Microsoft Dynamics GP vs. Zoho Books

It does accounting really well, it does payroll not so well. I say this because when you get into states that have complicated payroll laws like California, overtime calculations are hard to setup and get right. Same goes for other states when they do out of the normal pay structure like piece rate pay. It does HR, A/P and A/R really well and we have had no issues on that side; just payroll when it comes to certain states and how we do anything that is not salary or hourly.

Incentivized

Zoho Books is good for a company or organization that wants to keep track of invoices, payments, and cash flow. If you do not have a full-time accountant in your organization, it can work well as whenever you hire one or have someone check your books, the information they need will be there, provided it has been entered into Zoho Books. It works as a one-man operation or a small team. For larger teams, it would depend on how much information needs to be input on a daily basis.

Incentivized

• User friendly interface
• Able to be extended into multiple areas of your business
• One feature we have been using for a few years is EFT for payables - it has significantly reduced the time spent paying vendors and reduced our check printing and mailing costs. It is very easy to setup and use.

Incentivized

• The projects feature is what we use a lot it helps setting up projects as well as tracking expenses and bills for the whole project. The budgeting feature is very developed, allowing you to budget by total project cost, total project hours, hours per task, or hours per staff.
• Customer Estimates and Invoices are very easy to setup and send directly from the app (it also has a very nice and customizable reminder option).
• Stock and pricing listings is very intuitive and easy and makes it a very helpful and time saving feature.
• Bank reconciliation and Financial reporting are very developed and make it easy to share information with bookeepers and accounting specialists.

Incentivized

• Having an integration between Project Accounting and Field Service would be amazing! There are so many companies that have service technicians that perform work on a customer's contract but also have a need for project accounting functionality within that customer's contract. Right now those modules are separate so you either need to use one or duplicate some efforts if you need to use both.
• Microsoft Dynamics GP could do a better job documenting their new enhancements to the product. They realize great enhancements but the documentation about them, or new products, is lacking so it is difficult as a consultant to know everything a new feature can do for me and my customers.
• They could enhance their forecasting capabilities with a new forecasting tool within Management Reporter.

Incentivized

• Printing checks - they only offer one vendor and they are expensive compared to QuickBook alternatives.
• Their interface for bids - retainers and applying them against income could be improved, but once you know how it's easy.
• Their recurring fees don't seem to always work the way I'd want. But overall they work.

Incentivized

Due the economic challenges that Puerto Rico is having, the company has had to merge some companies in order to be more efficient. It has been easy in GP to process those merges, even thought we had to spend days to accomplish that the process was smooth and accurate. In addition we were able to streamline the purchasing and sales process and the organization is confident to keep renewing GP for the future versions.

Incentivized

Overall usability of the older model is not quite so user friendly for the basic bookeeper, but at an accountants level we can generate all the necessary reports and create Sales Orders, Purchase orders and invoices - though it is a bit redundant to enter the sales and purchase orders separately instead of being able to convert a sales order directly to a puchase order by applying a price book like the newer versions can.

Incentivized

Customization is the biggest struggle for us and most of the time we need to involve a tech person. The chat support is a great feature and very helpful. It would be great to be able to customize and create invoices and correspondence (templates) such are reminders in multiple languages within one organization. The currency (USD) would be the same. We have clients in different countries that don't speak English but pay in USD.

Incentivized

The rating is directed to the thrid party serive provider that we use. I do not now how good the Microsoft direct support is.

Incentivized

The support team feels very disjointed. We have filtered through a number of "lead" contacts and are frequently spammed by other Zoho members. Once getting an appropriate support contact on the phone - the team is very helpful, it just takes a lot of hoop jumping to get there. We actually unsubscribed from their support package as we were not getting the value we were looking for.

Incentivized

Basically the challenge with this implementation was the Business Portal, too many errors and even the aplication is up and running the users are still having issues. We will start planning the migraton to GP 2015 soon.

Incentivized

Because GP doesn't do CRM we have looked at D365 Customer Engagement for our field service, and F&O as a replacement. Vaporware, no direct upgrade path, and if you want to continue with GP for your back office and just use Field Service it's an insanely complex integration import/export. D365 F&O is a huge implementation cost, and without a direct migration path every bit of data has to be custom imported. There really is no straightforward way to stack up GP against these programs currently. Again, the future of GP is in some doubt.

Incentivized

Cloud vs. desktop, this and the fact that Zoho Books syncs with our other Zoho apps were the most pressing reasons for switching to Zoho Books. As mentioned previously, we consider our accounting software to be an integral part of doing business efficiently, and we can now do that considering our systems are all integrated.

Incentivized

The functionality that GP and related ISV solutions offer and the ease of integration of GP to other systems makes it an extremely scalable solution

Incentivized

• If implemented properly, the product can save many hours of data entry time - specifically by setting up integrations of large data sets.
• Many times the underlying business process must be adjusted to accommodate software limitations. By being flexible, a company can leverage their users' skills in combination with GP to make data entry faster and more efficient. I have seen many companies eliminate the need for data entry personnel as well as reallocate employee hours to more skilled positions such as reporting and analytics.
• Poor implementations, on the other hand, can cause employees to hate their jobs and the software. This isn't specific to GP but to the software industry in general.

Incentivized

• I was able to cut my costs for a more complete and easy to use tool.
• Many transactions, and accounting tasks on 1 platform, reduction in time by a lot.
• Clients can pay without leaving your website (less drop-off, better conversions).

Incentivized