We use the product primarily to track our finances. We use it for payables and financial statements. We create purchase orders and projects, pay invoices, and all that fun stuff. So, as with most of your users, we were on Sage, and Sage blew up because we were overusing it, so it addressed our ability to move on to a much more stable platform as well as the fact that it addressed the self-service aspect of the financial world, allowing our different communities because we've got communities all over the state of Florida. They're all very much independent, although they all roll up into us, and so it allows the communities to have much more control over what they do, at least financially, where things are coded and so on. This allows us to be more accurate in our reporting.
Pros
It truly allows our communities to really code their own invoices, at least by the way of creating purchase orders first. Many of our people have never used purchase orders before, and so it's been a bit of a challenge training them, but it's a pretty darn easy product to use Acumatica that is, and as long as our folks understand the different GL codes and so on and so forth, they can do just that and they provide us with everything we need in order to fold them up into our financial statements. I think the project module is also very easy to use, and because of who we are and what we do, we do a ton of construction work, both in the way of new units and refurbishing old units and all of that. And so the project module helps us a lot with control of finances and expenditures and so on and so forth. And I could probably talk for four more hours, but you've probably heard enough.
Cons
I think where we've experienced the biggest weakness is with the training on how to use Acumatica. Our people, many hundreds of them simply pointed at different videos and things and said, learn it. And I don't know if we're the average or not, but our people have struggled with learning all the different pieces and parts of it, and so that's been a bit of a challenge. I know that Acumatica has a lot of partners that consult with companies like us. We use one of them, and they've helped us a lot because they kind of bridge that gap, which is good. But I'd like to see Acumatica take a bigger role in that training and just be more available to answer questions and things.
Likelihood to Recommend
Scenarios within our own business or scenarios out there in the world. Well, again, for us, construction, we do a lot of construction. We have a division that does construction. We own so many different kinds of living facilities. We have life plan facilities and rental facilities. We have something for almost everybody who wants to retire, but we have to keep those units up to code. We have to keep them clean, nice, and new. We have to make them very, very livable and beyond. And so we're constantly working on doing refurbs, and when somebody moves out, we have to do a quick unit turn, meaning we've got to get it ready again for a new resident as quickly as humanly possible so that we can preserve our cash flow and so on and so forth. So the project tracking mechanism that Acumatica has is really a great way of allowing the construction vision to create that project, lay out the task, lay out the cost coding, lay out the budgets, and then track each and every piece of it along the way, making sure that we stick to our budget and so on and so forth. So that's been a big help. Again, the self-service coding for our communities has been a big help because they can put things where they need to. They don't always do it right, but it's the way of the world, I guess. So I guess that's a good start.
We use it for all of our accounting. We do the bookkeeping for 14 different entities and ministries primarily for accounting, managing church receipts, getting funds to missionaries, and that type of work. It does core accounting extremely well. It provides reporting and integration with some other modules, one that we had written for the project or for the system, and it just allows us to integrate the ministries with the accounting, and the reporting with the unlimited users. It's been a great benefit to our organization and contributing information on budgets and where people are in their ministries.
Pros
It processes our invoices, and our accounts payable invoices incredibly quickly. The AI feature with the reading saves a lot of keen time. The reporting to our users, which are throughout the state and remote, to be able for them to come in and check how much of their budget is remaining to help them manage their budgets is extremely important as we have over 300 different budget centers.
Cons
The payroll module can occasionally be a little clunky and is not as easily modified for clergy payroll, which is important probably only to us, but the system is a little bit clunky in trying to get us, give us the ability to set those clergy up easily with their housing exclusions and their housing allowances and the unique aspects of being a clergy person.
Likelihood to Recommend
It is very well suited, I think for nonprofits in general. It has the ability, through its sub-accounts, to track very detailed, broken, segmented reporting, which is just above anything I've seen in other packages. The ease of use I bring new employees on and they're functioning within a day. Very user-friendly, very just a nicely designed package. I think the payroll module could use a little bit of work and for the out-of-box reporting, you have to invest in making some custom reports at the start because the out of box ones are not very pretty.
VU
Verified User
C-Level Executive in Finance and Accounting (Religious Institutions company, 51-200 employees)
We use it for financials, we run through accounts receivable, accounts payable, financial reporting, intercompany transactions, and all of that. We don't use it for payroll. We use one of Acumatica's preferred partners for that and go ahead and journal that in. But yeah, it works great for us.
Pros
It does everything pretty well, in my opinion. And from a financial standpoint, as I said, we're a nonprofit. We have several different companies that do different things. We have a foundation that provides dental services for the needy. We have the Colorado Dental Association, which is our main membership association. We have a couple of political PACS, so kind of the gamut of the nonprofit world.
Cons
Well, it could be in some cases a little bit more user-friendly. We've run into a situation recently where in pulling in transactions made through our website, we have a situation where if people buy additional items all at once, they might get a discount and we don't know what to do with it. So that's something I'll be investigating how to deal with that and how to be able to account for that correctly.
Likelihood to Recommend
I can't really think of something where it's less appropriate due to the nature of our business, but one of the things I really like about Acumatica is it does have internal controls that are a part of the program, so that makes it really easy for me and for other users to do things correctly and to not get us into kind of a difficult situation. It also makes our auditors extremely happy.
VU
Verified User
Executive in Finance and Accounting (Non-profit Organization Management company, 1-10 employees)
Scope of our use case is fairly small, we have one location, 25 employees, and do about 15 million in sales per year. We use Acumatica for the whole scope of our business, from inventory, to AR/AP, to order fulfillment, and it works well.
Pros
Live data sync
Purchase order organization
Managing 40k+ different accounts
Cons
Performance. Sometimes it feels like it takes few seconds in between every step in a process, if that could be shortened, my efficiency would be vastly improved.
Ability to customize and enter data at any screen. Often you can view data one place, but you have to open something up deeper to actually change it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Acumatica seems very well suited to the needs of a business of our size. It gets (almost) the whole flow of our business in one place, and allows for live collaboration across all our departments. It probably wouldn't be appropriate for a business below a certain threshold in size. Also, it seems like the WMS features are not quite there yet. We use a Manhattan Scale product for that, but we would love it if we didn't have to deal with the interfacing between the two systems.
We are early in our implementation and using Acumatica for our financial reporting. We are moving from two antiquated financial platforms to one. We have also implemented the POS platform and run three e-commerce websites
Pros
Dashboards
Streamlined work flow
Cons
Understanding more the nuances of the NFP customers
POS e-commerce solutions
Likelihood to Recommend
I would ensure that NFP colleagues complete more research before engaging. We moved quickly due to antiquated systems and in hindsight, should have vetted a bit more.
