Certinia ERP Cloud vs. Genius Solutions

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.

Genius is great for analysis data using Microsoft products like Power BI or Excel as it links directly to them. Genius has also helped the work flow of our company a lot by streamlining processes. One process that helps our company a lot is the ability to print all work orders and fabrication/assembly plans in their batch printing module. Printing these would take up to five hours per assembly in Quickbooks and it now takes 10 minutes.

• 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

• The production is simple and efficient, this is done directly from our 3D design software (SolidWorks).
• Technical support is efficient, when problems arise, solutions are provided quickly.
• The monitoring of production costs is clear and easy to consult.

• 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

• Support hours (now, from 8h00 to 17h00, Monday to Friday).
• The info with help button (F1) to be more easy to find.

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.

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.

Genius is easy to use but you have to male sure it's set up properly. You also have to make sure you understand what an ERP should do to know the right questions to ask when you contact customer support.

Incentivized

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

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

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.

patient, friendly and clear explanations

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.

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.

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

Genius had a far better implementation team and had everything we were looking for without having to super customize a product. The implementation was also far easier than expected due to their ability to manipulate spreadsheets and import them in. We are glad we went with Genius due to the flow of the software and the syncable database. The main thing missed about Quickbooks is the ability to easily fix mistakes by deleting transactions or edit them even after they posted. This however made financials less reliable

• 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

• Tracking job costs makes it easy to see where we are in the projects.
• We save a lot of time for the production of "repeat" jobs.
• With job tracking from start to finish, we can easily schedule deliveries.