OpenAir PSA vs. Webexpenses

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

Really suits me well for making mileage claims, the map works well and it has an accurate log of addresses. Very handy and easy to be able to add any necessary receipts. Could be a good idea to include live road closures? but I understand that's quite tricky to do. Really easy to be able to move routes when you have gone a different way than recommended.

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.

• imports credit card transactions from our corporate card program without issue
• allows for easy set up of new users
• is a very intuitive, easy to learn tool
• has a very responsive support and customer service team
• Set up and configuration was thorough, and they were able to work through our unique issues, such as custom segments in NetSuite.
• It is a very inexpensive product. Well worth the cost.

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

• When you click add receipts after putting the details of your expense, you get the impression that you have done something incorrect from the prompt that you receive
• Two options for adding receipts can confuse people when training them on how to use
• An easy to access FAQ would be helpful

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.

It depends if alternative systems for other functions (HR / Payroll) have expenses functionality included as a supplementary service. If they’re part of a total system then having a separate system for expenses when another system provides the functionality (even if mildly less efficient, etc) then it wouldn’t be viable

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

Based on what I have used it for, it was very easy to use and navigate. The approval process was already setup on the back end so there was no confusion on my end. Notifications were sent to my email based on status which made it helpful to understand where an expense was in the process.

Incentivized

We have not had any outages.

it is always available when I need it

Incentivized

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.

Some times image uploads can be slow and you have to alter the image resolution to increase the speed

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

The support for the initial setup was great, but since then we have only had to contact support once when we had problems uploading credit card files. The help we received at this time was not good and we ended up trying various things until we resolved the problem ourselves. The online support tutorials are good, but searching for a specific issue is difficult.

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

All went well.

Incentivized

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 was difficult to train multiple people via video, as they learned at different speeds, and most of the user champions were not as capable with systems and finance processes as our dept.

Incentivized

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

As long as you have people that are fully aware of the setup steps to get users into the software then I would see no issues arising for any company.

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

The ease of use of the platform has been the biggest benefit of this system. We didn't need to provide any structured training to our staff, we just sent out the link and people were able to intuitively use the platform. Other competitors were harder to navigate and to use.

Incentivized

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

because as the business has grown to has the user base

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

• Easy integration with your existing finance / accounting software.
• Lot of time is being saved in maintaining records and now going completely online.
• Love the option of Scan receipts with Google-vision-powered optical character. This also resulted in less use of paper in our office.

Incentivized