The Intuit Enterprise Suite is an end-to-end business platform providing: financial management, forecasting and accounting capabilities; integrated payroll, payments, and bill pay; automated marketing; access to third-party apps, and access to a team of experts.
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Microsoft Dynamics SL
Score 5.4 out of 10
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Microsoft Dynamics SL is one of the ERP products in the Dynamics family.
This product was acquired from Solomon 2000.
The product is typically used by SMBs, particularly in project-based businesses (e.g. construction). It has strong accounting and project management capabilities.
With Intuit Enterprise Suite we have learned how to move some of our manual spreadsheets into the system to keep better track and get better numbers with. Things like Inventory, and Fixed Assets. The training has been great, they have numerous webinars and meetings that help us better understand Intuit Enterprise Suite.
For a small to mid-size business, MS Dynamics SL is effective. We are capable of managing our finances with a very low risk of error. We have worked with MS Dynamics for almost 15 years and have more than doubled the size of our business in that time with very few issues from the program. We have exponentially increased our revenue and reporting demands and have found SL to be very dependable and stable. The program does have the occasional glitch and those are sometimes outside of the realm of expertise of our IT department. SL support is excellent, but their timeliness is not as urgent as ours.
It tracks all payments to all vendors, so if any questions arise, it's easy to find the answer.
It tracks employee hours worked, holiday hours, and other paid time off, including vacations. It also tracks bonuses and employee profile information, including hire dates, contact information, Social Security, and Federal withholding details.
At the end of the year, all of our financial transactions can be summarized for our accountants so our tax returns can be prepared.
Provides flexibility for complex project based cost accounting
Strong and flexible allocation processer for cost allocations, markups, and pricing
A "Flexible Billing" module under the project controller series that allows for multiple billing formats ranging from fixed price schedule of values, T&M or Cost Plus, and scheduled billing.
Flexible reporting with options using Crystal Reports, SSRS, a Quick Query tool, and ability to tie into MS Office tools such as MS Access and MS Excel
Tight integration with Financials, but also the ability to integrate with modules such as Sales Order, Inventory, and Field Service
Customization abilities ranging from a VBA (visual basic for application) foundation to allow customizing existing forms to the ability to use the SDK (Software Development Kit) to build more complex customizations that integrate with Dynamics SL.
Reporting in the Project module is lacking functionality. I understand that most companies have specific needs when it comes to tracking project information but the standard reports are not good.
I would recommend a product like Management Reporter that is for Projects only. Project Reporter should allow users to pull in all Project related data into reports.
Fixing suspended batches. Obviously all of us users have experienced this mess. SL knows what needs to be corrected and there could be some step by step fixes in a separate repair module to do the steps we do in Query Analyzer.
The software is very user friendly and being able to create reports with specific data and export it to Excel is a great help in budgeting for annual costs and tracking where a certain program is getting more attention
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.
Intuit Enterprise Suite (IES) has been incredibly easy to use. I mentioned it earlier, but the universal search bar within IES has already saved me SO many hours not having to google questions or wait to speak with customer support. I have reached out to customer support on two separate occasions and it was a very pleasant experience. Both reps I spoke with were eager to help me and made the whole process much easier. Simply because of that, IES is already way easier to use than any other software.
I rate it a 10 because we have removed the fields we don't need so users can really crank the data into the system. The software was designed for the professional services firm in mind but does a tremendous job for construction firms and "blended" companies that are both distribution firms but project centric as well. Perhaps they drop ship inventory to a project where their employees or subs need to work on a project for example.
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.
Excellent. I am the first Lighthouse customer and I see first hand that their team cares, they care about not just the features but about their customers and their success. They truly want their customers to succeed
Support is only used when needed, so unfortunately ,they get all the odd issues. It's a difficult business, but Microsoft and our firm do a great job of meeting customer needs. We get routine feedback that our support services are very good.
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!
NetSuite was way more complicated; it required heavy user training regularly, especially for onboarding, was really complex to maintain and customize, required expensive 3rd-party consulting and customization, had complicated integration with other business systems, and was complex to build reports. Zoho Analytics was very basic and missed many important features that businesses need to run their operations.
Of the comparable mid-range ERP systems, Dynamics SL competes at the lower end based on price, but also above the high-end based on flexibility, data, and reporting. Being able to stay with the same core accounting from a $100 million dollar company to a $3 billion dollar company shows the range of capabilities.
Overall our experience has been great - easy and smooth onboarding process
Better support experience has surprised and delighted the team in ways I wasn't really expecting
I like it more than I expected I would - the convenience of having it all in one place and being able to toggle through entities is really a major improvement
