Review of High-End Accounting Systems -- 2006

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From the December 2006 Issue

This year’s group of high-end accounting packages represents some of the very best, most adaptable and customizable solutions available for mid-market companies requiring systems capable of growing alongside their own businesses. These products boast an extensive selection of integrated modules that go well beyond the standard accounting, distribution and manufacturing modules, combining rich feature sets with well designed, efficient and user-friendly interfaces. With infrastructure often as the only limitation, these systems scale to handle high-transaction volume environments and hundreds of users working across multiple locations. While each of the systems reviewed can be used for a variety of businesses, we have tried to identify the industries where these packages set themselves apart from their competition.

Over the last year, these high-end accounting systems have not only added features but have significantly improved the user experience by adding tighter integration to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Fixed Asset, Payroll and Human Resource Management systems. New powerful business intelligence tools and dashboards add to the experience by offering end users an almost infinite number of ways to easily view and analyze the enormous amounts of data contained inside these accounting systems.

As each of these products has matured, more third-party solutions have become available to provide complete robust vertical solutions for businesses that require specialized service management, rental, manufacturing, project accounting and job costing solutions. In addition, high-end features such as available to promise, soft and hard inventory allocations, deferred revenue tracking, vendor performance tracking, matching tolerances for purchase order receiving, multi-lingual screens, intercompany accounting and consolidations continue to set these systems apart from their mid-range peers.

All of the products reviewed here provide a variety of tools, including source code in some instances, which allow functionality to be extended through customization or integration with third-party applications. A few of the vendors offer programmatic access to the respective application’s business objects through Visual Basic. This powerful approach allows for customization or integration that is not invasive to the native programming code, provides some level of upgrade protection, and also ensures the integrity of data added to the database.

To provide consistency among the reviews, the following areas were evaluated for each package:
Modules/Scalability — This section breaks down the available modules as well as any other significant features that merit highlighting. This section also mentions new modules and enhancements that have recently been added.

Usability/User Experience & Security — This section evaluates the overall user experience in using the software, from the menus to transaction entry. A requirement for any system in this class is the ability to tailor workflow to meet a user’s needs and how that impacts the overall user experience. As expected, each of the systems uses some form of role-based security.

Extensibility — This section examines the availability of third-party vertical solutions and integration to solutions that extend the product’s base functionality to include payroll, human resource management, fixed assets, CRM, Point of Sale and other applications. All but one of the solutions reviewed has a moderate to extensive list of add-ons. While the quantity of available add-ons is certainly a plus, our evaluation also focuses on the quality of the integration with these additional modules.