More Efficient, Productive Staff
Boulder Creek Stone has streamlined many business processes, making the staff more efficient and productive now that everything is run through Acumatica. Not only has the team recouped unproductive time, but Acumatica’s flexible, easy-to-use interface and programming has saved the company money.
“What I really like about Acumatica is how much is configurable,” Starkweather says. “I really learned the difference between ‘customize’ and ‘configure’. In Acumatica, so much is configurable whereas in Sage, everything was an expensive customization. For a small/medium business, farming stuff out at $150 to $200 an hour can be expensive. Now we can do that configuration in-house without laying out all that cash.”
“I love, love, love the generic inquiries we can build,” he adds. “It gives us better data for analysis of our business processes, so we can see what we are doing well and take a deeper dive where we need to improve.”
Universal Search Speeds Data Retrieval
The company’s controller is the newest Acumatica user, and she found the ERP system as easy to learn as the rest of the staff. “I came from using Dynamics for 15 years, which was a pretty big switch, but Acumatica’s navigation is easy and drilling in is really helpful,” says Jean Eiden.
Starkweather praises the universal search bar for its ability to search across nearly all modules, making it much easier to find transactions. “Duplicate order entry is nearly impossible now,” he adds. “When we go to business accounts, it lists all orders, so we can quickly qualify if an order exists. We were doing quite a bit of duplicate order entry before.”
Starkweather looks forward to launching the Payroll module and hooking third-party applications, such as the HubSpot marketing automation tool, to Acumatica’s flexible platform. “When we talk about Acumatica, it’s not just about accounting but about where we do all our business. We work in Acumatica and don’t need to leave.”
Affordable CRM Streamlines Communication
Boulder Creek Stone discontinued Salesforce, electing to use Acumatica’s CRM to streamline communication between its sales and customer service. “Salesforce had too many bells and whistles for a company our size to manage,” Starkweather says. “Acumatica CRM has good guts that can effectively manage the sales staff and connect them to the data they need without bothering customer service.”
The company’s manufacturing sales staff doesn’t write orders; instead orders are entered through customer service, a process that involves a lot of coordination between the two groups. With Acumatica’s automated notifications, they are creating triggers that alert sales when an order occurs, eliminating multiple phone calls.
“The pricing on Acumatica CRM is way better than Salesforce,” Starkweather adds. “Acumatica is at least four times less, to be conservative.”
Platform for Growth
“With the automation we can now put in place, as we grow we won’t need to add incremental labor to execute back office tasks,” Starkweather says.
Likewise, Acumatica’s unlimited user pricing allows them to focus on growing the business, not worrying about additional per user costs. “When you have to pay an extra couple thousand dollars to add more users, you tend not to get enough capacity for what you actually need, and then it’s not as easy to roll out additional functionality,” Starkweather says. “It’s hard to justify the cost with the traditional model. With Acumatica, that’s not the case.”
Acumatica Over-Delivers
“With Sage, our technical support was generally very slow. You would put a ticket in and maybe you’d hear back from them two, three days later. With Acumatica, you get an almost immediate response,” says Glenda Starkweather.
Acumatica’s “response to customer needs is fantastic,” Scott Starkweather says, adding he likes submitting suggestions in the customer portal, seeing them voted on and implemented, and likes knowing Acumatica’s roadmap as it refines the product and adds modules going forward.
“It’s a fantastic product and we’re excited to grow with Acumatica,” Starkweather says. “It’s weird to be excited about an ERP product. Eight years ago, I thought. ‘Why would anyone want to sell ERP? It seemed to be all about managing expectations, getting a sale and then dealing with all the guff from customers when the companies couldn’t deliver a solution with a manageable budget for small/medium businesses.’”
“The cost was $250,000 no matter which company we looked at,” he continues. “Our initial decision was based upon who could give us 70 percent of what we needed, which was frustrating. With Acumatica, it feels like they bring 110 percent of what we need because they bring integration, ideas, and automation. Acumatica is bringing functionality to the small/medium business sector that was out of reach budget-wise four years ago.”
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