Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Advantages
The price-quality ratio is excellent, even though Odoo has become very competitive. The time to implementation is also great, if not one of the best. Excellent billing and service desk apps It is not the best solution if you are looking into a collaboration-focused software suite.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review CRM integrates nicely using our Zapier environment. The Lead to Contact/Account Conversion is very intuitive. Deals, Sales Orders, and Contract Zoho Sign work well together. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review The integration is loose and needs to be more stable and a true integration Development appears to take long periods of time to bring customer enhancements into the next release. I have seen numerous obvious business application needs to be brought to the attention that is still 2-3 years old without an update Unified User Interface and back end functionality/configuration across applications Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review While the software is easy to use and pick up, the different user interfaces and limits across the application make it difficult and slow to implement additional applications quickly and seamlessly across the organization. If the User interface was more consistent we would be able to pick up and train on new apps more efficiently
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Support is great as a customer, as a partner I get moved to that team more often and find issues in the support being provided. It also appears that the support agents do not take into account all the information provided and default back to the "step 1 of the playbook" instead of taking into account the business reason the support is being requested and understanding the steps already taken.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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!
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review 5 years ago, we decided to use
Odoo . At that time, the enterprise version of
Odoo was not competitive enough for a small company with minor integration needs when it comes to the pricing per user. Nowadays, pricing is almost equal. The effort of integration processes with
Odoo is still higher even though it delivers more potential. A decision between both today would be more difficult for us.
Read full review Scalability Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.
Read full review Return on Investment More time is spent on manipulating reports which can and should be automated. Lack of electronic invoicing process and other green technology features creates more cost on printing and storage costs. The lack of a user friendly interface requires more training and a bigger learning curve for staff. Read full review It has had an overall negative impact since we migrated from HubSpot due to the overall lack of support. Our users are frustrated with the complexity and lack of consistency in the admin portals. CRM is the only tool that is ready for business at scale. Read full review ScreenShots