QuickBooks Desktop Premier is an installed version of QuickBooks for general business, contractors, manufacturing and warehouse accounting, as well as nonprofits, professional services, and retail.
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Workday Adaptive Planning
Score 8.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Workday Adaptive Planning streamlines planning workflows, using AI and real-time data integration to improve collaboration and provide predictive forecasts for better strategic analysis.
We really think that ANY typical business would be a reasonable fit for QuickBooks Desktop Premier. While not necessary, even a comparatively unexperienced accounting person could look at the "Home" screen and follow their nose thru typical daily accounting processes without much detailed knowledge. Reporting is simple, looking up customer info and prior transactions is simple, looking up vendors and prior payments is simple... all in all, quite straightforward. I really can't think of an instance where it would be 'less appropriate'.
It's well suited to any business where you have defined inputs, a layer of structured calculations and a defined output. In other words, any business situation! We use it in a law firm setting where it enables us to import staff plans, assign targets to each individual, thereby generating a revenue forecast linked to business capacity. From there, global assumptions determine staff and direct costs, with the user overlaying discretionary costs to arrive at a final P&L forecast. This is then summarised using the reporting and dashboarding layer to provide outputs to senior leaders for sign off.
It helps create dynamic plans for finances, operations and various functional units in an organization all under one platform
It helps in scenario modeling to help analyze various business events and report by any number of business dimensions including channel, customer or product
It can be integrated with any system including ERP, BI or CRM
Support for older versions of QuickBooks ends after three years, then users must purchase the newest version at full price. Renewals should be deeply discounted for existing users.
I would like to see better in-product inventory tracking, so we can choose LIFO or FIFO rather than the ambiguous "average cost" method.
I would like to be able to assign payroll taxes to jobs for better job costing.
Expense reporting aspects are repetitive and hard to fully optimize.
Finance tracking is limited to basic reports with multiple levels or drill-down...hard to fully grasp without exporting data and massaging in something else (like Excel).
Because we have been extremely happy with the product and our organization tends to be creatures of habit. We rarely leave a product that works this well for the latest and greatest. Typically we follow the "if it's not broken, don't fix it rule". While QB does make changes we typically just roll with it. If we do find something we don't like we work through it until we fully understand its functionality.
For one we're in way too deep to not move forward with Adaptive. We're integrated with Workday, we do a ton of reporting with Adaptive, and it's working very well for planning and forecasting. No reason to look back or change course.
We switched to a more "robust" software program with the hiring of a new CFO. The migration of historical data and ancillary information has been cumbersome and riddle with errors and issues. In hindsight much of what the new software program was touted to accomplish is not come to fruition. QB Desktop Premier was sufficient for the organization needs
It is an easy transition for Excel users, with more built-in analytical tools and no need to build formulas. It also has built-in reporting and integration with Microsoft Office products such as Excel and PowerPoint. For non-Finance users, there's an initial learning curve to get used to the tool.
There haven't been any lately. The only one issue I can think of is when there was an update in Adaptive that altered our reports. Before I realized there was an issue, Adaptive reached out to let me know, so that it could be fixed.
All aspects of Adaptive Insights perform well. One area that I wish was quicker was integration. When importing data from Intacct our accounting ERP platform, it can sometimes take 4 hours for the import to process. The earlier imports are done, the quicker they complete. My estimate for a quick upload is about two hours.
This is where QuickBooks falls short. Many times my staff has had questions that have not been able to get resolved easily with a chat or call. I personally have had more general questions that have not been answered easily as well. I think QuickBooks needs to provide the resources of having readily accessible help in order to make it simpler to get solutions.
Whenever we have had any questions, issues, or concerns, the support has been quick and thorough. [This] allow[s] us to be able to fully resolve any issues, or be connected with the right group quickly to attain the result we were after; be it from simple formatting to adding new detailed reporting.
This was extremely helpful so that they could walk you through the model and teach you more about the complexity of various areas. It is most helpful when it is specific to your organization's model. The larger in-person trainings were helpful but they tended to be more generic and entry level. The trainings that are more tailored to your specific needs are the most helpful.
They often times tended to be way too generic or entry level. They would also become sales pitches to upgrade or get new Adaptive Planning products. The questions in the training would be very niche and specific to other organizations. They were rarely helpful to the group at large.
It is important to do your research. There are tutorial videos online that could help new user of this accounting system. These tutorials are straightforward and easily understandable.
Trust the expertise of very strong 3rd party implementers. Having deployed Adaptive at a separate company before, I thought I knew it all (hubris, I know). Fortunately, I began to (very quickly) trust the judgment of our Carlson implementation team, and they provided invaluable insights and best-in-class processes that have benefitted me and my team greatly.
QuickBooks Premier handles most of my business functions efficiently in one package. It is not my "everything." I use Replicon for time rather than QuickBooks. I don't want my WIP data interfering with my accounting. I use PaySimple for it's web interface and back office processing. I don't have security issues since I don't have any credit card data in my possession. With today's identity theft environment, I have to protect myself as much as I can. Not having credit card data in my accounting software lets me sleep much better at night. Quicken will do basic accounting but does not have all the double entry accounting systems contained in QuickBooks. QuickBooks Online does much of the basic business functions but I don't like the pricing structure. As a professional accountant, that is very important to me. Bill.com provided a good service but the ability of QuickBooks to add bills and receipts to transactions makes it redundant.
Workday became our choice because it is fully web-based and easily integrates with other systems. The learning curve for Workday was shorter than that of Dynamics. The reporting tools in Workday are more user-friendly than that of Dynamics. However Workday did not have Check Printing tools which are available in Dynamics. The organization started a project to digitize all financial transactions so it was not a priority feature. When it comes to scaling up the functionalities of Workday it was much easier than Dynamics.
We went from 2 users to 70+ users over a 2 year period of time. The application scaled wonderfully. 65 of those users were non-finance users so they were able to quickly learn the software and prepare budgets quickly and efficiently. That is the power of Adaptive and its ability to scale
Most of our business clients use QuickBooks which makes it efficient for us to work on clients that use the program. We can import QuickBooks data into our software which adds efficiencies to our tax practice.
Having staff that are familiar with the software enables our firm to provide quality service to the clients that use QuickBooks.
We receive referrals from satisfied QuickBooks clients.
It's facilitated a better financial literacy and management by the non-financial managers in the company, giving them a much better ability to see what they're spending, control it, and plan better in the future.
It's hard to quantify the ease of model and version management, but we could never do what we're doing now with our current staff. It would take a small army to replicate anything close to what Adaptive pulls off using Excel, if it's even possible.
