Continental Coatings takes advantage of BatchMaster financials over Sage 300 financials
When Liz Wu took over as the Accountant at Continental Coatings, they were running BatchMaster Enterprise (BME) , which was integrated to their existing Sage 300 financial application.
Liz found the Annual Software Maintenance charges for both Sage and BatchMaster together was more than she could justify. Another one of her concerns was the time and effort spent resolving any issues encountered when either of the applications were upgraded. Lisa had to involve both BatchMaster and Sage customer support teams to investigate their own applications to identify the cause and resolve the issue.
Liz asked BatchMaster “Do you have your own financial modules?” BatchMaster said “Yes, we released the financial modules two years ago.” Liz continued, “Since there are only two of us using the financial modules vs 15-16 people using the BatchMaster modules, it made more sense to move everything to BatchMaster than, say, everything to Sage.”
In terms of the Implementation, Liz said “It was right on budget. Time-wise, it took a little longer, but only because we chose to upgrade our server at the same time. We upgraded from BME 8.50 to 8.70, added the financial modules, and changed the server all at the same time. It was still close, though. Our target was to start using the BM financials from January 1st, and we actually started entering transactions on January 15th.”
There were obvious immediate cost savings in ASM and support, especially since both the finance and other modules are now compatible with each other. Since the move from Sage to BatchMaster financials, Liz found she didn’t need to manually post any AP or AR invoices anymore – it’s all automatic. On the AR side alone, this saves her 4-5 hours every month. She discovered similar time savings on the processing side – all up Liz estimates she is saving a whole week every year.
Functionally, Liz is delighted with what BM Finance offers. “I was pleased to see that every function I relied on in Sage financials was available in BatchMaster Financials, and during the demos I discovered many additional features we didn’t have and could use. An example was Bank Reconciliation. My predecessors used an Excel file for this, with BatchMaster I just enter the numbers and it is all done on the system.
Actually, the ability to export to and import from an Excel spreadsheet is huge for me also.”
Continental Coatings are customizing some financial reports. They are extremely happy with how BatchMaster’s development team are able to continue to develop these modules quickly to meet their needs.
Liz summarizes “Any questions I have, support comes back very quickly and resolves the issue. If it is a function I need and the software doesn’t have it, they tell me it will be in the next patch, and it always is. Although BM Financials is relatively new, it keeps improving. I thing that is pretty good. I would never have any influence at Sage over their software. The BatchMaster technical team listens to us users, and anything we ask for that makes sense, we get in the next patch. That means BatchMaster is growing, and will continue to grow – because you guys listen!”
