ByDesign is decent, but not designed for public companies
July 15, 2014
ByDesign is decent, but not designed for public companies
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Various versions over time
Modules Used
- Complete ERP
Overall Satisfaction with SAP Business ByDesign
It is our ERP system and is used primarily by finance, and logistics. It is also used by all employees for expense reimbursements.
- The user interface is intuitive and easy to navigate. You can easily drill down to the accounting info that you need for each transaction.
- All items in a transaction are linked well (supplier invoice, delivery confirmation, payment, associated journal entries, etc.)
- Until the recent announcement of changing the platform, SAP was good at issuing regular updates to ByDesign.
- ByDesign is not well equipped for large companies that need to be SOX-Compliant. For example, there is not a way to prevent the same person from creating and posting their own journal entries without approval. Documentation work-arounds are needed.
- In many instances error descriptions are not adequate to resolve a problem. Errors are caught in the Closing Cockpit, but the error descriptions are usually not specific enough to resolve the problem.
- Since the program is cloud based and the company is in Germany, it can be very slow to respond to requests; particularly when running large reports.
- We have several entities in ByDesign, and the application was not able to consolidate financial reporting for all of them. We had to build a costly bolt-on application (EPM) for our consolidation, financial reporting, and forecasting needs.