NetSuite vs. Financial Force/Salesforce? Positive and negative experiences? Trying to make a decision.
NetSuite vs SalesForce
Answers
Fast growing company, basically doubling each year, maintaining books for multiple companies in multiple countries in
We were evaluating NS vs FF last year
At each turn, it seemed that NS was the more mature product.
Although our sales team lives and breathes SalesForce, and the 'seamless' integration would be great, we didn't feel that FF was quite there in terms of our needs.
From what I recall,the main differentiation for us was the flexibility on how NS handled international consolidation.
With multiple subsidiaries in multiple countries, in multiple currencies, it just didn't seem like FF could handle it.
We also got the feeling that FF was a pet project of the SF team, whereas NS was in it to win it. Didn't help that the FF sales person never followed up when NS sent their sales exec and sales director to our office.
We signed in Dec, started implementation in Mid Jan/Feb, and aimed for May go live. Ended up with a June 1 go-live.
Having gone thru 2 month ends, still some things to tighten up, but happy overall.
In the coming months, looking to integrate fully with Salesforce some of our other products.
Negatives-
certain reports, you will need to custom build
inter-company transactions need some fine tuning
Overall pretty happy with NS.
Thanks Michael. Is there a reason you did not just use the NS CRM portion of the suite? We use Salesforce and QB Enterprise Edition right now and would like to consolidate all into one "suite".
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We didnt even consider using NS CRM mainly because everyone and their mom on our team was on SF. Would've been a Sisyphean task to migrate SF to NS CRM.
We took a quick look at QB Enterprise early on, but it seemed the install would have been just another bandaid solution that "could' integrate with our systems, but would likely end up being stand alone. I have not had good experiences with 'box' products like Navision/Dynamics, Great Plains. QB Enterprise came off just as clunky.
Michael sums up my impression of Financial Force from when I looked at it a few years ago. The product was added via acquisition and used to be a cloud version of Coda if I am not mistaken. Didn't seem a fully mature offering though it might have evolved further and be worth a look now.
FF was an issue for us as it related to monthly billings and various types of billings in a media company. I was (at the time) a big fan of SF, but the bolt on billing portion (we maintained our QB G/L) turned out to be quite a mess and an integration nightmare.
FF = a good CRM with an OK ERP build around it. NS = a good ERP with a good ERP integrated into it. If you want more than a small step-up from QB, you should go NS and convince a thought-leader on sales team to adopt NS CRM. (FF does a great job
Hi Michael. It's not an either/or situation. NetSuite ERP co-existing with SaleForce CRM is extremely common with software companies. There are several "out of the box" integration options available.
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