I am the administrator for Spectrum in our company and overall the Experience has been very good!

Ease of administration and our accounting team rarely has any issues with the software

Pros

The support team is amazing. They are extremely helpful and are good at fixing the annoying bugs and getting to the root causes of our problems. The accounting and hr side of the software works extremely well and I have very few if any complaints or issues that I have to fix or call support for.

Cons

The project manangement side of the software was never really completed so its less than impressive. But I think on the positive side since Viewpoint has purchased Spectrum I think that integrating it with their Team software will make a huge difference in this section!

2 years in and we're still learning.

We've found errors in the software. When we reached out to Spectrum to ask for a fix we were told it was our own fault, asked us to pay for the fix, passed around, then finally Spectrum said it was their fault and would begin to fix. No timeline was given however. We need better customer service or IT turnaround times. It is incredibly frustrating to reach out with an issue, or suggest a much needed feature, with little or no response.

Pros

Document imaging is great. We also enjoy the invoice approval feature. Took us a while to implement and learn the system (well, we're still learning).

Cons

Payroll adjustments we'd like to do behind-the-scenes and not on a paycheque are a nightmare. The inability to track the purchaser of AP invoices. We use a user-defined field, but it does not link to the payroll module. Definitely not as user friendly as we would have liked (we came from Quickbooks though). The pricing module sucks. We need to pay for amount of users at one time (as some users access maybe once a week at most), not for named users.

Spectrum - Great features but could be better

Pros

Document imaging is truly built inside the software. The image storage was built inside every module for anything you want to scan. All of our AP (invoices, vendor contracts, Insurance Certs), AR (invoice supporting documents, MSA's), equipment files (titles, registrations), etc. were stored electronically and very easy to review. When approving AP, right inside the pre-check register I could review an electronic copy of any invoice making approval on the road very simple. There were also reports that could be run telling you when contracts were to expire, registrations were due, etc. The bottom line is that the designers not only listened to what the end users wanted, they also spent a lot of time making sure they designed it to make it easy for everyone. There are also a lot of user designed fields that allow you to customize things to fit your needs.

Cons

We had problems keeping the TB in balance. At least every three months, we had a transaction that only posted 1/2 of the entry, so when we ran a trial balance, it was out of balance (and the rebuild utilities wouldn't fix it), we then had to spend hours researching witch entry didn't post correctly, figure out the other side of the entry and then pay someone with backdoor access to recreate the missing entries. When we called Dexter and Chaney's support team, they had no answers as to why it happened; they would just help us figure out how to fix it (charged per hour). The financial report writer needs a lot of work. They do not support any of the better 3rd party systems like FRx, F-9, Hyperion, etc. Therefore, there was a lot of dumping to Excel and re-keying things into formats we could use. There was also zero drill-down capability. If you ran a TB and questioned what was in the line item, you had to run a detailed TB to see the detail. Then, if it came from another sub-ledger you had to run a report there to see the source document. Our implementation consultant was not very good; her training seemed poor and her knowledge of the workings of Spectrum were great, but she had no experience with the every day use of it, so I frequently pushed back on how it would work in the real world. Eventually she would concede that it would work better the way I proposed.

Great product has some flaws but nothing we were not able to work around.

It's been a great product that we've used for the last 9 years.

Pros

The way that as technology changes they system is updated to match.

Cons

Vacation accrual system is not what I'd like it to be. I have to do my own spreadsheet to get it to work properly.

Construction Software

I am a project accountant and have been a Spectrum user since 1996 when it was called ForeFront and this is the only construction software I've used. Overall I find the software easy to use. I've participated in training led by Spectrum trainers and their help and advise is invaluable. The ability to export data in different file types for analysis - exporting to excel file, data only is one I use regularly. We're also lucky to have an IT software support specialist with extensive Spectrum background who is able to provide SQL reports for those times when the standard reports and exports don't give us enough flexibility with the data for analysis.

Pros

Most processes in Spectrum are intuitive for the user.

Cons

As a long time user of Spectrum, we have a heavily customized Job Cost Report. It's becoming more difficult to accommodate our custom needs as new versions are released.