Certinia FM Cloud vs. Euna Budget vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL

FFA is a good product if you want the ability to customize functionality and reporting. However, all the setup can be overwhelming if you are looking for an out-of-the-box solution. FFA is a great choice is you are already using Salesforce and want to report on KPIs directly from the source data. There are a lot of applications to help you feed data into the system or export it out in a usable format.

Incentivized

Citizen engagement would be the area where it could be best suited. I don't really see it outside of the public sector but we use it to interact with our clients in the public sector. It helps to be able to show the transparency of engagement of citizens to communicate best with local government agencies.

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In the service series, there is a weakness in applying revenue recognition concepts which are a strong point of the project series. It is difficult to get a period sensitive WIP that could be recreated at any time for a point in time (fiscal period).

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• Comprehensive spreadsheets and dashboards with filtering functions.
• Ease of file upload and conversion to and from Excel.
• The overall spread of the homepage makes for easy access to whatever information you're looking for.
• I believe FFA has a tremendous ability to data easy to access by all departments, but also is complex enough to retrieve specific data that is needed.

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• Charts
• Mobility
• Interactive

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• Ability to add companies, and sub-accounts on the fly allows for the growth of the system without conversions, and flexible reporting allows for the quick utilization of the data.
• Multi-Company allows for easy and automated data entry and reporting across multiple legal entities and business segments.
• Multi-Company also allows for easy centralization of business processes (AP check writing and Fixed Assets for example), while spreading data entry across the enterprise.
• Ability to Copy/Paste into Dynamics SL has always been a strength- especially from Excel. The additional power of being able to use Excel for a myriad of calculations, including complex allocations, and formatting the result into a JE to paste directly into the Journal Entry Screen has saved countless hours in data-entry, and made re-use of complex items very easy.

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• It took a very very long time to implement and we had configuration issues after the implementation that had to be addressed.
• Cannot run scheduled reports.
• Difficult to run reports (training is needed to configure the reports).

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• The search feature could be easier.
• Integration into other tools.
• The guided tours could be more helpful. If I'm nitpicking at this point.

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• When we have a lot of invoices rather than just a few large invoices, we can be frustrated by how long it takes Flexible Billings to generate a lot of invoices
• It would be nice if Dynamics SL had an easy integration to some of the nicer salestax tools such as Avalara and CCH.
• It would be nice if the fixed assets module and electronic banking were not third party.

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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.

Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.

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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's very easy to use and intuitive enough that you can guide yourself through even if you do not have IT on staff to assist you. It's easy to set up and get going in minutes. All you have in front of you to analyze data and present. It's helpful for the customer too.

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SL itself is relatively easy to use and most of the Help Files documentation is well kept and outstanding in the amount of information that is given. Most end users pick up the functions quickly and are off and running after some limited training. There will always be questions and research to be done, but overall SL is relatively easy to follow for a seasoned user

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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

We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.

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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.

I haven't had to deal with support much because it's such an easy-to-use product but when I have, they have been very easy to talk to, engage, and resolve our needs quickly. The challenges we had were met over the phone as they walked us through the system.

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Many times support will tell you that your issue is an identified bug and will be scheduled in the future to be fixed in a future release. The knowledgebase has gotten worse in recent years and much more difficult to use. many times you can't find the error during the search

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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.

Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!

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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.

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It stacked up very well. We evaluate at least 3 companies before making software decisions and this one was a clear contender. The map visualization and pop ups are wonderful to be able to visually see what you are discussing in person. These are qualities the rest do not have.

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We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great Plains and Peachtree (now Sage 50) and we discovered that they were rather complicated for our users. They were not as easy to maneuver and manipulate as SL and we felt that SL was much more "user friendly" and simplified, but still able to produce the same results.

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Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.

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• We moved to a subscription business, and FinancialForce cannot facilitate it. After using FinancialForce for 4 years, we had to switch to NetSuite. We had a negative return on investment with all the resources we used to do in-house development in FnancialForce.
• FinancialForce did not have a good way to match payments against invoices, and it was a very manual process. We spent a lot of human hours to get it done.
• It was still relatively cheap, so for the 4 years that we used it, the actual cost of the product was what we could only afford at the time.

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• ROI
• Transparency
• Purpose

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• Dramatic improvement in our ability to judge the profitability of jobs.
• Lots of improvements in delivering invoices and statements to customers.
• Automated AP approvals and imaging made our last tax audit a breeze.
• Ease of reporting data is a big plus. Financial statements with drill down capability are very useful.
• One integrated system means less data moving around and more real time information.
• EFT payments, email statements and live linked Excel charts have improved our efficency
• Too many more to name.

Incentivized