Microsoft Dynamics SL vs. Workday Financial Management

In the service series, there is a weakness in applying revenue recognition concepts which are a strong point of the project series. It is difficult to get a period sensitive WIP that could be recreated at any time for a point in time (fiscal period).

Incentivized

Our primary model for budgeting revenue is centered on patient counts. Missed assumptions early in the year result in massive ramifications over the balance of the year. Workday formulas allowed us to write formulas to project the recovery of such shortfalls over a variable length of time, resulting in realistic projections for overcoming said shortfalls.

Incentivized

• Ability to add companies, and sub-accounts on the fly allows for the growth of the system without conversions, and flexible reporting allows for the quick utilization of the data.
• Multi-Company allows for easy and automated data entry and reporting across multiple legal entities and business segments.
• Multi-Company also allows for easy centralization of business processes (AP check writing and Fixed Assets for example), while spreading data entry across the enterprise.
• Ability to Copy/Paste into Dynamics SL has always been a strength- especially from Excel. The additional power of being able to use Excel for a myriad of calculations, including complex allocations, and formatting the result into a JE to paste directly into the Journal Entry Screen has saved countless hours in data-entry, and made re-use of complex items very easy.

Incentivized

• We specically wanted a cloud financial management system that we could use in China and communicate reports to the headquarters organization and roll-up reporting. It performs well.
• It was reasonably priced since we are not a for-profit company and need the Workday flexibility for finance and accounting operations. Most of our requirements are met with this one system.
• The system worked efficiently with the additional security we built on to keep confidential. Many reports are ready off-the-shelf or easy to develop, which is a strength.

Incentivized

• When we have a lot of invoices rather than just a few large invoices, we can be frustrated by how long it takes Flexible Billings to generate a lot of invoices
• It would be nice if Dynamics SL had an easy integration to some of the nicer salestax tools such as Avalara and CCH.
• It would be nice if the fixed assets module and electronic banking were not third party.

Incentivized

• The automatic save function isn't always active for the cloud version. I'm not sure if it is a glitch or a settings issue.
• There are some limitations to customizations.
• Updates don't go through properly on the system, leading to downtime issues.

Incentivized

Unfortunately, Dynamics' lack of ability to smoothly integrate with our CRM system is causing us to look at other solutions. The efficiencies that we gain by using Dynamics for our day to day accounting are lost in the constant headaches of getting sales quotes to import properly into the system for invoicing. Another major issue for us has been budgeting and reporting. We currently do all of our budgeting and board reporting in Excel, which is too time consuming and inefficient, especially when a system as robust as Dynamics should easily be able to handle this relatively simple task.

Incentivized

SL itself is relatively easy to use and most of the Help Files documentation is well kept and outstanding in the amount of information that is given. Most end users pick up the functions quickly and are off and running after some limited training. There will always be questions and research to be done, but overall SL is relatively easy to follow for a seasoned user

Incentivized

Workday Financial Management is an easy to use, productive software suite that really brings all departments together and improved workplace efficiency. Before we began using the software, much info was partitioned in random places that were not clearly labeled or accessible to all shareholders. We are very pleased with Workday Financial Management.

Incentivized

We have had only one unplanned outage for 2 hours in the last 30 months. We shut down for 30 min to 1 hour once a month, but that is for Microsoft OS updates to the servers. Being a 24/7 world wide operation, the reliability is really important. We do get an 8 hour window on the weekend that we can be down for a short period to install Microsoft Dynamics SL updates, but we do not have many of those. On our last version upgrade, we shut the users out at 9:30 am and were fully operational in less than 6 hours. The upgrade was New SQL server, New SL server and 2 new Citrix servers.

Incentivized

Many times support will tell you that your issue is an identified bug and will be scheduled in the future to be fixed in a future release. The knowledgebase has gotten worse in recent years and much more difficult to use. many times you can't find the error during the search

Incentivized

Our support team has been awesome. They are extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through all of the challenges we have faced. Workday's community online is also extremely helpful with many trainings and help topics that can be reviewed at your convenience.

Incentivized

Just to let it take its course. The implementation for me once I became a part of my former organization was pretty seamless. Just get to know the basics and call the support team to ask questions if you need help on an issue, should they arise. They are ready, willing, and able to help!

Incentivized

We started with QuickBooks Enterprise when our company was young. We quickly outgrew this program as it was not able to accommodate the financial reporting we needed to satisfy our investors. QuickBooks was also very limited in managing our revenue as we grew. We did try Great Plains and Peachtree (now Sage 50) and we discovered that they were rather complicated for our users. They were not as easy to maneuver and manipulate as SL and we felt that SL was much more "user friendly" and simplified, but still able to produce the same results.

Incentivized

The application data of users in the case of PeopleSoft is stored in its proprietary data storage, whereas Workday Financial Management connects to outside databases to create analytics reports. Therefore, this option uplifts the need to use Workday Financial Management as an interactive tool of business intelligence. The release model of Workday Financial Management is ahead of Oracle because it has a continual announcement of more functionality that is a very attractive incentive for our project management team for improving and developing the ongoing operational streams.

Incentivized

Since the backbone of the database is MS SQLServer, the database can be easily scaled.

Incentivized

• Dramatic improvement in our ability to judge the profitability of jobs.
• Lots of improvements in delivering invoices and statements to customers.
• Automated AP approvals and imaging made our last tax audit a breeze.
• Ease of reporting data is a big plus. Financial statements with drill down capability are very useful.
• One integrated system means less data moving around and more real time information.
• EFT payments, email statements and live linked Excel charts have improved our efficency
• Too many more to name.

Incentivized

• Workday has helped my employer save money over the past couple of year by tracking time of employees and how long were days looking like.
• It has enables us to make better decisions by hiring more people instead of paying overtime to those who already work in order to have the right work/leisure balance
• The platform has also helped us to redesign our policies after seeing when employees were clocking in and clocking out and track people who were showing up late for work

Incentivized