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!

Excellent construction accounting software

Our experience with Spectrum has been good over the 6 years we are using the software.

Pros

This software does a good job of integrating our construction operations. We do not use the project management part of it though. We do a lot of job costing for our projects.

Cons

I think the inventory module should be modernized and brought up to current standards. It is not very easy to use.

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.

APM Review - Spectrum & Viewpoint

Overall a solid product that I use on a daily basis. It gets the job done and I would recommend to others.

Pros

I like that there are a ton of automated functions. Instead of the old spreadsheets, you can generate reports straight from the system very quickly. I use Viewpoint for submittals and RFI's that's about it. It too has many functions within the system. Good for storing public documents for subs to access.

Cons

It's still a work in progress in my mind. Some times weird glitches occur and things just don't make sense. Sometimes it seems like there are almost too many functions. Ease of use could be simplified.

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.