Replicon Polaris PSA is a professional services automation platform containing project management, expense tracking, and billing features, from Replicon headquartered in Redwood City, California.
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PSA
Score 5.8 out of 10
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Upland PSA helps professional services teams grow their business.
It is perfect for inputing time sheets, time offs and expenses. It is hosted on the cloud, so accessible from anywhere, and even from mobile. It should nonetheless do just that, as it is not suited to track the work that you are doing or details about it. It is completely useless in that case.
We have discovered over the last few years using Tenrox that we could adapt our needs or processes to fit in the Tenrox box rather than adapting Tenrox to fit in ours completely. I feel like Tenrox would be better suited for a company that has fewer clients and projects over the course of a year, as well as fewer users. We have approximately 350 clients, 21,077 projects in Tenrox at this exact moment (we close projects as we can), 188 active users currently, and 415,635 tasks (some of course assigned to now closed projects). With this much information hosted through the Tenrox cloud server, we experience increased lag time frequently. This causes a lot of unwanted rejection towards Tenrox in our company.
We love that our timesheets are pre-populated with all our employee's assigned contracts and we get to control what is on their timesheet as far as funder and contract codes.
Tenrox did very well with our integration and getting a timesheet that exports well with our payroll provider.
Tenrox has a great email reminder system for when people need to submit or approve timesheets.
Though the technical support staff are always very nice, sometimes they don't seem to understand exactly what the issue is based on our explanation. There have been several times when I've ended up solving the issue on my own without their assistance, despite numerous emails and phone calls. Could be a language barrier issue, perhaps they could receive more training in how companies are actually using the software on a daily basis.
Employee time sheets have to be approved by project managers and supervisors prior to my final approval. However, when viewing the time sheets in list form, there is no way for me to tell whether a time sheet has been approved by everyone else. I have to manually open each one and hover over the approver link. It would be helpful if there was a column in the list showing which approvers still need to approve it.
There have been a few times when time sheets were accidentally deleted by approvers. In order to retrieve them, we've had to contact Replicon support and have a backup instance of the information created. It would be great if perhaps there was some sort of archive or recently deleted section that could be accessed right away without having to go through Replicon support, a folder or something that would hold on to recently deleted files for a few days or a week just in case they needed to be retrieved.
Some of our projects have more than one project manager. Replicon currently allows for co-managers to be assigned to a project, but this status does not seem to include that co-manager in the approval of time sheets and expenses. We have had to manually create an approval path to include that second manager. It would be nice if co-managers would automatically be included in those approval paths.
Tax calculation per state tax rules. Tenrox's current capabilities relative to tax codes is extremely limited and we have to do several time-consuming work-arounds in order to apply the tax as needed for our business. What is particularly frustrating about this aspect is that our need is based on tax laws and codes set by states and I feel a financial system should be able to sufficiently structure for legally-defined tax codes.
Tenrox Project Planning add-on module. This portion of the system has never worked as seamlessly as you would assume given they were designed to work together. We've run in to many bugs and just oddities over the years. It's very finicky in my experience. We only use TPP for a small portion of our projects - those being our smaller or need to have huge task lists per client naming requirements.
(The bad that became the good!) In the past, we have had significant customer-service challenges with Tenrox and then Upland, however over the past several months we have noticed a marked change in this. If we had not previously experienced issues with the customer service, I would not have any issue with the level of service that we are currently receiving. Given the history, I am cautiously optimistic that our current level of customer service will continue. I think our service concerns finally reached the 'right' people and I am reasonably confident the positive changes are here to stay!
I am not in charge of renewing the Tenrox contract. However, if it was up to me, I would renew in a heartbeat. Tenrox is an asset to our organization and it keeps us focused. I am not aware of other products similar to Tenrox that provide the depth that they do.
I feel like if the user interface could combine time and expense for users to be entered on one screen rather than two completely separate locations it would greatly improve usability. If the expense entry process could be improved completely, it would greatly improve the usability as well. Everything else within Tenrox, makes everything very user friendly.
The support team is always very helpful and strives to ensure they have met your needs and corrected your issues in a timely manner. If they need more information or cannot recreate the issue themselves, then they will follow-up to gather the necessary data themselves. They are constantly striving to meet the needs of all users and understand so many different industries and types of environments out there, it is very impressive.
The main thing with implementation is to make sure you have taken full advantage of the "sandbox testing" site that Tenrox provides to you during development. Try out every scenario you can think of, have other people enter information if needed, so that you can make sure you have not missed any big items. If you have the opportunity, roll out implementation to small groups of users. Depending on how your company is set up, I would choose groups that are not all in the same department so that you can address questions across all areas before adding in more users in the next wave of implementation.
We used to track time on JIRA on the tickets. This was good enough for time tracking, but didn't integrate efficiently with accounting software, so accountants had to replicate manually the data from JIRA to their software in order to bill clients. Using Replicon made things much easier for them.
The Tenrox software looks and feels older and is not as user friendly! Harvest, for example, is an upgraded version that is easier to track and compile. This is what I'm comparing it to and it's not even close! We only selected Tenrox because it was cheaper and we had a connection in the company with someone at Tenrox to use that platform. We are currently looking for a change.
Tracking, tracking, tracking. It keeps the data we need and gives us the ability to look at it in countless different ways with just a few clicks, which is a big time saver. Without Tenrox, we would definitely have to increase our headcount in order to accomplish billing and payroll.
We recently were able to automate a huge portion of business that was still (yes, still in 2014!) being managed out of an Excel spreadsheet. We experienced a great deal of resistance to the change with our own employees, however now that we have it going we have cleaned up our invoicing and impressed the highest-financial officer for two consecutive months - our first/only two months billing directly from Tenrox for that group.
A newer development for our team - Some client managers in the other divisions our company have begun to look at what we are able to do with Tenrox and our other primary system and get some of their work moved over to our group. This is great and is giving us new opportunities - we will likely need to increase the headcount of our admin. team, but for a good reason (too much work coming our way!).
