Esker

reporting down to the individual field level helps gauge cost to serve

Needed lots of customization to fit our equally heavily customized ERP. Not really esker’s fault but something to keep in mind if your ERP is not out of the box.

EskerAP appears to have a great deal of functionality, particularly with 3-way match and setting up autopay. The entire suite most likely gels quite well together.

The Esker implementation team are helpful and well organized and keep us on task.

The mapping documentation is horrific at best. The FFD documents rarely list or match required elements, which are in other "sample" worksheets sheets that contain CSV fields that are incredibly difficult to read and parse. If we use the sample sheets, we receive missing element errors, use the FFD and receive more/different missing element errors. Use all fields from both documents and receive errors that we are sending fields that do not exist. Incredibly frustrating!

The technology is somewhat outdated. They do not accept direct XML or JSON formatted files, so all data must be converted to CSV, which requires heavy manipulation to strip commas, etc..

Then jobs and programs must be written to extract, insert a CSV string for the header fields, convert the extracted data to CSV , move to a queue and send all files once per hour. Tables such as Vendor data, GL Accounts, Tax Rates, Payment Terms, etc., should not need refreshed 10-12 times per day.

There is also no option to set exchange rates by vendor. In our case one division orders and pays foreign vendors in their currency, and our other division orders in foreign currency, but pays in USD.

I like that the system can be taught to recognize the fields you need. The reporting function is a breeze to set up.

The only drawback is that it can't read handwritten orders, we don't get that many so it is not a big issue.