We consider our volume of orders to be fairly high; 3500 to 4000 AR’s are generated daily; roughly 1.4 million AR’s per year. Each containing between 3 and 10 lines.
Having implemented various technical solutions to manage our volume we have found quite a divide between what we are told a system can handle by sales teams vs what it is actually capable of in the real-world.
We are currently investigating Epicor 10 as an option to replace current accounting systems, one of which is an older E7 instance and I am reaching out to you all for any advice/comments you can provide.
Can anybody speak to performance for any of the following scenarios? :
Invoicing:
Using the REST API’s to generate invoices and apply any billing schedule rates
Using any of the ETL-tooling Epicor supply, like Epicor Connect or perhaps the DMT
Cash Posting:
Often a single payment can be made against thousands of invoices. How is the user experience with this?
We will also receive 1 payment that would be applied across multiple invoices/customers
Reporting:
How is the user experience when using OOTB financial reports, via the AFR
Is the EDA a better option?
Interface:
How is the UI in general with these volumes - switching between screens etc.
Would we be better on-prem or SaaS? or a Hybrid perhaps?
This list is by no means exhaustive and I’m sure there will be questions to dig a little deeper. Anything that can talk to the performance to either alleviate or confirm concerns would be fab.
I’ll bite. Our AR invoice volumes are extremely low comparative to yours, so take this with a grain of salt.
You can definitely use the REST API to generate invoices.
Service Connect has a steep learning curve and a harsh user interface but is useful nonetheless. DMT is extraordinarily powerful, in my opinion, and the command line interface opens up lot of nice programmatic solutions if you’re leaning in that direction.
Single payments can be applied over many invoices. Thousands? Might need a custom solution to make that a little nicer though. We typically would apply a payment against maybe 10 invoices through the UI, but it’s relatively painless.
The Lockbox Integration is nice for this as it will apply the payment over any matching invoices based on the remittance advice and then will present the user the info to double check before posting.
We do this too. I think the magic setup is in how you configure the customer relationships with the national account.
OOTB; we don’t use them. We XLConnect which works nicely for for stock and custom reports. We don’t use AFR or EDA, which is Epicor’s BI product. The Business Activity Query is a great tool for querying the database and the data can be easily published to users via Dashboards.
Interface is usually fine…lots of times it’s dependent on the data being pulled. Quote Form, as an example, can be super slow for us sometimes but it also has a huge amount of data views being pulled into it. Some of this is dependent a bit on how you configure your clients.
A big advantage in Epicor is the ample use of Context, wherein you can have multiple different forms pulled up and when you make a change to one, i.e. change the customer in the view, it will pull in all the related form data based on that customers context.
I’m a big fan of IaaS as it gives you a huge degree of control vs. SaaS. On-Prem can be risky and hard to scale and all that. We are an IaaS group and manage everything about the environment from the OS up.
I think Epicor has done a great job presenting the developers with all the tools needed to modify the system to fit their needs. Lots of rope to hang yourself with too, but it’s definitely a system that can be customized to fit your needs.
Thank you so much for taking the time to respond. Do you mind if i ask, what sort of volume you do have?
Another Q I meant to ask was around billing schedules. Do you use Epicor to handle all of your billing schedules & charge-codes? We have pretty complicated scenarios and there are discussions on whether Epicor could handle this OOTB or as an extension.
We have a seasoned development team in-house so tackling solutions programmatically is always an option for us.
Thanks @ckrusen, it’s nice to hear this from someone outside of Epicor.
We’re very much looking for configuration over customization - or as long as the customization doesn’t interfere with the maintainability and the ability to upgrade the platform.
We do use Epicor to handle our billing schedule and charge codes, if I understand those words correctly. Forgive me if I am totally not understanding what you’re asking though!
Billing Schedules, if I am understanding it, would be Billing Terms in Epicor world. This is configurable on the customer level.
Payment Schedules are configurable on the Sales Order level as well, but we don’t use this at all so I don’t know any more about it. Here’s the blurb in the Application Help:
Charge Codes would be analogous to Miscellaneous Charges in Epicor and also have a high level of configuration both on the Charge itself and on the Sales Order Header and Sales Order Line levels, independently.
Regarding your desire to configure vs. customize, I think that’s a wise choice. The more you can flex to the system, the easier your life is going to be with upgrades. Still, a well seasons dev team like you have can surely manage the customization when the need comes.
Integrate with OnBase or DocStar and Automate your AR, AP with OCR – we do same amount if not more, without any human touching anything… OnBase -> Epicor OData API.
@Aaron_Moreng - thanks for the additional detail, it’s very helpful.
Billing schedules. in our domain, relates more to the charge codes and their values and configurable to a client level.
@hkeric.wci - We automate the generation of most of our ARs right now so wouldn’t be using the UI for more than a few hundred a month. AP automation is definitely on our radar further down the implementation. Thanks fore the tooling recommendation.
It’s all about volume for us. We need to be able to have the platform handle the number of AR’s & AP’s we generate. I feel fairly certain that the platform can handle the generation of the AR itself via the Rest API’s and keep up with the volume. It;s how the rest of the experience may suffer with the amount of data. Still, the more we can automate the less this should become an impact.
