EstimateOne vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL

If you are looking for new opportunities to get in front of builders and architects (indirectly) then I think EstimateOne may be a solution, if you believe in your product and am willing to work on larger projects. If your product is niche or in short supply, you may struggle.

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).

Incentivized

• Document access to projects on tender.
• Easy access to tenders and all commercial projects and their status.
• Good communication details with estimators.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Could do regional areas rather than state-based, we are based in Northern Victoria and we find it useless to have to pay for NSW access. We are not interested in anything more than 150 km north of the Murray River on the NSW side.
• Subscription could also be regional based, rather than just state based.

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

EstimateOne is easy to use, the user interface is designed to be simple yet functional - many other platforms I have used are much more cumbersome to navigate and don't offer as much functionality. Everything has been thought out well with EstimateOne - it seems to have been designed by people who have worked in the industry.

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

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Abby Tuong is an incredible employee who is EstimateOne. Her proactiveness, willingness to listen and help, and customer focus is second to none. With that level of support, it is no wonder EstimateOne has such rave reviews and is clearly the choice in the market.

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

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

We have used many other platforms, but none are quite as intuitive or have a clean and easy to use interface as EstimateOne. Our company uses BidContender, BCI, Procore, Aconex and many other platforms for tendering etc. I highly rate EstimateOne when it comes to looking for work and submitting tenders, it is by far the best for collaborating and keeping track of work.

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Lead generation: 200%
• ROI: TBC as our project timelines have been extended due to COVID.
• Congruence: team is very happy using the portal.

• 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