Great software, weak support.
Rating: 7 out of 10
October 23, 2012
Verified User
Vice-President in Finance and Accounting
Computer Software Company, 201-500 employees
Vetted Review
Verified User
- Software has great functionality and very user friendly/intuitive
Cons
- Support is severely lacking. When you have issues, it takes a lot of time and effort to get them resolved.
FinancialForce has the same robust capabilities with billing and deferred revenue, revenue recognition and that is the piece that drives us . Any software can do payables. Deferred revenue and billing are critical.
FinancialForce out of the box integration with Salesforce.com is very attractive to us. Right now licenses to NetSuite are cost prohibitive in order to give to sales and account managers. Sales people and account managers would benefit from seeing data in NetSuite, e.g. billing, invoices etc. With FinancialForce, they can see all data in Salesforce.com without requiring licenses to FinancialForce.
The second advantage of integration is closed orders flow and setting up contacts in NetSuite independent of Salesforce.com. Today this is a manual data entry process which takes 5-10 mins per order for existing customer, 10-15 minutes for a new customer as need to set-up the customer within NetSuite.
I don’t know about the relative pricing for Financial Force, though I perceive the overall pricing would be cheaper because of access to data for account executives and account managers.
Another potential benefit is international support relative to the NetSuite Enterprise edition that we are on. To get the international capabilities with NetSuite, we’d need to upgrade to OneWorld which is quite a bit more expensive. You need international user support. For us, it would be a brand new implementation and cost $50-60k. It would not treated as an upgrade. The go forward license model wasn’t all that different for current functionality, but were looking at added functionality. If international is a big priority, the scale is more tipped towards FinancialForce. International is handled using data from the same tables. NetSuite tables are currently different to Salesforce.com opportunities, and may show up differently due to foreign exchange rates e.g. $101k vs. $100k. This leads to foreign exchange reconciliation issues. Even if we had one OneWorld, we would still have this issue.
However, the lack of SSAE 16 compliance was the factor that really stopped us from switching to FinancialForce. Because it is an early stage product, there was some items around billing, revenue that were less robust, but with our in-house Salesforce.com expertise, our IT team felt they could customize Salesforce/FinancialForce quite easily. We don’t have NetSuite expertise in-house. There would be synergy in our IT organization to having one platform.
I think Financial Force will get there very quickly and then I think it will be difficult. NetSuitehas remained closed. There are not a lot of good consultants who work with it. By contrast, everybody knows Salesforce.com.