There are few decisions that have such a significant enterprise-wide impact on your architecture or engineering (A/E) firm as selecting a financial management software application.
For starters, there can be huge dollars are on the line with this investment…and that is before you consider lost time spent on research, training, and other efforts. Make the wrong choice and the impacts on your firm can be lost revenue, lost profits, or worse.
Of course, you try to do your homework to make an informed decision. Is this the right application for our firm? How does the support compare to other applications? How easy is it to switch from or to another application? But, it can seem difficult to get candid and objective data on these and many other questions during your research. Salespeople will have their agenda and there is no telling what the motive is of feedback that you find in various forums and such.
The good news is that you aren’t the first one to go down this road. There is a way to gather the lessons learned and unvarnished feedback from others who’ve gone ahead of you? PSMJ has recently released its 2018 A/E Financial Management Software Study, which presents the opinions of 387 firms on the strengths and weaknesses of leading financial management platforms in meeting the specific needs of the A/E industry. The report wraps up with a question that rates from 1 to 4 how likely firms are to recommend their software to others.
How Training and Support Stacks Up
For instance, we ask firms to rate the quality of training and support provided by from their accounting software vendor on a scale of 1 (terrible) to 5 (excellent), we find that almost all firms report that it is good to very good. The average ratings for all financial management applications by all firm sizes range from 2.4 to 3.9, with BQE ArchiOffice scoring the lowest rating (2.4) among small firms, while ClearView InFocus scores the highest rating (3.9) among large firms. Meanwhile, ClearView InFocus averages the highest rating among midsize firms (3.7) (see chart right).
Also covered in this report are firms’ views on how well each tool provides financial managers, principals, and project managers with the information they need, and how easy it is to access this information. In addition, firms voice their opinions on the ease of conversion from prior software, and how well their software integrates with other applications, as well as supports business-intelligence, human resource (HR), and marketing functions. Here, we rate individual responses from a low of 1 to a high of 3, 4, or 5, depending on the question, and calculate the average rating to provide the final score.
Software Likes and Dislikes
We also ask participants to share what they like best and what they dislike most about their accounting software. This section features open responses, organized by firm size and then financial management software, and includes comments on ease of use, reporting capabilities, and a slew of other examples of honest review.
The report concludes with a summary chart of all responses organized by firm size and financial management application. We summarize how firms rate their financial management software across all of the factors covered in this survey—translating numerical ratings or percentages into ratings of: Good, Fair, or Poor.
PSMJ’s A/E Financial Management Software Study taps into nearly 400 A/E firm leaders to boil down their thoughts on the most popular financial management software applications used by A/E firms today, including: Deltek Vision, Deltek (Axium) Ajera, BQE BillQuick. This report is available as a free download to PSMJ newsletter subscribers.
PSMJ’s A/E Financial Management Software Study is also available for purchase.
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