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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Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.4 out of 10
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For document-intensive companies looking to improve business efficiency, Square 9 Softworks develops solutions for process automation that aim to drive increased productivity across all business applications.
$50
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Pricing
Esker
Square 9 Softworks
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Square 9 Process Automation Essentials
$50
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Digital Transformation Essentials
$68
per month per user (5 User Minimum)
Square 9 Enterprise Essentials
$75
per month per user (10 User Minimum)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Esker
Square 9 Softworks
Free Trial
No
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
Additional Details
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Offered via a three-tier pricing model that allows customers to scale their solution up or down based on the changing needs of their organization.
Pricing excludes professional services and implementation fees
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.
Square 9 Softworks is well suited for unique needs within companies. We have built, renovated, and optimized custom workflows within our archives, designed highly specific interfaces with our ERP platform, and Square 9 Softworks has answered the bell through it all.
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.
The software is very flexible, and the technicians were great at implementing our customizations for the PO project.
While indexing fields in Global Search, the Key Free tool works great.
Global Search is well-organized. It's easy to navigate and find your documents.
The process for completing your project was well done. Communicating with individuals at Square 9 who were responsible for different aspects of the project was easy.
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.
Overall, it is not as stable as other software. Some errors could not be fixed, such as a form going forward without approval because a user pressed "enter" twice in a row.
I probably only use 20% of the functionality. Beyond that, I'd have to pay for development. We did that once, and the project that we paid for never was implemented. They allowed us to request a design before my time that was so complicated that they never got it to work. Once I came on board, I implemented a much simpler solution.
Our upgrade took much, much longer than expected, and was disrupted by so many software issues.
We are definitely renewing our SmartSearch. This is the only place all of our companies contracts and regulatory filings are kept. Our company would lose track of all expiring contracts if we did not renew. We would also need to spend many hours figuring out a new organizational system for all of our files, as well as savings the documents from SmartSearch onto the computer.
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.
The items I am searching for are easily found. They are found in at least 95% of the searches. The failure rate generally is related to another employees user error or a template error set up by our Square 9 team in house.
With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.
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
Support is always extremely helpful and responsive. Whenever we have a question, it is simple contacting them and also setting-up an appointment, if necessary. Scheduling the appointment is easy and they are willing to talk on the phone, which is not always true with software companies. Their report support tools are also really east to use.
It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.
I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.
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
SharePoint and Square 9 Softworks are similar in some ways and totally different in others. They both do workflow, although Square 9 Workflow gives administrators more options. They both have a repository, although Square 9 GlobalSearch is more structured in terms of customization. Using field values allows for more exact search capabilites. Square 9 AI tools allows administrators to get the correct data off the page more precisely with less effort.
The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.
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.
Reduction in human error through manual data entry process now being automated
Reduction in cost due to automation allowing the function to not require a full time employee
Reduction in time spent performing the previous manual tasks. Example: on our consolidated shipment days, it could take doc clerk 2-3 hours to prepare master document package. This has been reduced to 30 minutes or less (depending on size of shipment and time needed for OCR to complete)
