e-automate Value - From A Long Time User and CPA.

e-automate is our company's ERP solution. Our technicians also use it for remote tech. Our technicians love e-automate and it is great for billing. We built a couple of programs outside of e-automate, which is one of the areas where we are having issues. We find ourselves doing double the manual work because there isn't a public API accessible so we aren't able to connect. I'm also a CPA and do accounting for a lot of businesses in various industries outside of footPRINT that use various ERPs. The one issue with e-automate that I have found over the years is the amount of labor hours that go into maintaining it. I have several 30-60 million dollar companies that I do all the accounting for in 2-3 days a month. footPRINT is nowhere near that size, but I spend 60-80 hours a week trying to keep the accounting up to date.

To me, the contract management features are the primary reason anyone signs up for e-automate. They allow you to maintain your contracts with ease and give you more visibility into future events such as contract expirations, lease expirations, etc. The ability to pull in meters automatically is also very important at a certain point.

I handled all of our accounting in Quickbooks and then in e-automate up until we hit around the 5 million mark. The one system for workflows definitely helped keep things organized and gave us visibility into profitability. However, it also took away countless hours of my life over the years that I'm still wondering if it was worth it.