NetSuite OpenAir is a cloud-based Professional Service Automation (PSA) product which includes capabilities around project management, resource management, project accounting, etc.
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Webexpenses
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Webexpenses is a global provider of spend management solutions, combining integrated Expense Cards with cloud-based software for businesses of all sizes across 70+ countries. Serving industries such as retail, finance, technology, construction, and not-for-profit, Webexpenses gives businesses control over company spending by automating processes, proactively enforcing policies, and controlling costs. Features The Webexpenses…
OpenAir accurately reflects changes in real-time as well as lends itself to see where a draw is at, when payment is expected and what percentage of the contract has been billed or approved to date. This helps with project billing and tracking as well as cash flow. Quickbooks …
I wasn't involved in the initial purchase decision so I don't know what else we evaluated, but I imagine that we selected OA because we selected NetSuite and OA integrated well with it (same product family). We've been hearing a lot of good things with Mavenlink and will likely …
Previously we used a custom application running on top of Oracle ERP. One of the reasons we chose OpenAIR was because it was covering our requirements for time tracking and project/resource management, much better than the custom app. In addition we got other features like: …
Netsuite is a better and more scaleable solution for our agency as we have grown from just a few employees in 2001 to nearly 100 employees today. Netsuite helps us track expenses, time reporting, getting approvals on large purchases, project management from a personnel …
Our team found that OpenAir has better, increased functionality than other project management programs. Instead of using multiple softwares for time tracking, expense reports and project management, OpenAir combines all three into one. Using one tool instead of three saves us …
It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the …
We were handling concurrent project in multiple counties with multiple currencies. Netsuite handles multicurrency well. This was essential for our global operations. Because of this we chose OpenAir over Clarizen.
We came from a QuickArrow envirnoment, so going to OpenAir was the path of least resistance and it hit all the requirements. We looked at Financial Force and Changepoint. Financial Force was very intriguing because of the Salesforce platform, but not all our users are on …
Microsoft Project Server was a very complex solution and often unflexible. We needed something less complex but with power and chose OpenAir.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
I was not on the selection team that chose OpenAir. However, as I mentioned in my previous comments, I feel that OpenAir is a great stand alone PSA solution. For OpenSymmetry, we outgrew OpenAir and needed a solution that seemlessly integrated with Salesforce.com CRM data. …
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
I have evaluated Clarity, ConnectWise, SAP, and Tenrox solutions. From my perspective, judging against our internal have-to-have and nice-to-have criteria, they do not offer the level of flexibility and detail our organization needed to continue to support our current service …
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
OpenAir was the most complete solution and was strong in all areas.
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose OpenAir PSA
Oracle PAC professional services automation tool.
SAP PSA product
Webexpenses
Verified User
Anonymous
Chose Webexpenses
this is the only apps we used for the same purpose
Webexpenses is easier to use and understand to me and my colleagues. you literally can just look at the page and you can see the hwole graph of everything and the pie chart that is displayed so that you dont have to figure it out yourself
I used an internal programme in CBRE Ireland and it was not user friendly and you'd have to input the same information over and over for every expense added.
The biggest difference between Webexpenses and Concur honestly lie in the simplicity of what is needed from the employee and their expenses. Concur asks for a lot of itemization sometimes and may even have to import other receipts and invoices that are spent by the employee and …
The ease of use of the platform has been the biggest benefit of this system. We didn't need to provide any structured training to our staff, we just sent out the link and people were able to intuitively use the platform. Other competitors were harder to navigate and to use.
I much prefer Web Expenses to Concur. Although one functionality that Concur had, a user could email their receipts from the registered user email to Concur then these receipts would be available for the user add to their expense claim.
I would only recommend OpenAir if you are a company of 100+ with complex business processes and have a need to integrate into multiple external systems. I think most project managers find it cumbersome and irritating until they are trained on what not to use. It needs a more simplistic obvious approach rather than having every feature exposed all at once.
Really suits me well for making mileage claims, the map works well and it has an accurate log of addresses. Very handy and easy to be able to add any necessary receipts. Could be a good idea to include live road closures? but I understand that's quite tricky to do. Really easy to be able to move routes when you have gone a different way than recommended.
We had a specific process down pat with QuickArrow and wanted similar functionality. It gave us that and more.
