Financial Edge (legacy) vs. Microsoft Dynamics GP

• Financial Edge is well suited for traditional day to day accounting, accounts payable, and related needs.
• Financial Edge dashboard does not provide a snapshot view of data that I have found are available through other platforms (like QBO).

Incentivized

Microsoft Dynamics GP is well-suited for our environment, as we pay a diverse group of employees, including on-the-road drivers, shop employees (some in other locations), and office employees. It easily tracks time off, taxes, pay, etc. The reporting allows us to verify with our drivers how they are paid each week, whether it be through mileage or stop-offs.

Incentivized

• Grant Management - nothing is more harrowing than grant reporting, and FE does it best. It allows for layered budgets and limitless division of expenses among grants, overhead, or other projects/programs.
• Reporting - Most financial software tries to adapt for-profit accounting into a non-profit mode without addressing the unique needs of a nonprofit for reporting and auditing.
• Multiple projects and/or cost centers within a budget and system - nothing is more challenging than trying to manage expenses over several cost centers and FE is a champ at allowing that complexity.

Incentivized

• User friendly interface
• Able to be extended into multiple areas of your business
• One feature we have been using for a few years is EFT for payables - it has significantly reduced the time spent paying vendors and reduced our check printing and mailing costs. It is very easy to setup and use.

Incentivized

• Customer service blames the customer, and never offers solutions other than "wait it out." I've always been told it's my computer, even though everyone else at my work has the same issues.
• Website is constantly "under maintenance" and it somehow never gets better.
• The Database View is outdated and glitchy. Honestly get rid of it.
• The Crystal Report is the only way to handle monthly recurring statements, and Financial Edge does not offer support for it anymore. Good luck figuring that out on your own.

• Supply chain management is adequate but not exceptional, and there are challenges tying the product to a website front end. These features are present and work fine in many environments but are often lacking for customers who need more robust systems.
• Reporting tools often require consulting expertise or an internal business analyst to develop. Many smaller companies don't have this skill set, so it can be costly to upgrade to GP from a smaller packages like QuickBooks.
• Some features that are available in competing products are still not present in GP, such as full copy-paste functionality and more intelligent workflow/batch processing functions.

Incentivized

Due the economic challenges that Puerto Rico is having, the company has had to merge some companies in order to be more efficient. It has been easy in GP to process those merges, even thought we had to spend days to accomplish that the process was smooth and accurate. In addition we were able to streamline the purchasing and sales process and the organization is confident to keep renewing GP for the future versions.

Incentivized

It's user friendly, when it wants to be.

Menus are generally quite difficult to navigate, user-friendliness is lacking, platform can at times be unstable (crashes, etc), reports tha would seem to report one thing do not actually return that data. Usability is probably the biggest weakness of Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Incentivized

I would give this a zero if I could. Here's the deal. Once you request a chat with a representative, they immediately respond. So responsiveness: 10/10. However, they have a tendency to (always) tell you that whatever problem you're experiencing is your problem, not theirs. They offer no solutions and never take responsibility for their website malfunctioning

The rating is directed to the thrid party serive provider that we use. I do not now how good the Microsoft direct support is.

Incentivized

Basically the challenge with this implementation was the Business Portal, too many errors and even the aplication is up and running the users are still having issues. We will start planning the migraton to GP 2015 soon.

Incentivized

Financial Edge is more economical than GuideStar, and more focused on the financial successes than simply the management of funds and general data.

Incentivized

Because GP doesn't do CRM we have looked at D365 Customer Engagement for our field service, and F&O as a replacement. Vaporware, no direct upgrade path, and if you want to continue with GP for your back office and just use Field Service it's an insanely complex integration import/export. D365 F&O is a huge implementation cost, and without a direct migration path every bit of data has to be custom imported. There really is no straightforward way to stack up GP against these programs currently. Again, the future of GP is in some doubt.

Incentivized

The functionality that GP and related ISV solutions offer and the ease of integration of GP to other systems makes it an extremely scalable solution

Incentivized

• We have been able to more effectively track utilization of budgets
• Scholarship management has more than tripled over a five year period

Incentivized

• We have never missed a payroll using Great Plains. We have the ability to fix any issues that come up quickly.
• It streamlines our departments that handle money into one unified system. This gives accounting and finance the overall picture in one system.
• With Integration Manager we have to worry less about taking time to hand key transactions. This cuts down on entry time and increase efficiency for our clerks.

Incentivized