new financial reporting system

Bigcheeze

I'm looking at replacing the financial reporting system / light weight ERP in an SME and wondering if any posters had encountered systems that would meet the following characteristics / criteria:

- 80% of the company's costs are employee related so the ability to track time to customers is important
- multi-currency suppliers, customers, banking
- international multi-company
- employee expense submission would be a nice to have.
- good / flexible reporting functionality rather than just P&L - B/S etc.
- although it's an SME, the company has a couple of international locations so I'm open to considering a cloud based solution.

jessup

A lot of clients that I deal with are very fond of SAP. Some of the smaller companies have started using "baby SAP" called Business 1.

http://www.sap.com/solutions/sme/index.epx

It might offer more than you need but you did say ERP rather than just an accounts package with some added bells and whistles.

EamonOSullivan

Looks like you have quite a job on your hands to control this without resorting to many spreadsheets.

Have you considered any of the practise management systems, which would help you track rmployee time and charge it out to customers?

We use Sages time recording system, we dont use the full functionality, but you can get all employees to enter their time, and you can invoice directly from the system. Also if the invoice is above or below the chargeable time, you get a report on write ups / write offs. It also allows you to monitor how much of employee time is being charged out etc.

However it doesn't have a nominal Ledger function attached so you would have to maintain a seperate system to keep those accounts.

Herbalist

Hi Bigcheeze,

One product that might be worth looking at would be Coretime. I think it will fit most of your criteria as it is multi currency and multi company. It will allow employees to enter their expenses and their time. These can then be billed against a client or project or entered as non billable time. It has significant reporting capability.

With regard to the banking side it will not look after this itself but there is the ability to link to an accounts package in order to look after the banking aspect the product. Coretime will link to Sage 50 for example. You can download a free trial of the product which may help you to see if it would meet your needs.

I am connected with the company.

bridster007

ERP systems are really only for manufacturing companies. ERP is a derivative term from MRP - ERP systems integrated discrete manuf and financial systems.
It would be an overkill for your business but some may be very modular based which may allow you eliminate all the manufacturing/inventory related modules.

donnacha

bridster007 wrote: »

ERP systems are really only for manufacturing companies.

I have to disagree with you here - I've been working for a SAP partner in Ireland for 7 years and only approximately 20% of our customers manufacture anything.

OP - if you are interested we implement the SME version of SAP - called Business All In one. Feel free to PM me and I'll send you on my work email.