Acumatica vs. UDA Construction Suite

Coming from Sage, when you have to post financial data, it locks the system. Acumatica, there is no delay, there is no downtime. Dashboards. My CEO recently asked me, "I really want to see what our top customers are and what markets that they're spending the most money in." Acumatica had that widget already prepared for me.

Incentivized

If you've never used software before and have low expectations, then you might be able to make it work out.

• Real-time access to financials across firm's locations in India for better in-house sales, cost and financial health analysis
• The tool is great with respect to the creation of dashboards and KPI reporting to get visual picture of profitability and cash flow metrics across projects

Incentivized

• The beautiful user interface. It looks good.
• Their videos are professional.
• They have webinars.

• Mass updating existing BOMs or Production Order Details. For larger orders, especially if many things need to be changed it can take a painstakingly long time to update each production order one-by-one.
• The product configurator is too flat, we definitely need nested configurations that can capture variable subassemblies.
• Accounting has room for improvement, I don't really like the idea of SO Invoices living in a separate spot until they are Released. I have had complaints from our accounting personnel since they have to leave the "Accounting World".

Incentivized

• Their spell checker creates a squiggly line to tell you that you have a misspelled word, but, doesn't allow you to correct it.
• The spell checker lets you add custom words to a dictionary, but, it can only use one dictionary at a time to check spelling. So the default dictionary gets used, and your custom words still show up as being spelled wrong!
• You can't select-copy addresses, in order to paste them somewhere else.
• Using duplexing on my printer doesn't work right. It works for every other software I own, but not in UDA.
• There is a bug in the WIP date range that doesn't pull accurate data.
• "Options" in the estimate show only cost, not margin. So if you show your customer that report, you are revealing cost info, not selling price!!
• You can't import a PDF into bid notes, even though the premise of UDA is to try to make it a single repository for all your information.
• You can't use the arrow key to browse photos in UDA. You need to close, and click into the next one. No inuitive functionality.
• The estimating module separates material and labor, in ways that create a very confusing Scope of Work. You need to select the labor item from your database, then separately select the material from your database. You end up with two line items in your Scope of Work for the same thing. Instead of writing, "Supply and Install a new window" you have "Supply a new window" and then "Install a new window." It's hard for my estimator, and confusing for my client.
• UDA will WREAK HAVOC on your contacts in Outlook.
• It does a terrible job of managing husband/wife or partner/partner situations. You can't mail merge them properly, or, you get forced into combining their contact into into a single contact-- and then how do you know whether the cell phone is his or hers???
• There is no good way to credit design fees against the construction contract, if you happen to use that paradigm for your contracts.
• There is no way to filter contracts by their date created. So, how do you find your newest contacts for entering them into something such as Constant Contact?
• If you try to use integration of QuickBooks(QB) and UDA, your ITEMS list in QB will either get expanded to hundreds or even THOUSANDS of items... or, your POs in QB will get created in a summary form such that they are virtually meaningless.
• The "lead funnel" graphic may look cool, but there is not a good way to actually report on the lead status, track the activities and calls that you make, note significant emails that you write, or keep track of when you send out thank-you cards or spiffs/gifts!
• They might tell you that these things work, but, after spending MONTHS with UDA, I found out that these problems are deal breakers.
• Within their customer service department, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. They do not use a structure such as Zendesk that so many other great companies use. Even though I was paying for priority support, there were often days going by where I could not get a call or email back to assist me with a support request or provide a tutorial on how to do something. Had I not paid extra for support, this would be acceptable. But when paying for "TotalCare" priority support, there are times when the software had me stuck, and I was stuck for a day at a time waiting for an answer. Sometimes no answer ever arrived.

It is a flexible system that is very flexible and is easy to use. It will also be able to scale as the company grows. Frankly, we have invested too much time to walk away from it now and the initial phase is going well

Incentivized

I have found that out of all of the ERP's I have used in my career that Acumatica is the most user friendly. I compare it to an iPhone where it's just intuitive to use. I also love the search bar and the ability to search by a name, a document number or a transaction

Incentivized

It's always available.

there have been some performance issues

Incentivized

We recently switched VARs and it has made a world of difference! Our new VAR actually is proactive to various situations versus being reactive to events that have happened. They are accessing how we are using the modules and suggesting better more efficient ways!

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

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

Acumatica's flexibility, user interface, reporting, customizable system, data imports, Power BI integrations, exportable reports, and connections to other systems make it a stand-alone ERP solution. Finding another system capable of doing this would be a good find. Head above the others. In-system emailing. Import/export of data to and from anywhere.

Incentivized

QuickBooks has great quality assurance and while they don't provide support, their software is nearly flawless. Co-construct provides great support and solves problems. In comparison, UDA Construction Suite is full of flaws, and their customer service department is disorganized and overworked.

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.

• I feel like I am not using it to it's potential and it's frustrating to know that it can do more than I am able to use and more help with that would be great
• The implementation was a lot of customize building and I felt like some of it could have been built by my partner rather than having them sit and watch me enter a bunch of stuff, especially when a lot of it was over my head in understanding

Incentivized

• All my money was wasted. I could not get a refund.
• All my time was wasted. I spent much time on customer support, and even more time "stuck" where customer support could not be reached.
• My staff time was wasted, because it was hard for them to implement and then we ultimately abandoned it.