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Certinia FM Cloud

Score6.5 out of 10

33 Reviews and Ratings

What is Certinia FM Cloud?

Certinia FM Cloud automates financial management on the Salesforce platform. The customer-centric software includes a general ledger, automated billing processes, and financial intelligence.

Top Performing Features

  • Inventory tracking

    The software syncs orders and stock to maintain a real-time picture of inventory and supports multiple methods such as LIFO and FIFO.

    Category average: 8

  • Automatic reordering

    The software can be set up to automatically reorder a good when it falls below a certain threshold.

    Category average: 7.4

  • Location management

    The software can track multiple goods across multiple locations.

    Category average: 7.7

Areas for Improvement

  • Task Insight for Project Managers

    Project manager visibility into task progress of team members

    Category average: 7.3

  • Standard reports

    The software offers pre-built reports with metrics standard to the category.

    Category average: 7.3

  • Journals and Reconciliations

    Automate and synchronize ledgers and processes

    Category average: 8

Leaves Some Functionality to be Desired

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing brings the ability to manage high numbers of active subscribers to our television service as well as auto-bill monthly and integrate with our other systems. While it's helpful in its integration with SF and our CRM, it also leaves some usability and functionality to be desired.

Pros

  • Contracts
  • Sales Invoices
  • Integration with Salesforce

Cons

  • Ease of use
  • Clearer defined terms inside of specific features
  • Constant errors

Most Important Features

  • Monthly Sales Invoices
  • Active/Expired Contracts for our Engineers
  • Payments integrated into opportunities

Return on Investment

  • Positive- making auto-billing more effortless
  • Positive- ability to easily access customer's payment information from SF
  • Negative- missed revenue from hidden billing issues

Alternatives Considered

Square Invoices and Stripe

Other Software Used

3PL Warehouse Manager, Lucidchart, Asana, monday.com, Salesforce CMS, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio (Radian6 + Buddy Media), GoToConnect (formerly Jive), GoToMeeting, Five9

New FinancialForce implementation

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We were using NetSuite as an ERP and it was clunky. We wanted a modern system that integrated well with our current CRM, Salesforce. FinancialForce ERP looks to the average user that this is just part of Salesforce and native to the system. This allowed us to have adoption to the system rather quickly.

Pros

  • Resource planning.
  • Hours tracking.

Cons

  • It might have been the implementation but it causes some apex errors.
  • Default fields are not enough. We need to customize which we'd rather not do.

Return on Investment

  • Haven't had a full year to evaluate ROI.
  • Reported higher adoption rates.

Alternatives Considered

NetSuite

Other Software Used

Salesforce Commerce Cloud

Accounting in the cloud

Pros

  • User interface is more modern and user-friendly than other software
  • Dashboards allow for good visual interpretation
  • Reports are able to be customized to better fit users' needs

Cons

  • Financial reporting could be easier to use
  • More out-of-box reports for standard reconciliations (bank rec, aging, etc.)
  • Some of the processes are time-consuming (running an aging, cash matching, printing checks)

Return on Investment

  • FFA has allowed us to automate accounts payable and reduce total processing and approval time from 1-2 weeks to 2-3 days
  • FFA has given us the ability to create automated dashboards with KPIs
  • FFA has allowed us to reduce month-end close from 10 days to 5 days

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Dynamics SL

Other Software Used

Concur Expense, Microsoft 365 Business, Salesforce CPQ (formerly SteelBrick)

FinancialForce -- For a growing small company

Pros

  • FinancialForce has a very familiar user interface if you have experience using SalesForce. Since it's built on top of the SalesForce UI, it doesn't take long for people to learn to navigate around. This helps when onboarding new employees.
  • There is a lot of customization available. Since SalesForce is highly customizable, so is FinancialForce. This will help if you have an in-house developer that can tailor to whatever specific business need your company has. This pertains to layouts or reports that are being built.
  • It has better scalability than QuickBooks.

Cons

  • Since SalesForce was not made with accounting in mind, building FinancialForce as a module on top of SalesForce gives problems because the overarching architect of SalesForce cannot facilitate all the accounting requirements.
  • The FinancialForce integration team was not very good, and did not help us set up our FinancialForce very well. Their customer support is also lacking and takes a long time to respond and troubleshoot our problems.
  • FinancialForce doesn't actually build financial statement reports. We were only able to run a trial balance, and we had to build the statements ourselves in Excel.

Return on Investment

  • We moved to a subscription business, and FinancialForce cannot facilitate it. After using FinancialForce for 4 years, we had to switch to NetSuite. We had a negative return on investment with all the resources we used to do in-house development in FnancialForce.
  • FinancialForce did not have a good way to match payments against invoices, and it was a very manual process. We spent a lot of human hours to get it done.
  • It was still relatively cheap, so for the 4 years that we used it, the actual cost of the product was what we could only afford at the time.

Alternatives Considered

NetSuite and QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Other Software Used

NetSuite, Avalara, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

FFA Review

Pros

  • Comprehensive spreadsheets and dashboards with filtering functions.
  • Ease of file upload and conversion to and from Excel.
  • The overall spread of the homepage makes for easy access to whatever information you're looking for.
  • I believe FFA has a tremendous ability to data easy to access by all departments, but also is complex enough to retrieve specific data that is needed.

Cons

  • I am a full supporter of FFA.

Return on Investment

  • I have not been with the firm long enough to determine it's overall impacts.