Esker offers their eponymous document automation platform, for paperless ordering and billing, and accounts payable / accounts receivable (AP / AR). It can be delivered as a cloud offering (as Esker on Demand), or on-premise (as Esker DeliveryWare).
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QuickBooks Online
Score 7.8 out of 10
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QuickBooks Online is a SaaS version of the QuickBooks product. It contains all of the features found in the local version. Higher-priced plans include greater automation, payment management, inventory and time tracking, and analytics features.
Esker On Demand is great for Sales Order Processing order creation. We use it with web services. It can make table read calls, test order creations (simulate order), and help with order creation. They are also working on change order management, but if you have multiple order entry methods or touch points, this feature may not be usable for your company.
QuickBooks has long been a standard when it's come to small business accounting. Their tools work, the user interface is fairly intuitive to navigate, and it has suited the needs of our small business (11-20 employees) for the past 10 years. However, as we continue to grow and come into a greater need to control our branding, we find that QuickBooks Online often limits us in customization and branding. Plus, it just has some odds quirks in the coding of how the invoices are setup up that often requires us to "fight against the system" in order to accomplish what we want in our invoice structure.
We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.
It like the product 'right out of the box' and I trust Intuit will continually improve it over the years based on my experience with their desktop products. The large providers of Apps makes customizing the entire package relatively easy and seamless for a wide variety of business types.
Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.
Do NOT use their premium payroll. It's expensive and [I feel like] their customer service is horrible. I spent almost 4 hours trying to get an answer to a simple question about a 941 form they filed. They kept transferring me around to various people and every single time they couldn't find the 941 form I had a question on. I had to do a screenshare to show them where it was! I got disconnected three times and they never called back. They also told me that I would have to talk to the IRS at one point. I refused and told them that they were filing these forms on our behalf, they were doing the calculations so they should be able to answer my questions. I asked several times to talk to a supervisor and they wouldn't transfer me to one. They just said that they could put in a request for a supervisor to call me back in 24-48 hours! It was just unbelievable how horrible it was.
There are tab issues. When I tab the field doesn't highlight and I have to backspace or delete what is in the field. Happens on the memo field and sometimes other fields. Very time consuming.
They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with
Support is great, all incidents been resolved. Quickbooks Online forum is very well organized and helpful. I like the fact that they let the community contribute in resolving issues. Most or many of your answers can be found online. You can also get help on YouTube, but the easiest way to get assistance is through their chat system.
The person in charge of QB needs to be very accurate with record keeping and is recommended to stay on top of tasks. The biggest issue we have is reconciliation, and those issues occur only when too much time has occurred between reconciliations
I have listed a few that we considered but there were many more in the initial assessment, Esker was priced well and had the best user interface. Was really easy to use and the implementation process was well designed. It was a system that could handle a two tiered delegations of authority for project expenditure and operational expenditure.
I have used Wave Accounting for another business. I selected QuickBooks Online over Wave because of the features available from QuickBooks. Wave is great since it is free, but I feel that paying for QuickBooks Online is worth it for the features. In addition there is such a robust support network and training available for QuickBooks.
As we have grown along our professional path, we have also expanded our use of QB. The scalability is easy and features seem to be waiting for you until you need them. We have increased profits by over 10x from our first year in business to the current and have yet to find a reason to look elsewhere
We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.
