Certinia ERP Cloud vs. Sage 100

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.

Sage 100 has been well suited for running the monthly accounts receivable and accounts payable aging reports. This helps us track our accounts that need to be collected and payments that need to be made. Our field operations team has been slow and unwanting to adopt the Sage Field Ops just because they're resistant to change and technology. It's less appropriate for really detailed accounting reports spanning for long periods of time with all accounts because it takes a very long time to run and process.

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

• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

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

• Sage 100 at times will simply not connect to our server, we get remote support & all is well but, that issue tends to happen 2-3X a year.
• Other than the above, I really can't complain. Coming from a more custom U.V. type database that used a whole bunch of codes to navigate, I think Sage 100 is 10x easier to use.

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.

I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

Incentivized

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.

Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.

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.

Sage Support is very good. I usually get a person on the phone in a short time frame and usually get my issues fixed in one called.

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.

We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

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

I didn't choose Sage 100 ERP -- it was already in use when I started at the organization over five years ago. It has the same types of pros and cons as other big hulking software suites meant to power the infrastructure of corporations. It's slow, tough to customize, and doesn't connect well with other software. It does bring all the information into one place, which is great

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

• Sage 100 overall had a very positive overall ROI for the business. All users were making decisions based on the same information and valuable time was no longer spent trying to analyze data from a number of sources.
• Moving the warehouses to using Sage 100 reduced the operating expense of the distribution side of the business by 5% on an annual basis (~$100K).

Incentivized