Exact Globe+ vs. Microsoft Dynamics SL vs. Sage 500 ERP

For a smaller company I can see this being a realistic solution. The cost is relatively low, complexity and install isn't too painful, and it's not difficult to use for the most part. As a large enterprise ERP system I believe this is a bit too simple. It is a cheaper alternative but would be hard to use if we were much larger.

Incentivized

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

Sage is wonderful for payroll and employee management. Although it has the capabilities to be a one-stop-shop program, it seriously lacks the interface necessary for wide use. I've had to consult Sage professionals on numerous occasions to explain and walk me through the program as there are so many redundancies. This program has wonderful potential, but they need to update the software and user interface before I can recommend it to any colleague.

Incentivized

• Inventory, Item Data, Purchase, Order, General Ledger, Number & Document Settings are seamlessly setup in Exact Global
• Core processes of Purchase Management (PO process), Inventory Management (Inventory Costing, Sales Process, Interbranch Transfers, Stock Count), Sales Order Management (Creating, Maintaining, Printing, Fulfilling Sales Orders) are managed at a click of a button in Exact Global
• EWS Growers (customer), supplier and items data are managed seamlessly in Exact Global for various financial processes setup

Incentivized

• 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

• Payables and receivables handled beautifully
• Projects has the reporting capabilities we need
• Cash management is easy to do

Incentivized

• The necessity to buy individual modules to fit specific needs is a bit of a pain, it feels like you're being nickle and dimed.
• Revision control on bills of material and parts is not intuitive or easy. We have not purchased the engineering change module, but it appears it may be needed to really implement this.
• It's difficult to transfer engineering models from popular solid modeling software, requiring a third party solution to really make the transfer work as designed.

Incentivized

• 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

• The application is very functional, but the interface is a little "stale" compared to more modern applications.
• The underlying client software is written in an old version of Microsoft Visual Basic. I suppose SOME DAY, Microsoft will be discontinuing, although Microsoft has its own ERP software written in that same code.

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

We will renew our investment in Sage 500, mostly because the competition is very expensive and are bloated with options that are not needed.

Incentivized

Exact Global is a strategic tool for financial core processes operations at EWS. It is integrated with ERP to seamlessly deliver key processes like O2C, P2P etc. and very well liked by users for its ease of use and flexibility of data moving across different systems. Exact Global is a part of EWS’s enterprise architecture and roadmap aligned to PACE strategy for achieving business objectives

Incentivized

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

I have been using Intacct for almost 10 years in 2 different companies and I just simply love it. I tried SAP (GUI) and Netsuite and they dont come close to what Ive seen.

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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

Receive Great support from Exact Global team. Timely response and resolution by the vendor and never breach on SLAs - it’s a support team’s dream to support Exact Global.

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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

The online training courses are not up to date. We experienced technical issues with two of the classes.

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

Keep your database and application in different servers.
Install Microsoft Office on your application server so you can use some of the data analysis tools in Sage.

Incentivized

Exact Global served EWS’s purpose of streamlining global core financial processes per industry best practices in one e2e solution better than other products evaluated on multiple parameters - cost, ease of setup, flexibility and suiting the use cases better. Exact Global has integrated well with our ERP for a seamless delivery of core financial processes

Incentivized

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

500 seems much smoother at handling some of the basic accounting tasks, for example both issuing and later reconciling checks in Dynamics AX seems a little tedious.

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

Incentivized

• Monitoring of production cost.
• Registration and documentation of engineering changes.

Incentivized

• 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

• Efficiency - enhanced automation
• Cost reduction - simple workspace is enough

Incentivized