Professional Services Cloud Reviews

Very easy to implement and start getting benefits near term.

Lots of options to weigh for set up and overall use. Easy to get bogged down on complicated areas that wont materialize or are minor parts of a business.

PSA is a critical backbone to conducting our business.

No issues or concerns to raise here....

It allows us to scale our business as needed and track our resources while also allowing us to bill/invoice.

Sometimes organizations are not all the same and therefore some of the out of the box solutions did not fit our use case and we have had to do some customizing.

Being built on Salesforce allows us the benefit of:
1. Customizing the application, screens, and processes as we evolve
2. Seamless integration with our opportunity/deal pipeline
3. Use of Salesforce reports and dashboards

We tried using the Conga add-on to generate invoices, but ended up reverting our previous process. The invoice generation design process is not built well.

After the initial setup process (albeit long and tedious), the platform seems to work pretty well. It is well designed and a huge improvement over our previous financial management system and has cut our month-end, year-end, and other periodic closing process times in half.

The system consistently slows down after a few days/weeks/months. Sometimes this is due to a FinancialForce upgrade, and sometimes it has been due to bad code written for us by our FF consultant. The process for getting these performance degradation resolved can take weeks, wasting dozens of hours of valuable time.

this software has helped my company significantly in our process to switch over from older software.

This software takes a lot more time to use although it may be worth it.

I love Salesforce, and they have hit the nail on the head yet again with this product. Imagine Salesforce for accounting.

I have no cons to report. This gets the job done and is easy to use. Subject to user error, so train employees diligently

The intuitiveness and user experience / page layouts are easy to understand and follow.

There are multiple ways to do multiple different things, and some ways can cause errors. The only way to know this is to test out different methods and seeing for yourself that the error arose. It would help if there were either:
- limitations on the number of ways one can perform a process, or
- more flags that notified a user that doing something in one way may not provide the desired outcome.

Example: placing a 'hold' on a resource when staffing a Resource Request
- the correct way to do it is to select the resource and then click 'Hold'
- there is another way to do it where one can go to the empty Resource field and populate it. The status of the RR will say "Held" and it will show that resource's name, but the resource will not actually be Held, and thus, will not show up in the Resource Planner.

Its built on Salesforce and is housed in the same system making it easy to keep everything in one place!

Some of the setup and customizations can be hard to find or find out how to configure.

It's very intuitive and helpful for my daily job.

There is not much bad I can say about Professional Services Cloud.

- Feature rich
- Forecasting
- Resource requests and management
- Project financial management
- Integrate-able and Configurable

- Expensive
- Lack of OOTB sophisticated doc gen capabilities
- High implementation cost

My favorite quality of FinancialForce is the seamless integration with Salesforce.com. The platform operates much in the same way as Salesforce, so customizing and reporting were easy and quick to learn. This made the integration process go much smoother and I was able to train my team quickly on using the new financial system. Throughout my history of using FinancialForce, whenever I did encounter a questions or problem, opening a case was easy and the response time was within 1-2 days.
Another key functionality that I really enjoy with having both our operations and finances under one login, is the reduced amount of data entry. We have greatly reduced the amount of time spent on duplicate data entry by operating in the same system. FinancialForce also offers a lot of automated functionality, but one we use is the automated cash matching, which takes out another step of manual data entry. The operating efficiencies we've leveraged by implementing FinancialForce have paid for the cost and then some.

We are a small organization of 20 and we do not have a developer in-house. We struggled with the FinancialForce reporting app, as this requires some use of code and developer 'speak'. The standard Salesforce reporting allows for FinancialForce data as well, so we rely on this function more often, but when it comes to the standard P&L structure for our board, we needed a 'pretty' report, and this requires the FinancialForce reporting app. During our implementation we were promised by the implementation partner that they would write the reports for us, however this was never delivered. FinancialForce is working on rectifying the problem for us, but it will require some additional hours and financial resources on our end.

