Accounting Seed vs. M1

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

Implementation is by far the weakest link in the ECI/M1 process. Although the tool is powerful, the client is expected to drive the process of learning the tool, planning the meetings with consultants, identifying risks and making mitigation plans, etc. without any samples, guidance or assistance on the part of ECI. The tool is best suited to high volume, standard product manufacturers who build to inventory or to order without much variation. The shop floor routing and time tracking are straightforward if you can master the convoluted Unit Of Measure calculations. The tool is either hosted locally or accessed through Remote Desktop. Shop floor is web enabled but the main desktop for M1 is still a relay which makes connectivity a potential issue. Moving this platform to a truly web hosted environment would substantially improve connectivity and eliminate compatibility issues with Apple products

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.

• Manage inventory counts. Good precision on quantities in and out, through shipping, MI, MR, and receipts.
• Job costing shows great details on labor, operations, and materials to be used. I wished that would do better in outside operations that would return, but we still think it is great.
• Ability to track changes (changelog), showing all changes that had in a particular place. Such as where, when, and by whom a line item unit price was changed in a PO.
• Link, traceability, keeping history. If done correctly, it is amazing to keep the history of a part/lot.
• The amount of user rights/customization is unbelievable. It can be hard to set up in the beginning, but it is great that you can give some very specific access to a user, and it is not (in general) as a package.

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.

• Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
• We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
• Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.

Incentivized

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

Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio

Incentivized

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

Support has been great and timely

Incentivized

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

Our customization requirements were not that high and based on a price/cost benefit M1 was the winner. SAP was considered but the upfront costs and challenging learning curve together with the lack of flexibility in the SAP HANA public cloud version made the M1 choice more natural. SAP Services is usually more expensive compared to M1.

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

• Time savings having to only enter certain information once and have it follow through the entire order process from quote to cash

Incentivized