Esker vs. Tropic

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Esker
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Esker is a global cloud platform built to unlock strategic value for finance and customer service professionals and strengthen collaboration between companies by automating the cash conversion cycle. Esker’s mission is to build a foundation that promotes positive-sum growth, increased productivity, improved employee engagement, and greater trust between organizations.N/A
Tropic
Score 9.4 out of 10
N/A
Tropic is a procurement intelligence platform that automatically finds ways to reduce and control costs. By combining procurement workflows, supplier management, and benchmark pricing data together in one place, Tropic brings visibility, control, and leverage to company spend.N/A
Pricing
EskerTropic
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
EskerTropic
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
EskerTropic
Best Alternatives
EskerTropic
Small Businesses
Square 9 Softworks
Square 9 Softworks
Score 9.1 out of 10

No answers on this topic

Medium-sized Companies
MSB Docs
MSB Docs
Score 9.4 out of 10
Freshservice
Freshservice
Score 8.8 out of 10
Enterprises
Tungsten Capture
Tungsten Capture
Score 8.0 out of 10
Freshservice
Freshservice
Score 8.8 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
EskerTropic
Likelihood to Recommend
10.0
(0 ratings)
9.5
(0 ratings)
Usability
5.5
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.9
(0 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
EskerTropic
Likelihood to Recommend
I would recommend Esker based on the automation of invoice sending - it is very nice to have a tool that not only stores all of the contact info, but sends the invoices out as well. The tracking feature is great to have to see if the submission was successful. I do think that overall it could be much more user-friendly, but once you know what you're doing, it is not hard software to use.
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Tropic is not ideal if you only have contracts below $5k. There isn't sufficient room to successfully negotiate those down. However, if you have sizable and or multi-year contracts, this is where they excel because they have a lot of real life data points to pull from. They are also tough negotiators. One of our reps owned an exhausting negotiation process with a data aggregator and saved us hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Pros
  • Everything is electronic and every manager receives an email each morning telling them how many invoices they need to approve.
  • It has completely removed paper form the Accounts payable process and automatically archives invoices for the mandatory period required by Inland Revenue.
  • For monthly reporting there is visibility over what has not yet been included in the accounts and staff can follow with the tardy managers.
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  • Contract negotiation
  • Contract visibility
  • Benchmarking
  • Current contract usage
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Cons
  • We can't enter credit memos in Esker. Need to enter in SAP and then link.
  • PO invoices that were trained to go into the PO bucket, route into the non-PO buckets.
  • Freight invoices that have had hundreds going into the non-PO bucket have a tendency to route to the PO-bucket because a PO number is referenced on page 7.
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  • Their platform could be improved a bit to do a better job of shadow IT tracking (licenses being used or expenses).
  • Lowering prices for folks who may only want their platform without negotiation services.
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Usability
Esker does everything that it promises to do, but it is very hard to figure out. I am a very tech-savvy person, but I needed extensive training to be able to use the basic functions of Esker. Once you know what you're doing, it's not too hard, but I don't understand why they couldn't make it easier to use.
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Support Rating
They have been very helpful and the online support site is awesome. They keep the site up to date with the latest changes and present challenges to keep learning the new updates to keep things entertaining. They are overall a great crew to work with
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Alternatives Considered
We investigated Readsoft early in our exploration of upgrade options. We were on Esker DeliveryWare, but the UI for Readsoft, at the time, seemed to be a little convoluted and geared towards exception handling and required tiered users. Also, Readsoft was more cost prohibitive and did not have a solution for our faxing. Though, as I understand it, they may have since found a solution for this issue
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We reviewed other provides for automated bill entry, but not for contract negotiation.
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Return on Investment
  • We now have reporting available down to the individual field level (changes, errors, etc) and can calculate cost to serve.
  • It replaced on-premise hardware with cloud SaaS that is more cost effective and risk adverse.
  • It is more intuitive; we can put new hires on order entry and experience less user errors. As a solution owner who fixes problems and answers questions, I don't find myself having to "think" about Esker and it has become a smaller part of my job now that end-users are more self-sufficient.
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  • They returned savings for us that was greater than the cost of their service.
  • The company has better hygiene in terms of being on top of our contracts - from negotiating terms that finance cares about to ensuring we don't let a contract auto-renew.
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ScreenShots