The SCM Module of FinancialForce is fantastic for organizations looking for a plug in to Salesforce that can be customized but also has a lot of fantastic out of the box features. Our company went from using Quickbooks which provided very little if any controls and reporting to using the SCM product which allows you to use the same functionality for permissions, page layouts and reporting as you get in the native Salesforce application. The product links seamlessly into your existing organization and allows you to take Opportunities in Salesforce and create Quotes to your customers, sales orders from the quotes, purchase orders to your vendors and invoices to your clients. You can report at the line item level on all of these objects which gives you excellent visibility and control into the day to day operations of your business. There is also an inventory functionality that can assist with inventory management. We don't use this function but I've seen the capability and it's also fantastic.

Because SCM is still growing there are a lot of new releases of the product that have great fixes and updates. However, upgrading can be a long process because of the amount of testing you have to do. The more customized your environment is the longer the upgrades can take. We are running about 10 versions behind right now due to this. However, we realize this will level out over time and become much less time consuming as the product matures.

It is highly configurable and provided it meets your requirements and when it is finally configured and set up it works okay.

It is incredibly complex and entails significant learning and development time to configure it. High on-going costs for maintaining and evolving the product in line with the business, entailing the support of a significant in-house IT team. Not suitable for SMEs and organisations of less than 100 staff or T/O of over $50m. The sales team from Financial Force understated the complexity of set up and learning time and over promised on suitability and functionality. The support team at FF have proven to be unhelpful and difficult and are only interested in selling more consulting time. Issues in integrating with Microsoft.

The software is hard to use and dysfunctional, we were sold on the concept of it being integrated with Salesforce and struggled with the intergration every time we used the program. The common theme between salesforce and financial force while integrating and trying to use the platform was that is salesforce's issue you need to talk to them when it was a 95% an issue with financial force.

Customer service, financial force has a serious lack of empathy towards thier clients. they dont care if you have been with them for 5 years or 6 months they treat you like a number. the software is labour intensive and doesnt work well.

If you need an accounting package that integrates with Salesforce, this would be the best option. It does have most features your accounting and finance people need.

Our financial people constantly complain about the speed, has decreased efficiency as it takes longer to do tasks than previously in Quickbooks. Also, it has periodic slowdowns that has been determined to not be our network, but them. Admittedly this is mostly secondhand from our accounting and finance departments.

We have been able to go paperless with our AP and journal entry processes, which provides good efficiency any time a question comes up.

It honestly falls down on the most basic accounting function, however - reporting on the General Ledger. The important thing to realize here is they built this onto the SalesForce architecture. That system considers 'accounts' or customers, the key data object. General ledger accounts, aren't the key object. So that materializes in a lot of ways. The main one: there is literally not a stock screen or report where you can query the CURRENT year to date balance of a general ledger account. You especially cannot do it while showing transactions to date. It sounds crazy, but I challenge you to force the sales technician to show you the out of the box screen where they can say "what's the current balance of computer equipment" and have it return what the transactions are so far this month, and what the balance is at this moment. They'll show you the transactions. They'll show you the last closed balance. But they will not show you the current balance. That has to really tell you something about this system.

- online Access
- great performance even with big data
- cross company / multicompany mode

- no Country customization
- no links to local authorities (VAT, direct tax Returns)
- no natural support of multiple GAAPs per Company (e.g. local GAAP, IFRS)
- no usually fixed asset Register for financial fixed assets.

It's built on the Force.com platform. You can code your processes around FinancialForce using their APIs or by directly manipulating their database, so it gives you a lot of flexibility on how you develop around FinancialForce. It has a nice customer community portal where you can share ideas, log issues etc. Support is great, and if anything does crop up as an issue, they really work hard to get it fixed.

It was one of the first cloud-based accounting packages, and with that has come some architectural decisions that I think they've realized were a mistake, but with every release, they fix these. Invoices need to be hand-coded in Apex VisualForce; there is no "Invoice creation wizard", but FinancialForce is happy to do this for you. When you create an invoice from an opportunity, FinancialForce assumes that you want to invoice every line on the opportunity. This isn't the case sometimes. You can delete the lines off the invoice, but then it becomes hard to see which lines have been invoiced and which haven't. You can't invoice multiple opportunities at one time. That said, we have resolved them all by using custom Apex code. Trying to fit FinancialForce into a developer org is tricky, due to the amount of configuration data that is required.

The functionality is compatible with so many software/module combinations

The implementation process was quite long although I believe that was due to our internal working!