Looking for recommendations on financial software stack
September 17, 2024
by a searcher from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in St. Louis, MO, USA
Looking for recommendations from operators on which financial tools you've had the most success with. Accounting, financial planning, procurement, inventory management, payroll, etc.
I operate a medical device company that buys components from various vendors and assembles products in house. We're thinking about upgrading Quickbooks to one of the more premium plans that includes some of these features, but wondering if there are other options that operators find more useful. Thanks!
from Northwestern University in Dallas, TX, USA
The differences were primarily on the manufacturing side.
I implemented Infor's Cloud Suite Industrial (aka Syteline) at one manufacturing company. Very robust, fully functional. There were quite a few hiccups after Go Live but that could have been due to set up errors and/or all the custom programming we did.
At another manufacturing company we put in Fishbowl's inventory module which included purchase orders, receiving, warehouse/inventory, accounts payable and sales orders. This company did not have part numbers, much less BOMs, when we started, so Fishbowl seemed like a basic next step. We were told by Fishbowl that we could run the Inventory module as a standalone and it did great for receiving in material and making warehouse moves, but there was no way to relieve inventory used in manufacturing. We learned that we needed to install the Manufacturing module to do this, but since we didn't have BOMs, cycle times, work centers, etc. we were a ways off from being able to use it. In the interim we used inventory adjustment functionality to remove material from inventory but it hampered our visibility to material usage, inventory accuracy, etc. Fishbowl only talks to QuickBooks and Xero out of the box and doesn't have its own built-in financial module.
I was involved with a Global Shop implementation that we ultimately abandoned due to GS software glitches. This was in###-###-#### They were in the midst of moving to a more modern database platform and the root of the glitches seemed to be that part of the program was running on the old database platform and new screens and modules were running on the new database platform and the two didn't always play nice together. I'm not sure where they are in this transition now.
in United States
I've mostly dealt with companies getting bought by private equity firms, and one of the first things we usually do post-acquisition is get them off QuickBooks to something more robust. I think NetSuite is a great product. Sage Intacct is ok, though not great. I've used Great Plains / Dynamics in the past, and it seemed fine as well. I've even used Xero for a small business and found it to be pretty good. SAP is good, but likely overkill for what you are doing.
I would recommend investigating NetSuite and maybe Dynamics if you can. The Campfire (noted above) seems pretty slick, though I've never heard of it. Jan's comments (about using specialized software) I think is a good one. You can use some of those products for the same tasks (e.g., I believe both Ramp, Expensify, and Bill.com all have options to do expense management) ... if they do, one thing I can definitely recommend is: the fewer products the better! If you can get it all in one, even if it costs more, may be worth it.
Good luck and happy to chat in more detail if it would be helpful!