Acumatica vs. Viewpoint Spectrum

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.

Viewpoint Spectrum would be fine for small to medium-sized companies. It would be great for transitioning from an in-house paper-based process, especially since it's designed with small construction companies in mind. They're making it even easier for smaller companies by offering additional features that you'd normally have to find in other products. However, companies can easily outgrow this system. We have about 15 years of data in the system, over 300 active jobs, and nearly 1,500 employees. In the past 3 years we've noticed slower performance and frequent locks in the system that require intervention from a system administrator. We moved to the cloud about 2 years ago and this has made troubleshooting even more difficult as we don't have the same access that we did before to resolve performance issues.

Incentivized

• The data is very flexible, you are almost able to do anything with the data if you can establish the right relations.
• The UI is very friendly and easy on the eyes, compared to our last ERP which I coined as a "List of lists" where drop-down menus lead to drop-down menus.
• Dashboards and keeping everything as a single source of truth.

Incentivized

• Dashboards make navigating to the crucial information quick and easy.
• The layout with what we affectionately call the job info bar helps our project teams to quickly get where they need to go in the system.
• Crystal reports are easily managed and integrated with Spectrum, giving us great flexibility in custom reports.
• With a little training, and I mean a little, Spectrum is user friendly. Easy to create favorites/shortcuts for ease of use.

Incentivized

• I think improvement, we don't know too much yet as we're just now going live, but the customization is the thing that's nice about software like this, you are able to customize it very well easily, but that takes a little bit of understanding to get to know that, and so we're not quite there yet. That'd probably be my complaint, even though it's not really a complaint, it's just able to do too much for us.

Incentivized

• Subcontract Kiosk can be glitchy - allows subs to overbill on subcontract billing items
• Document Imaging can be glitchy - often says users do not have adequate security to view/add documents, but they do - if they sign out and back in, it works fine
• At times, support can be lacking - sometimes case responses are delayed or you get an incorrect answer

Incentivized

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

It checks all of our boxes at the moment.

Incentivized

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

Some things in Spectrum are NOT that intuitive, but I think knowledge of the software just comes with time. There are still some things I need assistance with in Spectrum but I'm very comfortable with my day to day items now that I've been using it for years. However, if there is something I don't do often or haven't done before, I don't find the software to be that intuitive, I actually find the logic on some things to be a little weird but it's fine once I know how to do it.

Incentivized

It's always available.

Very little down time. They host our system.

Incentivized

there have been some performance issues

Incentivized

For the most part the product is very reliable. Since we are hosted we sometimes have connectivity issues but I would say that is more our ISP than Spectrum.

Incentivized

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 support has recently changed. Last year, you could call in and get an immediate response. Now that doesn't seem possible unless you have an urgent situation with access to the software, payroll or payables. I have found that using chat or e-mail works nicely for the most part, but sometimes I feel it would be easier if someone from support would jump on our site and take a first-hand look rather than going back and forth

Incentivized

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

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

Incentivized

Our trainer was excellent and navigated the time zone differences expertly. She gave us test assignments to complete and was available for questions at any time.

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

It is important to have a strong implementation partner. It made the transition from our old system to the new system easier.

Incentivized

Acumatica excels well against other tools due to its rich set of capabilities like deep integrated project management, financial management, scalable unlimited users, robust real-time visibility and strong customisation, outperforming Odoo's variable modules and QuickBook's limited ERP capabilities.

Incentivized

Spectrum, when compared to Simply accounting, is better. It has more options, and it is easy to navigate. Spectrum meets our needs better. Spectrum, when compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate, is better. Spectrum has better connectivity between its project management system compared to Sage 300 Construction and Real Estate. Spectrum, when compared to CMIC, I believe they are equal. CMiC has a better project management system, but Spectrum has an easier accounting system to navigate.

Incentivized

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.

You can grant user specific access which is nice. Project managers do not need all the same modules as Accounting. But Accounting does need access to PM modules as well

• Positive. Again, it is just that insight that everybody can see. Whether it's my sales guy that's on the show floor that's looking at it at his mobile app, or if it's me in the office logging in every single day, I know what our inventory is. I'm never worried about if we have enough product or where everyone is at. It has it all.

Incentivized

• Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us the opportunity to be proactive in analyzing the costs for a project in time to make a difference in the outcome of the project. It has allowed us defense in supporting our communications with the project owners.
• Viewpoint Spectrum has allowed us to become more productive with its accounting software and the cohesion between the modules. It has definitely streamlined the processing necessary to account for the business.

Incentivized