Certinia ERP Cloud vs. SAP Business ByDesign

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.

Do you plan on going public at some point? If so, this may not be the best solution for you

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

• I like the ease of use and the implementation methodology.
• With SAP Business ByDesign you can integrate other systems with Web Services, and data technology to get information easy and fast.
• SAP Business ByDesign includes an Analytics Module to create new reports in regards to your needs.

• 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

• Time off request could be better. Right now, there is no option for sick time
• It crashes often
• Customization could be better

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.

SAP BYD work centers are consistent and easy to navigate once you understand one work center. The document flow tab that is in each window allows one to see all related transactions. Document flow is important because one is able to see the flow of transactions and can therefore reverse transactions by following the document flow in reverse. It is possible to group items in each overview screen to see what items are open. The system is working as hoped.

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.

Because SAP Business ByDesign allows us to improve our work, reduce the operational steps, implement audit controls, allows us found standard reports or it allows us to create new ones if you need more than the exists are enough for your work or your needs. Overall, SAP Business ByDesign allows us to standardize our operations, enhance our work, improve our skills, work over a web environment or mobile interface.

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.

The Business ByDesign support is stablished since you contract the service with SAP. SAP resolves according to the service level agreement. Currently, we continue with the service and we are using the support channels available. We are receiving the support. The SAP support gets an incident and after that, they contact us to resolve the incident, if necessary, they set the meeting to understand it or we explain the incident

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.

I recommend implementing all workshops during the ERP selection that you need to know very well about the ERP software. It allows us to gather information to accurate the plan of the project implementation. Additionally, we must reach the high-level commitment to achieve the main goals, to define the RACI matrix and communicate to all project stakeholders.

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

ByDesign stacks up well against the competition. Companies that do multiple things are usually the best fit (manufacturing, distribution, and service). The more 'modules' used, the fewer competitors will be able to meet the company's needs. It is not inexpensive, but if the needs of the company have the complexity from either a global perspective and need localizations and foreign currency, or a volume perspective and need resources greater than what can be easily housed on-premise, ByDesign should be a top consideration.

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

• Positive - Access to the real-time reporting allowing for faster decision making especially when fixed price projects are heading into an over budget position.
• Positive - Complex KPI can now be tracked and as a consequence intensive plans can be made to capitalise on this level of reporting. Staff also have clear visibility over their own performance.
• Negative - We are a bit on the small side at 30 employees for a ByD solution so it was relatively expensive for us. It would be a much better value preposition above 50 employees.