the capabilities we needed, but it also wasn't overkill.

Incentivized

M1 is light years ahead in overall cost and proficiency. It allows so much more control and flexibility as compared to its competitors. When choosing M1 we went through many demos and M1 was the only ERP that met our needs and still does. We also control our own data which is a big plus for us.

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.

• Positive impact. Customers had no problems getting their products during the implementation process and this location still grew 10% this year. So, it's enabled us to handle more with less steps and also with less people. Even though we didn't need to let anyone go, we were able to divert those resources to things that help generate revenue or to handle more orders.

Incentivized

• Time savings having to only enter certain information once and have it follow through the entire order process from quote to cash

Incentivized