Certinia ERP Cloud vs. Sage 100

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

For small and medium business in the distribution and light manufacturing space, Sage 100 is probably the best bang for your buck. As a very scaleable system, you can modify the system to meet the needs of a growing business without making gross changes to the core of the system

Incentivized

• 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

• Simple to implement and use. Operation very intuitive so new employees are quickly trained.
• It is very flexible with many modules and many features allows for easy customization to suit particular needs of any department or company.
• Context sensitive help, training and support make it easy for a company to operate with out a lot of additional outside tech support.
• Scalable plenty of room to grow as the business grows without being bloated.
• Pricing is very reasonable.

Incentivized

• 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

• Database backend, Sage 100 relies on the ProvideX database, which has limited ODBC functionality
• Document management. Paperless Office is not a robust solution for Sage 100 and feels like an add-on.
• Support. Getting support is tricky, and you will usually have to work with your reseller/support partner.

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.

I would put this out to bid, if I were at the same organization. There have been a lot of improvements and changes in enterprise software and my preference would be to find a good web-based or cloud-based tool. Lower overall cost of ownership and improved efficiency would be my target criteria for a rebid of this.

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.

Overall Sage 100 has been pretty user friendly. If we have a question on anything, we are able to contact our implementation rep who helps us right away. Some of the Sage Field Operations may not be as intuitive for our field personnel to use. I wish the reports ran faster so that we could run and put together many reports quickly at once.

Incentivized

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.

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.

We use a local software technology partner to help support our Sage100 needs. We do not need much assistance with Sage100. There are very few issues or questions.

Incentivized

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.

We had an advantage in implementing the tool in that our director of Ops had been part of the team implementing the ERP for other users so we knew what to expect and were able to avoid a lot of the challenges people sometimes face with implementations. However, the process still took far longer than desired.

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

We have used Foundation and it did not work out well, so we selected Sage 100 because the implementation and functionality was much better. We didn't have to keep coming up with workarounds or complications on Sage 100. Also the data security is better.

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

• Sage 100 has allowed us to better serve & manage our customers since we integrated it into our system in 1996. Since then, we have seen a lot of changes but, the consistent, simple layout has kept us re-newing our contract year after year.
• Ordering inventory has been easier than ever since we integrated inventory tracking. No more ordering too much or too little.

Incentivized