It has a lot more reporting functionality than QuickArrow. There are hundreds of options for layout, what is reported, etc. I haven’t played too much with those reports yet. We more or less just replicated reports I had in QuickArrow. We needed the professional services/transition team at NetSuite to help me. There are too many options at this point. I imagine we won’t use all of those reports. Quick Arrow had a lot less.
Mobile Capabilities – There wasn’t a mobile concept for QuickArrow. OpenAir has been beneficial for iPhone users for time sheet submissions. There is no app for Droid users yet. There are not a lot of users out there, who really know how to use it yet. Managers are not using the app for dashboards/reporting, etc. The field has been pretty quiet but they do really like the mobile app feature. They like not having to go to laptop to enter their time. That’s all we require of them – just time entry. We ran into some glitches - some of the time sheets submitted via iPhone did not get to the tool itself. That happened in one instance. I made QA aware of it. I am not sure what the resolution turned out to be.
The UI of many parts of the system is really poorly designed. Inputting and updating forecasts is a very time-consuming and difficult process for our PMs and it doesn't allow any type of upload from a spreadsheet (which might be easiest in absence of a decent UI).
I have extensive experience with the reporting piece of OA and have a list of notes and improvements. The entire module is very inflexible at least pieces of it are not intuitive. Easy example: If you create a custom calc with a filter on Project Type to only include hours from our customer projects (Impl and MS), but then create a report with a filter to only show hours from MS, that custom calc won't work properly. The filter logic is unable to handle multiple filters on the same field.
Specific example of a ticket we've filed but not heard back on: When you close a project, any remaining forecasts from that project remain active and show as "committed hours" against those individuals which doesn't make sense on projects that are closed. Why would you not give an option to delete any remaining forecasts when closing a project as default behavior?
When you click add receipts after putting the details of your expense, you get the impression that you have done something incorrect from the prompt that you receive
Two options for adding receipts can confuse people when training them on how to use
We plan to continue our use of NetSuite OpenAir for the reasons cited already. Outside factors, behond our control, would be the only reason we would not renew -- such as an executive mandate to use the same platform going forward. If such were to happen, our Services processes would need to be revamped, as other PSA solutions do not support our current have-to-have criteria.
It depends if alternative systems for other functions (HR / Payroll) have expenses functionality included as a supplementary service. If they’re part of a total system then having a separate system for expenses when another system provides the functionality (even if mildly less efficient, etc) then it wouldn’t be viable
In this day and age I should not have to read a manual to understand a product. It should be intuitive to administrate and perform basic tasks. It feels like a ton of intelligence was poured into making OpenAir feature rich but no where near as much attention was given to the user experience.
Based on what I have used it for, it was very easy to use and navigate. The approval process was already setup on the back end so there was no confusion on my end. Notifications were sent to my email based on status which made it helpful to understand where an expense was in the process.
As an admin, I've had more contact with OA support than most. I've found their response to tickets typically timely and helpful, however many of the responses to tickets are "we will file an enhancement request" and then I never hear about it again. So not terrible, but not a very fulfilling experience.
The support for the initial setup was great, but since then we have only had to contact support once when we had problems uploading credit card files. The help we received at this time was not good and we ended up trying various things until we resolved the problem ourselves. The online support tutorials are good, but searching for a specific issue is difficult.
Very knowledgeable and able to articulate how other customers configured the solution to meet their needs as well as the best practices they recommended.
We did a 3 day online remote course back in April. NetSuite prefers training to occur before migration. We went over the functionality of tool and three months later we migrated. Personally, I didn’t find it that beneficial. Certain parts of it were beneficial as they applied to me – talked a lot about invoicing capabilities that didn’t apply to me. They also have knowledge base / e-learning assets, but I haven’t referred to them
It was difficult to train multiple people via video, as they learned at different speeds, and most of the user champions were not as capable with systems and finance processes as our dept.
It went fine. Everything came over the way we wanted. In addition to migrating the current projects we wanted to migrate historical data – did that seamlessly. The finished product looked pretty good – just needed to tweak – and they helped us with that
It was our goal to be on a single vendor solution for all aspects of our business: CRM, Project Management, and Finance. By choosing NetSuite with OpenAir PSA, we were able to eliminate the need for three other vendor solutions that required external integration among the disparate systems (Salesforce.com for CRM, MS Project Server for Project Management, and MS Dynamics for finance).
The ease of use of the platform has been the biggest benefit of this system. We didn't need to provide any structured training to our staff, we just sent out the link and people were able to intuitively use the platform. Other competitors were harder to navigate and to use.
