Epicor Prophet 21 is an ERP for distributors, allowing companies to manage their supply chain with one ERP, with industry-specific functionality, cloud-based applications to modernize operations, connected ecosystems to ensure visibility across the organization and AI-infused solutions to drive efficiencies.
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QuickBooks Commerce
Score 7.2 out of 10
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QuickBooks Commerce (formerly TradeGecko) is a cloud-based Order and Supply Chain Management platform. TradeGecko was acquired by Intuit QuickBooks in August 2020, and plans to sunset the resulting product were announced June 2021 (it will be discontinued as a standalone product in June, 2022).
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Pricing
Epicor Prophet 21
QuickBooks Commerce
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Epicor Prophet 21
QuickBooks Commerce
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
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Monthly and yearly subscriptions available to meet your business' needs. Cancel at anytime.
Basic - $99/month
Business - $249/month
Business Premium - $449/month
Enterprise - $999/month
Good for distribution organizations with warehousing. Can also support both Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payable, although a more thorough Accounting package is recommended. Is strong when it comes to integrating bar codes and scanners, particularly for warehouse maintenance. Prophet 21 does include a basic CRM offering. However, it is very basic, and for any real Customer Resource management, a third-party tool is best (even recommended by Epicor.)
Using TradeGecko requires to the company to make compromises. Which compromises depends on the business, what they are using for other 3rd party applications and what they sell. You need to be very good with excel since you are able to upload and modify most files, which gives you major control over your data. They however need to modify the way in which new inventory items get loaded, as it is quite awkward if you use variants. 'Reports' as has been described prior has improved dramatically and most if not all can be downloaded in CSV/Excel format. This allows you to build your own reports with the data from the system. If your business is very complex in nature, TradeGecko probably isn't the system for you. If you are doing thousands of transactions a day, again this is not the system. However, if you are a small to smaller mid-sized business, the system, its cost and the 3rd party applications make it worth a first second and third look.
Prophet 21 could use better management tools for its own data. The database has a tendency to bloat and over time can grow exceedingly large without administrative intervention.
The UI can be cluttered at times and the windows tend to jump into focus or drop from focus when it isn't expected causing user confusion and data entry errors.
Branding on forms and the UI is almost nonexistent. Customizations of screen aesthetics and form layout options should be easier and not require custom programming.
- Couldn't integrate with existing QBO account. Had to set up a new QBO account and transfer all data, create lots of journal entries - was very time-consuming and labor-intensive. Caused some financial discrepancies to resolve.
- Have to process returns on Amazon and Shopify orders manually
- Tax-inclusive is not allowed - European sales are tax inclusive - can't import order with VAT included. Looks like the software is suitable for US only. Have to create such orders manually in Commerce and then manual journal entries in QBO
- Supports accrual accounting method only. In cash - it's a mess
- Support - not knowledgeable enough - I could only call for support (now they have chat) and they always had to get with the back-end and every call was not less than 1 hour. At the end I would get a link for the training materials
- Inventory not synching timely sometimes - I have a screenshot proving that inventory on our Amazon account was 0 but Commerce still had quantities, I had to manually press synch
- Shipping line from Shopify orders is not coded to Shipping income account but goes together with Sales of product income account
- When partial of the PO is received, not able to create a bill for the partial. There're only 2 settings: either bill created at the time of PO creation (for the whole PO amount - which increases your AP right away) or at the time the whole PO received. It works only when PO is shipped as a whole.
I've used Epicor Prophet 21 for about 12 years (in various iterations). It started out as CommerceCenter by Prophet 21 then became Prophet 21 by Activant and then Prophet 21 by Epicor. So frequently, when a software company is acquired, it stops being great. That has not been the case with Epicor Prophet 21. Over the years they've been under Epicor, the product has just gotten better and better, with major extensibility enhancements and new mobile components coming online.
I don't believe there is much you can't do in Epicor Prophet 21. Some of the processes, though, are fairly rigid with customizations and would either need to be tailored for another approach or the internal process would need to be changed to match how Epicor Prophet 21 is designed.
When hosted locally, you don't have to worry about outages unless the power goes out and the battery backups fail. It can also be hosted in the cloud which is as reliable as your internet connection. There's really no concern for outages in the software by itself. Outages are controlled by external factors.
I do feel like there are some screens and reports that could be streamlined. Prophet 21 likes to load features all at once when going into a program but a quicker load time into order entry, for example, is worth having a little latency while a non-essential tab that doesn't get used very often is opened.
The support is some of the worst I've seen across all the 122 software vendors we work with. Everything is offshore and it is always vague answers, links to wiki's that don't apply, and when we pay for project support they charge $200 an hour for someone who works remote from Mexico to call you on a poor quality VoIP connection that isn't all that well trained and often doesn't have basic IT skills
The on-site training was great. I give it a 9 because the trainer was a chain smoker who had to excuse herself a lot to smoke. Kind of unprofessional. She was a very good trainer though.
I had a great time with the online training. Most of the online trainings were live which meant you had opportunity to interact with instructors. I liked trying to derail them by posting funny comments to the chat window. The only complaint I had about these is they weren't recorded for later use. Well, another complaint is that they were sometimes too short.
The overall implementation is smooth. Prophet 21 sends someone on-site for as many days as you need them to step through the initial implementation. Data conversion is the biggest trick. Make sure you get help with that portion of implementation. Also, be sure to offer plenty of training incentives to keep people coming back for more training. A little money spent up front will save you tons of headaches later.
I have not looked at them in detail, but have received a lot of positive comments through out the industry, we're on the fence in regards to viability of cloud based solutions, but from the information we have received it seems like NetSuite has developed a good solution for the industry.
Each of the applications has a specific place. We select and implement the best solutions for our clients based on their budget and requirements. This is often determined by integration requirements. We like to say that every application with do a different 95% of what you need it to. There will always be a different 5% to forgo between applications.
Prophet 21 is very reliable. The database is robust and well designed. The application is also hard to break. If there's one feature I don't like, it's that they haven't accounted for the dreaded single quote. That's kind of the bane of Microsoft SQL's existence. They need to escape that character in every field that will accept it in the system. Otherwise, the system throws all kinds of errors and many times will crash.
