Certinia ERP Cloud vs. JobBOSS²

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.

I would recommend JobBoss to any colleague in small—to medium-sized manufacturing firms. Although I am not convinced that it will be able to handle advanced data from larger firms, it should be able to handle everything small—to medium-sized businesses require. JobBoss is great.

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

• Estimating is great once you learn how to use it, and it makes repeat estimates easier than ever.
• Time tracking is amazing for us. It has taken some time to figure out exactly how we want to use the tracking parts, but it's only because it has multiple ways to do the same thing and finding out what works best for us took some time.
• Billing and Purchasing are a breeze. The full package is worth the money to fully integrate the entire business into JobBOSS² since it can handle it all.

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

• quoting - limited functionality currently
• costing of jobs and parts - there is very limited information on how their calculations work and limited customization of costing. Most of the job costing or margin reports are inaccurate. Costing is a black box with Jobboss2 that doesn't allow you to better understand how they are calculating nor the ability to tweak the variables of those calculations to align their reports and models with the way your organization costs and prices jobs.
• Raw material inventory and resource tracking for jobs - we don't even use the raw material function because it's inflexible. When you quote raw material, oftentimes you ask for one size diameter of raw material...but the vendor may not have it and often the next best size instead. When/if this happens, you'd have to delete or re-add the raw material to jobboss2 and re-assign that size to every part that's used. You'd, in theory, have to have every possible size of raw material and every spec of raw material that you use in Jobboss2, and you'd still have to re-assign it all of the time to different parts when you couldn't find the ideal size of material. This is a huge gap.
• Automatically logs you out while using the platform, even with only one tab open. We'll be actively using jobboss2, and even within a minute of login, you click on a module of jobboss2, and it will ask you to log in again. Very frustrating.
• Inability to open multiple tabs in Jobboss2. We need to crossreference information all of the time, comparing inventory, last jobs routings & dates, and costs which we try to pull up multiple tabs in jobboss2, but it does not effectively allow you to do this. It's slightly possible, but oftentimes will log you out of your session as soon as you open a new tab.
• Blanket orders and consignment - Jobboss2 is ineffective at allowing efficient tracking of blanket orders or parts on consignment. There's no functionality for consignment tracking of parts as you try to track replenishment buckets.
• Customizable reports with more field and table selections - reports can be customized but only with the fields that Jobboss2 provides for that specific report. We need to link other tables from the database to be able to see the information that we need, and jobboss2 does not easily allow you to link a new table into reports to add additional fields that you want or need to see. For example, in Salesforce...you can pick specific tables that you want to link together and pull any field that you need. Jobboss2 only allows you to see the specific tables that they pre-built for reports. If you need another field that's missing on the report, you'd have to know SQL in order to add it vs. a user-friendly report builder that anyone non-technical would be able to use, which is standard in most other software platforms for ERP or CRM.
• material/inventory forecasting to plan when you need the next job - this is incredibly limited. We typically look out for 2-12 months to plan when we'll need the next lot for a particular part. Jobboss2 material forecast will only let you look at the next 4 months as 4 columns and then it groups any months beyond that into one 5th column. You should be able to set a specific time horizon (i.e. from today to 12 months out and see the stock level and orders needed for each of those next 12 months. As a result, we still have to use manual spreadsheets to plan our production and scheduling jobs.
• jobboss2 upcharges for most new features or modules that you want to add. For example, they've built reports that would be incredibly useful for the majority of their customers, but they charge to add one simple report because it's considered a customization.

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.

Jobboss tends to have a very steep learning curve and isnt always useable for a lot of manufacturing staff. Buy-in to utilize the software was and continues to be a challenge as staff needs to track & input components so that info on Jobboss is up to date and reliable

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 is extremely easy to learn and use E2 Shop System. It provides everything a manufacturing company might be looking for, starting from entering a new PO to shipping parts. Routers that get created from E2 Shop System also help track parts on the shop floor and is accessible from every where. E2 Shop System also now has an app, which is great when it comes to scanning router steps directly from your phone.

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

Have had no issues with availability

Incentivized

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

Have only had minimal issues with slow processing

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.

The initial training leaves a little to be desired because it's done by people who know the generalities of the system. However, once you get into one-on-one trainings and tech support calls, they do a tremendous job in these aspects. They go above and beyond to make sure you get what you need.

Incentivized

Our trainer was very knowledgeable and helpful.

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 videos and live seminars were helpful but not all were as in-depth as needed.

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.

I assumed there would be more assistance from JobBoss for implementation of the software. I felt it was very independent on my part and I felt unsure a lot of the time

Incentivized

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

We really didn't compare too many other ERP systems. Unfortunately, I was not involved in the decision at the time it was made. We used to have E2 but we were kind of forced into upgrading because E2 would no longer do software updates. Very fluent transition from E2 to JobBOSS².

Incentivized

Ability to add individual data collection seats instead of purchasing in bundles

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

• We have seen improved visibility of our jobs and on how we quote our products to our customers.
• It is nice to be able to see what is running on each station, who is running it and what part of the process the job is currently at.
• I also like the Data Collection module as I can see in real time what all the employees are currently doing.

Incentivized