Epicor Eclipse is an end-to-end business system for wholesale distributors, as well as electrical, HVAC, plumbing and PVF businesses. Eclipse simplifies complex distribution processes found in today’s dynamic supply chains.
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Sage Intacct
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Sage Intacct is a cloud ERP system targeted at high-growth small and medium-sized businesses. Intacct includes applications for core financials and accounting, purchasing, order management, and financial reporting and business intelligence. It also integrates with 3rd party software like Salesforce.
Eclipse is well suited for quick order entry where the source is a formal purchase order document or a phone call with a known customer. In these scenarios the order entry process is quick, and order processing is smooth even if the customer has a lot of "special" requests like shipping part today and holding the rest or shipping some of the order to other addresses. Eclipse also works well if you have a good database of products, especially in searching for products where only partial information is known or finding existing orders where all you know for sure is the customer. It is not particularly well suited for Point of Sale where a walk-in customer who doesn't have an account wants products for which part numbers are not known, due to the requirements to release an order for a customer with no credit.
If someone was asking about it for retail use it would be a 10 for sure. Compared to larger ERPs, Intacct has most everything most business would need and then some. For the Family Office environment it's like fitting an oval shape into a round hole. It's really close, but you have to do some manipulating in how you use it.
Sales Order tracking, even returns are strengths of Epicor Eclipse. It can be set up to match returns to previous orders so that the correct credits are applied. It is capable of setting up contract pricing as well as matrix level pricing according to sales velocity or individual customer buyer programs.
Purchasing can be set up to work by full line buys or short buys while still maintaining a balanced inventory level of vendor line product.
Vendor Invoices and purchase orders are easily matched up for payment and the diverse reporting features are able to provide multi-faceted views of Product Sales, Items with No Sales, or Sales or Purchasing trends, just to name a few.
It is also tracking warehouse operation in both RF and non-RF environments, or a combination of the two.
Custom, real-time financial reporting. I am able to streamline my reporting to pull in various account groups and calculations which save me time from having to do it in Excel.
Out of the box standard reports for clients who don't require as custom of reporting or even as a great starting point to build out reports.
Integrations with other platforms, such as Airbase, various banks, Rippling, etc.
The dashboard module is extremely helpful in my monthly review of various entities.
I use it every day and can't see a reason why I would stop unless I started a new job. If I were to leave my present position, the new job would be much more attractive if they were Eclipse users.
Sage Intacct is continuously evolving and increasing it's functionalities. I am excited to attend conferences to learn what is in the roadmap for future releases. Additionally, using Sage Intacct allows me grow as a professional, I am really enjoy the knowledge that I have within the product to be able to share my experiences.
This is very easy to use for someone that hasn't ever used the system before. Despite any preconceived notions about how a system should function they can learn this and become efficient with really not a lot of effort. I have used many systems and this is probably one of the easiest I have ever had to learn to navigate and use.
The ease of use as a seasoned user is wonderful; however, new users struggle to adapt to the program efficiently. Better training videos--all in one location--would be beneficial. The use of a "sandbox" environment is a great tool for new employees or for the fiscal department to test certain journal entries or other transactions to verify accuracy of data.
I haven't experienced any outages in the two years I have been using the system. It is always available as long as the computer is up. The only time I have seen it not be available was on occasions where we lost internet, or power and then we lost access to everything, not just Epicor Eclipse.
There has only been one occurrence where Sage Intacct was not available to me, however I had already been working a number of hours trying to get a project completed. It honestly allowed me to step back and take a much needed break.
Everything in this system moves fairly quickly, that may be in part because we are a small company with only 21 users on the system at a time, or it may just be a the way the Epicor Eclipse works for any size company with any number of users. I can only speak for what I know and say that it is fast for our purposes.
As fas as integration is concerned I don't feel this slows Sage Intacct down at all. However, sometimes I do feel it takes some larger reports more time to load due to all the detail. As well as, I "move very fast" in my motions so sometimes I double click on fuctions too quickly and the system seems to think that I have a duplicate request.
The tier 1 support is trying, and sometimes they are successful. Sometimes they aren't. This topic isn't as black and white as the questions might suggest. Currently their Tier 1 support team is over seas, all items automatically go to Tier 1 and then when they can't help they either escalate it or tell me they need to check with someone else and they will get back to me. If they escalate me to Tier 2, then the issue comes back to the States and the support is usually at a higher knowledge/experience level and it can get resolved fairly quickly. If they don't escalate, then it might take weeks and multiple follow ups on my part before I either get a satisfactory resolution or finally get escalated.
Only a few times have we had to reach out to support, and every time we did, we received a relatively quick response and a solution was found fairly quickly. Only once was there an issue that took longer than a week to resolve, but it still did eventually get solved.
The training classes that I have attended have been top notch. The presenters are extremely knowledgeable on their subject matter, including real-world application of the system. They aren't just software techs training end users, they seem to be end users that have become experts in the over functionality and capabilities of the system.
I have taken in person training classes at several of the annual Sage Intacct user conferences. It is very interactive and the trainers are very easy to follow and understand. They are great at getting everyone in the class involved. They also make sure everyone has learned to task before moving to a new one.
The on-line training is very good, and it is taught by the same people that do the live in-person training sessions. The difficult part of it is, asking questions about your specific company's nuances or special circumstances. I don't remember if you can access the on-line training sessions after you have taken them for reminders purposes, but if so that is a great asset.
The free training is very minimal. For what we pay for the service, I would like more training. We end up training new users in-house because the provided free training is not nearly comprehensive enough. That being said, the training provided, for the material covered, was adequate and relevant for the given topics.
I don't really know about the implementation, it was back in 1998 and I didn't start here until 2016. By the time I started here they had been running it for a number of years and most of the people that were here when it was implemented are no longer here, and the ones that are don't really have much to say about how the implementation went either bad or good.
I would not use a thrid party administrator to implement your system, especially if you are going to be modifying the system at all. Use Intacct implementors as they will be able to better support you on any issues that come up after you go live.
Most of my experience has been with Epicor's Prophet 21. For most distribution verticals, Prophet 21 is the only way to go. The comparison I've drawn is this: Prophet 21 is like a ferrari. Epicor Eclipse is like a reliable donkey. Both get you from point A to point B but Prophet 21 is going to get you there much quicker and with the kind of insight into your business that will help you thrive.
For starters, ease of access works so much better in Intacct. Additionally, the availability of options for entering information into the software far exceeds what we've seen in other software, enabling more accurate reporting. The audit history also helps a ton when we're looking for previously posted information. I personally love that you can run Intacct offline to practice with these features.
I don't really know about the scalability. It's the same as it was when I started, I do know that you can buy more user licenses, but I think they come in packs of 5, which can be a problem if you only need 1 and will never use the other 4. But, again I'm not sure on that.
One of the main positive ROI impacts has been the constant upgrading and adding of new features to keep the software user friendly, relative, and robust.
Our credit manager has said it has made their job easier with daily reports to catch pricing discrepancies and straighten out before they go to invoice makes us look better.
With the addition of sale analytics it has given our sales force tools and new approaches to our customer base which has raised profitability.
