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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Workbooks
Score 5.0 out of 10
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Workbooks offers cloud-based CRM, marketing automation and business applications to the mid-market. Workbooks includes order management and fulfillment, invoicing, and supplier management. Workbooks aims to provide a single 360° view of customers, where the information is accessible anytime, anywhere.
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.
It's a really great system for small to medium organizations that are willing to spend some time thinking about how their workflow can be improved by designing processes which will allow them to streamline and automate their business. For people who are not serious about making a commitment to bettering their business, Workbooks may not be a correct fit. For instance there are a lot of features which many people think they don't need, but they haven't really spent the time to figure out what the needs of the business are. The nice thing about Workbooks is that you can turn off things you don't need, and then when the business demands, they will be there for you to utilize.
Sales process management from enquiry to delivery of product
This was previously on as many as 4 systems using excel and legacy applications such as the written word in log books
Automatic reporting for financial compliance: once built, the reporting process reduced the workload on a monthly basis from 2 days to 20 minutes
The FD loved it
The overall capability of the package enabled the sales force to rapidly pull our pertinent data for a sales call, plus managing time and resources better for increased efficiency
Business development and focussed marketing became so much easier, we noted that the process paid for itself many times over
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.
There really isn't all that much, what I would like to see is an app to use on iDevices. Our sales team all have iPads for presentations etc.
While Workbooks works rather well with HTML 5, I would still like to see an app. I know it's in the making, but haven't seen anything of this as of yet.
I am sure that would increase productivity even further (if it's of the same standard as the main environment).
the product works. support has been good or great so far all has been great and we hope to get more from the product. we purchased for an initial year then renewed for a longer term, we have no regrets with this.
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.
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
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.
We felt the high amount of customisation available from Workbooks was much more beneficial to us than the offerings from the larger CRM companies. We also liked the smaller company mentality of Workbooks as it reminded us of ourselves. Ultimately the price also paid a factor as Workbooks was more affordable for what we needed.
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.
