How Dynamics GP Cloud ERP Outperforms Acumatica

The popularity of Enterprise Resource Planning solutions has picked up across all industrial landscapes, as the benefits and capabilities of fully-integrated ERP systems become easier to achieve. Thanks to business management systems, whether established market leaders like Microsoft Dynamics or relative newcomers like Acumatica, more companies today researching and adopting a better solution. Functionality plays a key role when it comes to comparing Dynamics GP vs Acumatica.

Business resource planning is an essential instrument for all companies, large and small, however it is the SMBs that tend to get hit the hardest when it comes to ERP needs. In a June 2015 article for Enterprise APPS Today, Drew Robb reported that “87 percent of potential ERP buyers fall under the SMB category”, and that “the vast majority of these companies do not currently possess an ERP system”.

The reason for this isn’t always clear, and there may be more than one reason at work, but some of the common reasons why companies who don’t have an ERP mentioned would be:

Budget limits
Employee resistance to change
No commitment from key decision makers.

With these key concerns in mind, it still fails to outweigh the benefits that an ERP system brings to a company as they plan to grow and expand.

Why Dynamics GP?

Microsoft Dynamics GP aims to remove that concern entirely. Dynamics GP offers flexible and realistic subscription options that meet the ideal needs of a particular SMB and their present budget restrictions. Furthermore, it significantly reduces employee hesitation when it comes to learning a new application process. Thanks to the mirroring features that Dynamics GP has in regards to the Microsoft Office Suite, a smooth and steady learning curve is common among new users. The familiarity of Microsoft Office as well as its capabilities with Dynamics GP contributes to an already quick and efficient implementation process. This backed up by the fact that there are more than 50,000 companies in the U.S. running on Microsoft Dynamics GP, it eases owner’s minds that they can easily find employees to hire that have previous experience with the product.

More Importantly, Why NOT Acumatica?

Interoperability between applications within an ERP system is a must and when various project management features don’t collaborate with one another, as experienced with Acumatica’s ERP system, then the end result can be costly.

Acumatica lacks the direct integration with the Microsoft Office products, because, well, it’s not a Microsoft product. Little things like importing/exporting reports, analyses and tables, and all the values coming over in the right form are little struggles you won’t deal with in Microsoft Dynamics GP.

Some other issues are deployment options, or the lack of choices in the case of Acumatica. Microsoft offers On Premise, True Cloud Subscription or Hybrid models for all types of businesses that want flexibility with how they deploy their ERP solution. Acumatica can only be deployed in the cloud.

This raises issues with data migration if you decide move off the product in the future. You won’t have direct access to the database and system, and simply will be relegated to export CSV files. The same is with all solutions born in the cloud like NetSuite.

Lastly, the product has only been around since 2008. Microsoft Dynamics GP has been around since 1993. So while Acumatica is still working out the “kinks” and trying to build its partner network, ISV portfolio, etc. Microsoft Dynamics GP is tried and true after many years of perfecting its product. It was the industry leader in the 90’s and continues to be the industry leader in SMB ERP solutions in 2016. The support of the Microsoft Stack (SQL, SharePoint, Exchange, etc.) and the flexibility of Microsoft Azure cloud gives companies peace of mind that they can invest in a Unified Business Solution with Microsoft.