MIP Fund Accounting vs. Sage 100cloud

I tried a couple of other funds accounting software, and we had staff that was familiar with MIP. I then chose MIP for both companies. I know we get accurate information out of MIP as long as the information put in is good. MIP is a little clumsy for AR billing, but maybe it would be easier to use if it was available in the cloud module (or if it is, I haven't been able to see it).

For small and medium business in the distribution and light manufacturing space, Sage 100 is probably the best bang for your buck. As a very scaleable system, you can modify the system to meet the needs of a growing business without making gross changes to the core of the system

• General Ledger processing, including journal entries and reports
• Ability to download all reports directly to Excel and PDF formats
• Use of Grant codes to enable grant reporting by month/quarter/year
• Ability to have multiple departments and consolidate into groups for reporting
• Accounts Payable and Accounts Receivable cannot be out of balance
• Multiple ways to use the product including Cloud and Classic options, Visual menu or Standard (Top of screen) menus to select processes, many options we are not using in our simple organization

• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

• My #1 request would have a report that can pull from all modules. There are some reports that I have to run in separate areas to compile the data I want. If there were a one-stop-shop report center, that would be fantastic.
• I would love to have an option to make text size bigger in all parts of the system.
• We are in CA; I would like to see call center coverage to account for the time change to Texas.

• It's painfully slow even for mid-sized businesses like ours without millions of transactions.
• It crashes very, very often and has numerous critical failures.
• Unfortunately, it's a local program so that excludes it from being used remotely. You have to be on site for it to work.

We have been using MIP for over 25 years. In the '90s, we used the MS-Dos version and subsequently changed to the Windows version in the 2000s. Our organization is still relatively small in terms of staffing and even transaction volume; however, over the years, the number of projects has increased and is projected to increase drastically in the next year or two. With the increase in projects along with the ability of MIP to cater easily to large organizations, it makes perfect sense for us to renew when that time comes.

I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

I don't know what it would be like in the for-profit arena, but for the non-profit arena, it is an excellent product. I love how you don't actually have to close years and are able to get information that spans over the year-end. And the grant tracking is excellent too. It is just an excellent accounting system.

It is easy, flexible, user friendly and feature laden. Out of the box or easily customized to meet our "wish" list . Sage offers a variety of modules and bolt-ons, user defined fields etc., allowing us to conduct business "our way" without forcing us into a one-size- fits- none mold or having to purchase expensive and cumbersome programming modifications

Mostly its available when I need it. I do get kicked out of the cloud while entering data at times. But I do not lose data and can often just open up the classic version to continue doing what I was doing. Only rarely is there no availability and when that happens, its a very short amount of time.

I feel that reporting is difficult to use. Copying existing reports for a new fiscal year is easy but often the data you want to display is not selected, even filtering for the correct data. We routinely have to call support for assistance with reports and most of the issues cannot be resolved during a phone call, a ticket has to be placed for more in-depth examination of the issue. Multiple users cannot run the same report at the same time; so if two people are trying to run an expanded GL, you will have to copy the report and save it with a new name in order to use it at the same time. This results in lots of unnecessary reports in the list. In addition, once you have been using the system for a while you wind up with hundreds of reports in your list of options; there may be a way to archive reports but we have not found that yet so we currently have reports in our list from accounts that are over 10 years old.

I have not reached out to MIP for technical support; however, their website offers great help resources so I can solve an issue on my own. Another team member reached out to MIP for support and was helped quickly. The transition process took longer than expected due to a lag in communication.

Sage Support is very good. I usually get a person on the phone in a short time frame and usually get my issues fixed in one called.

There are no specifics on what happens if you make one choice or another to know which is the best selection. This is true for JVs and AP. In training we were not given specifics of what happens when one possibility is selected over another.

Denise O'Malley provided training for the HR module when we added it to our system. Denise also gave us a demo of the EWS module which we were able to see that it would not meet our needs. She was very kind about and understanding regarding the functions we needed with a time clock system.

Don't waste your time with MIP. There are plenty of other softwares out there that will do the job better. Do your homework. Get references from actual users. Make sure that what you choose will truly integrate. Make sure that there is local support. Get training. You will be glad that you passed this one by. Trust me.

We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

This is the first time I've worked in the non-profit world. Accounting is somewhat different so I am very glad to be using a product designed specifically for non-profits. Many accounting processes are similar of course, but it is nice to have them tailored to fit the requirements of a non-profit organization.

I've reviewed Accpac, Syspro, SAP Business 1 and Platinum. Sage is far easier to use and setup than Syspro and SAP Business 1. Generally speaking, most accounting software does the same thing, at the end of the day, how easy is it to modify data inside the system and review to make sure that your system integrity is intact. I find that Sage 100 is excellent at these things.

Not real sure what you mean by scalability. It seems to be able to handle all of the funds we are currently working with. If you mean the looks of it, some things are small and it would be nice to increase the size according to the user.

• The Accounting and HR teams have been able to eliminate double entry, and therefore free up a lot of time.
• With the budgeting module, we have been able to obtain a firm grasp on our grants and utilize those funds in the best way possible.

• We have seen increased efficiencies for our team members processing orders and fulfillment as they are now integrated.
• We have cut paper/printing/mail expenses by 500% of what we previously spent.
• Our overall cash management has improved with the visibility from Bank Reconciliation and Financial Reporting.