Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Premier Bank Platform

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

Premier Bank Platform is well suited for a banking environment, it wouldn't really make sense to use it in any other kind of environment. We are a medium sized bank who outsources Platform and it suits us fairly well. They are some issues with Fiserv from time to time but overall Platform allows us to complete our banking duties quickly and with relative ease. Fiserv takes care of updating all aspects of Platform for us so from an IT perspective it saves us a lot of headaches. Most end users are satisfied with Platform, the only grumbling you'll typically hear about is when the service is unavailable.

Incentivized

• Great Plains started as back office/accounting, and that is still it's strong suit.
• SQL and the GP programming language, Dexterity, provide a robust, scalable, and stable platform with well documented maintenance and repair procedures. Relatively easy to manage, tune, and support.
• Microsoft support for GP verges on "particularly well". Doesn't quite get there but good enough once you know what you're doing
• Strong partner network, including the GP User Group (GPUG)

Incentivized

• Because the Premier Bank Platform is developed by Fiserv, a very large company, there are considerable resources to continue to develop Premier and roll out new solutions.
• It holds most all of our customer data in one central location and transfers that data to other Fiserv apps fairly well.
• It is fairly intuitive and most users pick up on it quickly.

Incentivized

• With respect to the allocations, once the expense is entered into the allocation account, you lose the ability to run any detail on just the total of the expense. It would be nice if you could run a trial balance on the allocation accounts the same way you can with regular accounts.
• I've always thought security set up could be a bit simpler. It actually has gotten better through the years. Specifically, with eight separate entities, it would be nice to have a "master" setup where you could call up one group entity, assign the users rights, and then be finished. Currently, whenever I have a new user, I have to call up each individual entity and select all of the features I want the user to have. That means I have to do eight steps for each user.

Incentivized

• The software itself is currently a bit dated, but it will be overhauled here sometime in 2019.
• We outsource the platform and sometime the connections to Fiserv are not reliable which cause the platform to be unusable.
• Fiserv has several different platforms and Premier seems to be the most dated of the bunch, again that appears to be changing in 2019 but in the interim it still remains an issue
• The customer support can sometimes be lacking when facing issues with the platform, they will tell you they'll fix it later but give no time frames as to when that might be.

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

Though it is a basic accounting package, I believe some users do not find the old style menus and navigation options intuitive. There is also a great lack of training resources in the market, so users have to learn the product without guidance a lot, resulting in inefficient workflows and misuse or misunderstanding of many features.

Incentivized

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

I come from a strong background of using SAP. SAP doesn't have the flexibility of GP, an example would be SAP doesn't allow core mods, if they catch you, you lose support. Microsoft doesn't really care about mods, but they will be quick to have the vendor you used support your issue if it is caused by those mods. With SAP your company adapts to the software, where with GP you adapt the software to you.

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

• Microsoft Dynamics GP allows my clients to move from a paper or spreadsheet based company to an integrated, electronic, streamlined business. I love being able to help clients gain efficiencies through the use of Microsoft Dynamics GP.
• Microsoft Dynamics GP allows for better customer service because everything is at our fingertips. If someone calls questioning an invoice, we can easily look it up. If someone calls stating they paid an invoice with a certain check number, we can quickly run a query to find that particular check number to see where it was applied.
• Having everything on a single platform provides ease of use for upgrades, backups and end user training. There is only one software to learn!

Incentivized

• Platform is absolutely critical to our daily bank operations. It's a bit on the expensive side to setup and maintain but in the end worth the money because of the complete coverage it provides in daily business functions.
• There are several competitors to Platform but Premier is what our bank has used for many years, even before it's Fiserv acquisition, and what many employees are comfortable with. A switch would involve a massive investment in retraining.
• A negative impact can be on when there are outages or mishaps on Fiserv's side. Fiserv has a tendency to not compensate you even when they should be obligated to. They seem to play the outlast you game where they hope you will give up and stop asking.

Incentivized