I'm looking for a better accounting solution for Xpedia's applications division. Going forward this will be a separate legal entity that I will lead. Our current software is Acumatica, which is a very feature rich ERP suite. We host it ourselves, but it is completely browser-based so I've become spoilt with having something that's always available from anywhere. The only problem with Acumatica is that it is complete overkill for our requirements. This means the processes are too cumbersome as we don't have dedicated staff who can specialize in a single discipline/module like debtors clerks etc. When you have the staff to use Acumatica properly I think it would be a fantastic product to use, but we're simply not there yet. It also means the software is a little pricey. The Xpedia Applications business has a headcount of 20 and annual turnover in the R5 000 000 to R10 000 000 range (that's roughly $500 000 to $1 000 000 in USD), so a full-blown ERP is a little bit out of our league.
So for part 1 I'm going to list requirements and hopefully get some additional ideas on this and from part 2 onwards I'll expand on our search, the products we've looked at and the process to evaluate and arrive (hopefully very shortly) at a conclusion.
Here's a list of features we need:
- Cloud-based, hosted by provider
- Easy to use. Everyone always says that, I know... But it must have a free trial so I can check it out first hand and see if I find it easy to use.
- Must support South African Rand (ZAR) as base currency for our business.
- Must support multiple currencies (i.e. I want to be able to send a client in Mozambique or DRC a USD invoice instead of a ZAR invoice).
- Must support recurring invoice items (we have lots of clients with monthly retainers or recurring software license fees)
- Must support recurring cost items (e.g. recurring software license fee costs, our own retainers to suppliers etc.)
- Must support fixed asset depreciation, revenue deferral, work in progress, even if only through manual journals.
Nice-to-haves:
- Banking integration (we will use an First National Bank of South Africa account)
- Time tracking
- Support ticketing
- Project management
- Departmental transactions and reporting (not that we really have departments, just want to keep track of profitability of different products and services separately and traditionally something like a departmental breakdown appears to have been the easiest way to achieve this)
