Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Velocify by ICE Mortgage Technology

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

Small businesses who do not need complex reporting and analytics would fit well into the Velocify model. There needs to be specific segments that appeal to this type of CRM, and the best feature is within an added layer--dialer. The ability to turn things around and contact your leads immediately was very beneficial to us, and could prove to be a boon for a small to midsize business.

• 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

• The prioritized queue allows for management to set contact standards and hold users accountable. It removes all the guess work out of what lead to call next.
• The Dial IQ feature is fantastic for powering through calls and maximizing speed to contact.
• The Shotgun lead distribution puts the lead into the hand of the user that is ready and available to call that lead immediately. No handing off a lead to an originator and hoping they call. This feature allows for the system to notify multiple users simultaneously and first user to press 1 wins the lead. Talk about creating a competitive sales environment!

• 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

• Velocify would be well served to create a more robust email drip campaign platform.
• Velocify could revamp their dashboards and prioritized views our individuals work out of daily. It's rather overwhelming when working with a lot of leads. Adding interactive graphics - calendars, easy to view alerts, etc would be great. (Big Purple Dot does this well)

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

I am sure that we as a company are likely to continue using Velocify. I am not involved in the selection process, but I have not heard any negative feedback and switching programs would more than likely be too much work

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

Users can gain a very good understanding of the system quickly. The administrator can use terms that are familiar to their company when setting the system up. Most new administrators error to the side of complexity when setting up the system. With Velocify less is more.

The system is always up!!

If the system is set up correctly it will be a game changer for your organization.

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

While I didn't speak with the Support team often, they seemed very accepting and reliable. My favorite was the company emails that we would receive whenever something wasn't working correctly so that we would know that it's being worked on, providing a bit of relief to the other employees that were having trouble.

Incentivized

The in-person training if you will is done via GoToMeeting or some other service. I have been told that the moderator goes way too in-depth and too fast.

Velocify offers online training via videos and written descriptions of implementation procedures.

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

If you plan to have more than 20 users on Velocify you should outsource implementation to someone that knows how the system can best be implemented for your business/process flows. If you have fewer proposed users try to use one of the canned levels.

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

Before we went with Velocify, we had Salesforce and Hobson's EMT Connect. Both of these systems were rather expensive and didn't give us exactly what we needed for lead conversion as well as the customization we desired. However, I feel that some of the reasons we went with Velocify were not exactly truthful as we found out during the implementation process or much later that there were things they said that they could do that once we started getting into the weeds with it they weren't able to execute. From a lead conversion and speed to lead standpoint, this is a good product. From a reporting and lifecycle management standpoint, this is a very poor product compared to the other two

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 system is fully scaleable both vertically and horizontally across the enterprise.

• 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

• Faster lead conversion lead us to higher potential for "first school wins" philosophy.
• Negative return on time spent maintaining Velocify. Because manual reporting was needed and much had to be done outside of the system, there was a monetary loss of time because of this.
• Predictability was near impossible for us, and the fact that we had to purchase an email automation system because Velocify did not do anything we needed was a negative ROI for our business.