Certinia ERP Cloud vs. Unanet ERP GovCon

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

As I said, Unanet is great for timekeeping and expense reporting. It's very easy to navigate and intuitive for my staff to use. On the other hand, reports are a challenge. The ones that are "canned" only come out as PDFs so I find I waste a lot of paper each month. Customized reports are better and come in Excel, but setting them up is not that easy. We've been working with Unanet just over a year. We went "live" effective 1/1/2017 and we're still avoiding the reporting functions even though that was one of the main reasons we purchased Unanet in the first place

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

• Near real-time visibility into project financials. As soon as the employees save their time for the day, you can get a good measure of project financial performance. Work authorizations are embedded into Unanet so unintentional overruns are virtually eliminated.
• Nice integration with the Joint Travel Regulations. It is easy to import the latest rate tables for both CONUS and OCONUS destinations.
• Good customer support and highly responsive. Webinars on new features are free and broadcast on a regular basis. Feedback to suggestions for new features are addressed in a very timely fashion.
• It is easy to structure Unanet to support DCAA practices to be able to get approval for cost plus jobs.
• With exports to .csv files, it is easy to extract data for further analysis beyond the relatively rich built-in reporting features.

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

• Adding hours for subcontractors must be done via import because the hours don't update on the reporting if put in via vendor invoice.
• Make posting dates less complex.
• Should be easier to figure out roles needed for managers in the organization.

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.

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.

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.

Every time I have reached out to customer support, they have been very helpful and resolved my issue very quickly and efficiently

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.

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 were previously using Deltek GCS. Deltek stopped the support for this software so we were forced to change to a new product. We reviewed Costpoint, a Microsoft product and Unanet. We selected Unanet because it had all of the features we were looking for in a new software and it was very user-friendly.

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

• Unanet has had a very significant ROI on several fronts. Our payroll department spends much less time managing and processing time in general.
• Unanet has allowed all of the project managers teams bill on a much more granular level which has saved significant time over the previous Excel based processes of gathering project level data.
• Using Unanet companywide has also saved many hours of time that were previously spent translating data from other platforms, and consolidating data via Excel for reporting purposes. Using the same tool (Unanet) with the included reports has saved significant time and hassle which has had an enormous impact on the ROI of Unanet.

Incentivized