FinancialForce Software

Over complex software supplied by an unhelpful vendor.

Pros

It is highly configurable and provided it meets your requirements and when it is finally configured and set up it works okay.

Cons

It is incredibly complex and entails significant learning and development time to configure it. High on-going costs for maintaining and evolving the product in line with the business, entailing the support of a significant in-house IT team. Not suitable for SMEs and organisations of less than 100 staff or T/O of over $50m. The sales team from Financial Force understated the complexity of set up and learning time and over promised on suitability and functionality. The support team at FF have proven to be unhelpful and difficult and are only interested in selling more consulting time. Issues in integrating with Microsoft.

We are implementing this product and whatever I have seen so far it works well

Pros

good user interface, Intuitive to use

Cons

Haven't observed anything bad

Advice to Others

Do review the product and watch the Demo

Likes Best

We have been able to go paperless with our AP and journal entry processes, which provides good efficiency any time a question comes up.

Likes Least

It honestly falls down on the most basic accounting function, however - reporting on the General Ledger. The important thing to realize here is they built this onto the SalesForce architecture. That system considers 'accounts' or customers, the key data object. General ledger accounts, aren't the key object. So that materializes in a lot of ways. The main one: there is literally not a stock screen or report where you can query the CURRENT year to date balance of a general ledger account. You especially cannot do it while showing transactions to date. It sounds crazy, but I challenge you to force the sales technician to show you the out of the box screen where they can say "what's the current balance of computer equipment" and have it return what the transactions are so far this month, and what the balance is at this moment. They'll show you the transactions. They'll show you the last closed balance. But they will not show you the current balance. That has to really tell you something about this system.

Recommendations

Don't assume anything. Take the very most basic functions you do, and just have the vendor show it to you. Pay attention while they do so.

Likes Best

The SCM Module of FinancialForce is fantastic for organizations looking for a plug in to Salesforce that can be customized but also has a lot of fantastic out of the box features. Our company went from using Quickbooks which provided very little if any controls and reporting to using the SCM product which allows you to use the same functionality for permissions, page layouts and reporting as you get in the native Salesforce application. The product links seamlessly into your existing organization and allows you to take Opportunities in Salesforce and create Quotes to your customers, sales orders from the quotes, purchase orders to your vendors and invoices to your clients. You can report at the line item level on all of these objects which gives you excellent visibility and control into the day to day operations of your business. There is also an inventory functionality that can assist with inventory management. We don't use this function but I've seen the capability and it's also fantastic.

Likes Least

Because SCM is still growing there are a lot of new releases of the product that have great fixes and updates. However, upgrading can be a long process because of the amount of testing you have to do. The more customized your environment is the longer the upgrades can take. We are running about 10 versions behind right now due to this. However, we realize this will level out over time and become much less time consuming as the product matures.

Recommendations

Make sure you're ready to invest in a knowledgeable in-house Salesforce administrator if you don't already have one. It's a must have if this product is going to be the center of your business operations. Also make sure you take time to get your customization's correct during the design phase of your implementation. Test everything including the processes you're trying to implement in your sandbox using multiple users and profiles. The functionality of this product is very powerful, but with that power comes a lot of administration. Every field, page layout, and role based access needs to be reviewed when this is implemented to ensure you're taking full advantage of the product.

Likes Best

My favorite quality of FinancialForce is the seamless integration with Salesforce.com. The platform operates much in the same way as Salesforce, so customizing and reporting were easy and quick to learn. This made the integration process go much smoother and I was able to train my team quickly on using the new financial system. Throughout my history of using FinancialForce, whenever I did encounter a questions or problem, opening a case was easy and the response time was within 1-2 days.
Another key functionality that I really enjoy with having both our operations and finances under one login, is the reduced amount of data entry. We have greatly reduced the amount of time spent on duplicate data entry by operating in the same system. FinancialForce also offers a lot of automated functionality, but one we use is the automated cash matching, which takes out another step of manual data entry. The operating efficiencies we've leveraged by implementing FinancialForce have paid for the cost and then some.

Likes Least

We are a small organization of 20 and we do not have a developer in-house. We struggled with the FinancialForce reporting app, as this requires some use of code and developer 'speak'. The standard Salesforce reporting allows for FinancialForce data as well, so we rely on this function more often, but when it comes to the standard P&L structure for our board, we needed a 'pretty' report, and this requires the FinancialForce reporting app. During our implementation we were promised by the implementation partner that they would write the reports for us, however this was never delivered. FinancialForce is working on rectifying the problem for us, but it will require some additional hours and financial resources on our end.

Recommendations

For my organization, about 90% of our operations are based out of Salesforce.com, so the choice to implement FinancialForce was almost a no-brainer. We are also a non-profit, so we always have to look at the cost, but again, the cost of implementing FinancialForce was not only competitive with other financial software, but the savings of operating efficiencies played into our decision making. A seamless implementation onto a new platform is key for reducing the impact on day-to-day operations, so remember that sometimes a lower estimate for implementation might end up costing you more in other areas of your business.

Likes Best

It's built on the Force.com platform. You can code your processes around FinancialForce using their APIs or by directly manipulating their database, so it gives you a lot of flexibility on how you develop around FinancialForce. It has a nice customer community portal where you can share ideas, log issues etc. Support is great, and if anything does crop up as an issue, they really work hard to get it fixed.

Likes Least

It was one of the first cloud-based accounting packages, and with that has come some architectural decisions that I think they've realized were a mistake, but with every release, they fix these. Invoices need to be hand-coded in Apex VisualForce; there is no "Invoice creation wizard", but FinancialForce is happy to do this for you. When you create an invoice from an opportunity, FinancialForce assumes that you want to invoice every line on the opportunity. This isn't the case sometimes. You can delete the lines off the invoice, but then it becomes hard to see which lines have been invoiced and which haven't. You can't invoice multiple opportunities at one time. That said, we have resolved them all by using custom Apex code. Trying to fit FinancialForce into a developer org is tricky, due to the amount of configuration data that is required.

Recommendations

Watch out if you need to use Reporting Balances; it does use a lot of storage data in Salesforce. Make sure you know your financial processes and the reports that you need to create from the data. A good idea is to do a parallel run using your existing finance system and FinancialForce to iron out any kinks.