Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Redtail CRM

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

It is extremely well suited to client management in the insurance and financial services industries. I think it would not be nearly as useful in a retail setting as many of the features would be irrelevant.

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

• Redtail CRM gives the capability to have a place to store all client-related documents in a readily accessible, yet secure, location.
• Redtail CRM has a feature to input notes and comments on particular clients in order to keep track of communications with and steps taken for those clients. Those notes can be easily accessed across the firm.
• Redtail CRM allows all email communications to be stored in a safe and secure manner as well as making those communications accessible on demand.

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

• I would like to see the ability to push annuity business into Redtail like brokerage accounts.
• I would like to be able to attach documents to specific notes instead of just contacts in general.
• Those are the only two cons that I have.

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

The platform is easy to use and train on. It is a one stop shop with all the information needed to maintain a clean client relationship. We recently had our scheduled audit done and Redtail was helpful in pulling the different reports we needed to produce for the audit

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

Was good and still is good. Seems like when a company acquires another they try to squeeze out more profit and forget what made them successful in the first place. Reducing staff and support seems inevitable, even though the number of users has increased significantly over the past 10 years

Incentivized

Generally speaking, Red Tail has been available whenever needed. there was a time period however where it was down and not available, giving 500 errors when trying to log in. They explained that it was due to upgrades they were making and it has virtually disappeared. Has now been available 99% of the time.

Incentivized

Overall general performance is quite satisfactory. Some of the automation factors that other products have available are slowly migrating to Red Tail. When these add ons are available and fully implemented, it greatly increases the power and usability of the CRM. Occasionally there are products that will not intergrade due to the nature of how they are set up

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

We use the HELP section of Redtail often. If it is taking you more than 5 minutes to figure out than go to the HELP desk. We have had only great experiences when reaching out for help. We also LOVED the Redtail University we attended.

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

Quite honestly, I have visibility into a number of CRM systems and Redtail stands alone as the strongest contender. It has the most thorough and customizable interface of any I have encountered. There are few other tools that offer the unmatched flexibility and the depth that any business could stand to profit from.

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

The biggest problem seems to have been with the email module. connection issues, sync issues, compliance updates, etc. The concept is great however there seems to be issues in getting it to work consistently. When it works, it works well. It seems that the frequency of downtime had been greatly reduced however.

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

• Redtail makes it easy to log customer interactions for compliance related fields.
• With Redtail, you don't have to worry about losing information. Just pull up the customer's profile and make some notes on what is going on. You can never be too detailed in the advisor industry.
• The integration ability at Redtail really saves us heaps of time. You can feed information over from the custodian straight over to another 3rd party. API is game changing!

Incentivized