Esker is a global cloud platform built to unlock strategic value for finance and customer service professionals and strengthen collaboration between companies by automating the cash conversion cycle. Esker’s mission is to build a foundation that promotes positive-sum growth, increased productivity, improved employee engagement, and greater trust between organizations.
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M‑Files
Score 8.9 out of 10
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M-Files is a platform for knowledge work automation. M-Files helps knowledge workers to find information faster, work smarter, and achieve more. M-Files features a metadata-driven architecture, embedded workflow engine, and advanced artificial intelligence that enable customers to eliminate information chaos, improve process efficiency, and automate security and compliance. By embedding automation and GenAI into its core, M-Files' platform not only increases efficiencies…
I would recommend Esker based on the automation of invoice sending - it is very nice to have a tool that not only stores all of the contact info, but sends the invoices out as well. The tracking feature is great to have to see if the submission was successful. I do think that overall it could be much more user-friendly, but once you know what you're doing, it is not hard software to use.
M‑Files is great for companies with multiple locations. Drive letters can become cumbersome to use and collaborate with colleagues and M‑Files fills that gap. The check out/check in system is great and allows only one editor at a time. This can be good and bad depending on the situation.
Everything is electronic and every manager receives an email each morning telling them how many invoices they need to approve.
It has completely removed paper form the Accounts payable process and automatically archives invoices for the mandatory period required by Inland Revenue.
For monthly reporting there is visibility over what has not yet been included in the accounts and staff can follow with the tardy managers.
We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.
More user friendly customization options that do not require knowledge of coding/scripting. For example, prompting the creation of a new document from a template in a workflow.
When using the 'insert property' feature in a Word doc, I would love to convert dates from a mm/dd/yy format to be written out (such as September 21, 2018). Or possibly even just to pull the year or the month from a selected date to insert into a document.
I've often wished that I could find more detailed tutorials online for some features.
M-files meets our almost all needs, we dont have other option to replace m-files. it saves lots, like Hardware because of Vault Feature means we can create many vaults (mini-servers) in m-files in other solutions we need more hardware for more installations.
Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.
It is a powerful system that can locate content fast and effectively. The system takes quite some time to setup initially. It can be hard for M-Files support to know how businesses operate and how they want to use the system in a way that works for them. The customization makes it great for companies to cater to their own needs. Once the system is set up in a way that makes sense for the business, the user experience is positive. There is room for improvement in the notifications, workflow, and support areas.
I noticed some lagging with the integration with Microsoft Office but not so much that I would not use it. It has gotten better with updates. to be fair the issues were when Office 2013 first came out.
They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with
Usually when I need help from them I got support and it was very good and focused to solve my problem. I didn't have so many problems, but when used it worked. I just would like to have a support in my native language, but I can understand that sometimes is hard for the companies.
The key insight is that the most important thing is to have a open mind. The application is easy to use, but if you have a company with different views and it is not aligned could be a huge problem. So the company transformation is required together with the application. Ensure to use as much as possible the capabilities of the application helps to have best ROI.
We investigated Readsoft early in our exploration of upgrade options. We were on Esker DeliveryWare, but the UI for Readsoft, at the time, seemed to be a little convoluted and geared towards exception handling and required tiered users. Also, Readsoft was more cost prohibitive and did not have a solution for our faxing. Though, as I understand it, they may have since found a solution for this issue
I've compared recently with Box, but they still predicate their storage on WHERE instead of WHAT, which means if it isn't in a specific folder, you won't find it. Some documents may relate to multiple projects. In M-Files instead of putting a copy of a file in many folders (thus having many copies) you can build out the relationships, so there is only 1 copy of a document which prevents multiple "originals" from being developed separately.
We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.
The price we pay for M-Files is about one third less than the price that we were paying our previous vendor plus we have a custom-built amazing dependable system with great support.
From a compliance and legal standpoint, our policies are always available to end users including easy access to previous versions.
