Dext vs. OpenAir PSA

Application suits well to multiple user structure where users buy and pay expenses on the go so each user would have their own mobile app and access to Dext Prepare and soon after the purchase, they take a picture of the receipt and upload so finance team can access the information straight away. It would not suit well where a business has very few users who pay the bills and most bills are on the cloud (via emails, all-digital in the first place). Because these bills can be emailed to the accounting system in the first place anyway or other software providers where monthly subscription is much cheaper.

Incentivized

I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.

Incentivized

• Key metrics on the submissions by clients and any delays. This allows for early identification where client may be struggling to get the information submitted to Receipt Bank, holding up the bookkeeping processing and ultimately delays in delivery of information to the clients.
• Identifying unprocessed receipts sitting in the clients Receipt Bank file.. This assists in managing internal workflow and aiding team members who may find they need assistance in completing key tasks.
• Identifying which clients are using Receipt Bank effectively and which clients need assistance. This can provide the opportunity to discuss with all clients what works well for them and what needs improvement by sharing some of the wins from other clients.
• Providing managers the ability to review with ease the progress of Receipt Bank processing by client and by bookkeeper. This allows them to identify issues literally before they occur.

Incentivized

• We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
• It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
• Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.

• On the Inbox screen include a 'due date' column so items can be easily sorted in due date order to assist managing accounts payable
• improve the data matching between XERO and DEXT. Currently it performance is 'random' and does not occur on each customer file. Seems it is something that needs to be requested from support. It should be an automatic feature

Incentivized

• The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
• I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
• Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?

Incentivized

Dext is the best way for us to manage our business expenses. Physical and PDF receipts/invoices will be around for a while, but the move to eInvoicing is very good and we look forward to Dext adding this feature

Incentivized

We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.

Receipt Bank was great 3 years ago when I started using it. Now it’s way to expensive for what you can get elsewhere for free. Also the rebranding didn’t work in my opinion so the Dext name doesn’t have the same feeling to me as Receipt Bank.

Incentivized

In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

The performance was acceptable. If you had a very large data set you were working with it might take a little longer, but within reason.

When I think I have broken the platform the help guys and girls are simply fantastic. They take time to understand the problem and usually resolve the issue on the spot. I have not had to wait more than an hour to get anything resolved - be that an issue I have created or a fault in my understanding of the program. Can't rate their support I have received to date highly enough.

Incentivized

As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.

Incentivized

Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.

We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them

It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that

I have never been able to get Expensify to work for me. The reports are just completely unintuitive and I end up having my client generate the report I need and send it to me instead. For QBO the restriction on which email addresses can send receipts is too limiting. They also do not extract data well and the overall system is very clunky compared to Dext. Of course the trade-off there is that you aren't paying a separate monthly subscription fee.

Incentivized

It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).

Incentivized

Once the system is setup, it's easy to manage and maintain.

• Receipt Bank has helped alleviate the frustration felt by both our clients and our staff when it comes to the detail needed for some of the organizations that we serve. In some cases it's just NECESSARY to have all of that detail for the financial statement preparation, and prior to Receipt Bank, we had to email back and forth, download attachments, manually enter the information into Quickbooks Online, save the document etc. It was a tedious process. Receipt Bank took care of all of that, and it saves both our clients and our staff HOURS of work each month.
• Receipt Bank has given our clients the confidence to make their work places paperless offices. It frees time and money for them, because they don't have to keep track of the documents, they don't have to store the documents (and find a place to store them), and they never have to file them away. Receipt Bank archives all of the documents so you can find them if you ever need them, and the documents are in their financial data as well, which is where they really need them. I've never had a client regret going to Receipt Bank just because it makes life so much simpler for them.

Incentivized

• It covers our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management better than the previous solution we used.
• Project managers are happier having this tool for their job and also because it is running on the cloud as opposed to running on-prem.
• It doesn't help in any way improving the "chasing" of the people that don't submit their time-sheets in time. This one stayed the same as before.

Incentivized