Certinia ERP Cloud automates financial management on the Salesforce platform. The customer-centric ERP software includes a general ledger, automated billing processes, and financial intelligence.
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M1
Score 7.1 out of 10
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M1, from ECI Software Solutions headquartered in Ft. Worth, is an all-in-one manufacturing ERP software solution, built for small and medium-sized discrete manufacturers.
FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing has more features, more useability, and manages higher numbers of customers. The systems I have used in the past are easier to navigate but couldn't handle this number of customers.
Infinitely better. We are much happier with FinancialForce ERP rather than Netsuite. This allows us so much more flexibility and growth potential. There is a good chance we will use other functionality of FinancialForce in the future to stay within the same ecosystem. We …
FFA is built on the SalesForce platform, giving us one source of data for our KPIs. Unlike Dynamics, FFA allows us to create custom reports and dashboards through which we can share financial results. We were able to better automate and streamline accounts payable using FFA. …
NetSuite is much better in that it can produce financial statements, has a subscription module, and is just as customizable as FinancialForce. If you have a midsized company, NetSuite may be better suited for your business needs. FinancialForce requires a lot of in-house …
Compared to other accounting software FinancialForce Accounting has its good and bad aspects but overall it is a good option. Reporting directly from FinancialForce Accounting can be difficult to do, but standard accounting tasks are straightforward and not time-consuming to …
The initial allure of FinancialForce Accounting was the fact that we were very happy with Salesforce.com and the ability to integrate FinancialForce Accounting with Salesforce.com easily (although it was time-consuming). But after analyzing its functionality it was also …
Outside CPA was strong proponent of Quickbooks and it was evaluated initially, but size of company, complexity of transactions, eventual move to Salesforce and need for multi-company and multicurrency ruled it out almost from the start. As the only accounting system built …
M1
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose M1
We replaced Open Systems with M1 7 years ago. Our Open Systems software seemed to be more user-friendly and was not overburdened by reports and processes that were not needed for daily functions.
M1 is light years ahead in overall cost and proficiency. It allows so much more control and flexibility as compared to its competitors. When choosing M1 we went through many demos and M1 was the only ERP that met our needs and still does. We also control our own data which is a …
M1 is better with the manufacturing side of software whereas Sage 100 is better at the financial side. Which is frustrating that M1 implementation people are not accountants, so they got us up and running but did not do a good job of making sure the GL accounts were setup …
Our customization requirements were not that high and based on a price/cost benefit M1 was the winner. SAP was considered but the upfront costs and challenging learning curve together with the lack of flexibility in the SAP HANA public cloud version made the M1 choice more …
M1 does a good job of being able to handle our requirements. Some of our assemblies and sub-assemblies require a significant amount of detail and different levels in order to complete - and M1 handles that. Some of the other products I've used, or implemented else where fall …
FFA is a good product if you want the ability to customize functionality and reporting. However, all the setup can be overwhelming if you are looking for an out-of-the-box solution. FFA is a great choice is you are already using Salesforce and want to report on KPIs directly from the source data. There are a lot of applications to help you feed data into the system or export it out in a usable format.
Implementation is by far the weakest link in the ECI/M1 process. Although the tool is powerful, the client is expected to drive the process of learning the tool, planning the meetings with consultants, identifying risks and making mitigation plans, etc. without any samples, guidance or assistance on the part of ECI. The tool is best suited to high volume, standard product manufacturers who build to inventory or to order without much variation. The shop floor routing and time tracking are straightforward if you can master the convoluted Unit Of Measure calculations. The tool is either hosted locally or accessed through Remote Desktop. Shop floor is web enabled but the main desktop for M1 is still a relay which makes connectivity a potential issue. Moving this platform to a truly web hosted environment would substantially improve connectivity and eliminate compatibility issues with Apple products
Manage inventory counts. Good precision on quantities in and out, through shipping, MI, MR, and receipts.
Job costing shows great details on labor, operations, and materials to be used. I wished that would do better in outside operations that would return, but we still think it is great.
Ability to track changes (changelog), showing all changes that had in a particular place. Such as where, when, and by whom a line item unit price was changed in a PO.
Link, traceability, keeping history. If done correctly, it is amazing to keep the history of a part/lot.
The amount of user rights/customization is unbelievable. It can be hard to set up in the beginning, but it is great that you can give some very specific access to a user, and it is not (in general) as a package.
Some of the functions are pretty detailed - and so they take a while to generate screens and pages in reports.
We actually use it for 2 companies we own - and it would be nice if the inter company communication was a little smoother. It's hard to share some data, and not everything is possible to be shared.
Customized reports need to backed up before any updates to M1 or they're lost. It seems M1 overwrites the report folders everytime you run an update - so you have to keep track of what you've changed in Crystal Reports and restore it.
The company has now converted its legacy, "home grown" operations system and built it on the force.com platform, and the integration between it and FinancialForce is deeply entrenched. No other application would be able to replicate this functionality, and the company will be able to scale and leverage the force.com platform as it grows.
Change management is always an issue, but the evidence of the application's usability is that both long-time employees (used to the legacy systems for many years) and newer employees have been able to learn the system and improve their business processes.
Because it would be helpful if ECI would provide better documentation, communication and workflows to understand how each field interacts within the system and how each of those touch other areas within M1. It would also be useful if ECI would provide prescheduled training for how to customize things with M1 through Design Studio
Unless the internet is completely unavailable - which has not happened yet - the application is always accessible. Since FinancialForce is built on the force.com platform, it's uptime is tied to Salesforce security and system performance standards
The response time for FinancialForce is exemplary. Immediate acknowledgement of the support request by automatically logging a case/ticket on the provider side, then less than 24-hour follow up by a support team member with specific questions, information or resolution for the issue.
Through its Xtra login website available to its customers, FinancialForce offers a complete set of online, video tutorials, training and documentation. Each tutorial is "bite-sized", meaning it imparts instructional, step-by-step information in 2-3 minute narrated videos. For a particular cycle or process, like invoices to payments for example, each tutorial builds on the last so that the user can get a complete picture of the steps and process in less than 10 minutes.
The company decided to run parallel for three months in order to soften the impact of the change from the legacy "system" - which users had been interfacing with for over a decade - to FinancialForce. While not recommended, this did provide time for the in-house "super user" team of 2 people to become completely familiar with the application, and thus provide hands-on training and be a resource for the users who would be processing the daily accounting transactions.
FinancialForce Subscription & Usage Billing has more features, more useability, and manages higher numbers of customers. The systems I have used in the past are easier to navigate but couldn't handle this number of customers.
Our customization requirements were not that high and based on a price/cost benefit M1 was the winner. SAP was considered but the upfront costs and challenging learning curve together with the lack of flexibility in the SAP HANA public cloud version made the M1 choice more natural. SAP Services is usually more expensive compared to M1.
We moved to a subscription business, and FinancialForce cannot facilitate it. After using FinancialForce for 4 years, we had to switch to NetSuite. We had a negative return on investment with all the resources we used to do in-house development in FnancialForce.
FinancialForce did not have a good way to match payments against invoices, and it was a very manual process. We spent a lot of human hours to get it done.
It was still relatively cheap, so for the 4 years that we used it, the actual cost of the product was what we could only afford at the time.
