Accounting Seed vs. Certinia ERP Cloud

Accounting Seed is a great solution for businesses looking for reliable accounting software. It offers all the features needed and works as expected. In addition, it is not as pricey as many competitors and therefore a great choice. I would recommend it for both startups and established businesses.

Incentivized

FFA is a good product if you want the ability to customize functionality and reporting. However, all the setup can be overwhelming if you are looking for an out-of-the-box solution. FFA is a great choice is you are already using Salesforce and want to report on KPIs directly from the source data. There are a lot of applications to help you feed data into the system or export it out in a usable format.

Incentivized

• When making a deposit for a donation we can tag the account record.
• Anyone can recognize donors that are also vendors.
• Extracting general ledger detail is accurate and easy - allowing us to ensure the GL matches revenue detail from donations, box office and education.
• Budgeting is actually pretty nimble now that I am using it more.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sometimes when creating a receipt it can't seem to find the company I am searching for in the drop-down, I have to go out to the company and enter from there.
• Some of the accounting reports seem to be limited, though at times this may just be the user! Still learning as I go! But there have been some reports that state I would need to add another partner app to do, which would mean more cost.

• It took a very very long time to implement and we had configuration issues after the implementation that had to be addressed.
• Cannot run scheduled reports.
• Difficult to run reports (training is needed to configure the reports).

Incentivized

The company has now converted its legacy, "home grown" operations system and built it on the force.com platform, and the integration between it and FinancialForce is deeply entrenched. No other application would be able to replicate this functionality, and the company will be able to scale and leverage the force.com platform as it grows.

Accounting Seed was easy to implement and use without third-party service providers' intervention. Furthermore, the vendor forwarded us a copy of articles and documentation on implementation, customization and integration, which made it much easier for us to integrate it with company API and other external programs.

Incentivized

Change management is always an issue, but the evidence of the application's usability is that both long-time employees (used to the legacy systems for many years) and newer employees have been able to learn the system and improve their business processes.

Unless the internet is completely unavailable - which has not happened yet - the application is always accessible. Since FinancialForce is built on the force.com platform, it's uptime is tied to Salesforce security and system performance standards

If Visualforce pages are enabled, they sometimes slow down the load time.

We seldom have had to use their support but when we have, they have been responsive and actually were able to answer our questions in a simple, nontech language. You don't have to be a programmer to talk to them!

Incentivized

The response time for FinancialForce is exemplary. Immediate acknowledgement of the support request by automatically logging a case/ticket on the provider side, then less than 24-hour follow up by a support team member with specific questions, information or resolution for the issue.

Through its Xtra login website available to its customers, FinancialForce offers a complete set of online, video tutorials, training and documentation. Each tutorial is "bite-sized", meaning it imparts instructional, step-by-step information in 2-3 minute narrated videos. For a particular cycle or process, like invoices to payments for example, each tutorial builds on the last so that the user can get a complete picture of the steps and process in less than 10 minutes.

The company decided to run parallel for three months in order to soften the impact of the change from the legacy "system" - which users had been interfacing with for over a decade - to FinancialForce. While not recommended, this did provide time for the in-house "super user" team of 2 people to become completely familiar with the application, and thus provide hands-on training and be a resource for the users who would be processing the daily accounting transactions.

I have never used Xero at my current organization, but I used it at Alliance Data before Implementing Accounting Seed. Xero wasn’t updated much during the years that we were using it. Also, Xero failed to integrate with some of third-party applications that we were using. Finally, Accounting Seed was highly navigable, had clean UI/UX unlike Xero.

Incentivized

FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing has more features, more useability, and manages higher numbers of customers. The systems I have used in the past are easier to navigate but couldn't handle this number of customers.

Incentivized

• Accounting Seed has been available to use at a reasonable annual cost.
• Installation, setup and integration cost were reasonable.
• Customization is simple so we do it our selves and saved money not using outside consultants

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized