FinancialForce Accounting Review

Pros

this software has helped my company significantly in our process to switch over from older software.

Cons

This software takes a lot more time to use although it may be worth it.

FinancialForce for small organization of 20 FTE

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Overall we've had a very positive experience with the SCM Module!

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

More than I need Human Capital Management Software

I would say if you are a small or medium business and you have no idea what an HR department or IT department looks like, then you need Vana Human Capital Management. If you have employees and you want to increase performance, this solution is complete. HR departments will thank you, you will save time and headaches. This made our performance reviews a dream. The social collaboration is new to us and has become the center of our corporate universe. you will be overwhelmed so just be warned the Quick Start Implementation will appeal to you, but I encourage you to just get the next level up so the team at VanaWorkforce.com will do all the work for you. Just get it. Oh yeah, since it is on force.com it makes integration with CRM and other force.com products a single click of the mouse and has single sign-on, super cool. Patrick.

Pros

The user interface is excellent. If you know Salesforce.com CRM then you will inherently know how to use Vana HCM. WOW! No training required. Great future vision product, it has more than I need to manage my team, recruit and track people, leave, benefits, compensation, performance and more. Even better I LOVE the Social Collaboration tool. It keeps my employees working and collaborating in the solution and not of facebook or twitter. Also love the collaboration on goals, initiatives, performance reviews and projects. Top it off the library was an added bonus, since I can store and share corporate documents and even education materials as part of the solution (free) and have my team collaborate with others on these and track it in the learning management. Overall: over the top! Thank you.

Cons

There is almost too much to learn. The overwhelm is consuming. I wish I had the ability to configure everything that is delivered. Knowing where to start was a bit daunting, thank goodness they did the first series of configurations to launch the product and provided me with an easy to use Getting Started Guide so my team could calm down and get started 1...2...3 Learning to use the system most effectively was a challenge, but I think we finally got it. It may have been more of a resistance to change, rather than a solution problem. It took a while to adopt it as a company, but we are all on the same page now and it ROCKS! The Social Org Chart was a bit of a challenge to set up, but easy to re-org and fix with a little help and is now AWESOME!

One of the best cloud-based accounting applications at the moment

Pros

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.

Cons

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.