jack wrote the following post on 8/14/2007 3:24:28 PM
I am posting this message as a service to those who are considering the purchase of Accubuild software. We are a 20-employee, $6,000,000 construction subcontracting firm. We spent a fair amount of time researching an upgrade from Peachtree Accounting. Accubuild would only demo the program through a webinar, which in hindsight, makes complete sense. Most of the demo was manipulating data already in the system. Accubuild does that very well. However, what was painfully absent from the demo was the laborious process of entering data. Nothing could be entered "on the fly". If you were halfway into an invoice and realized an item or phase was not already in the system, you had to cancel the transaction, and back out to the main menu, enter the missing data, and then begin again on the invoice. This is true for all data entry windows. In addition, only one window can open/active at a time, which hinders efficiency. You cannot take a phone call about an A/P invoice, and pull it up while entering ANY other data. You must back all the way out to enter another area.
Beware that very few reports are included with the package, as we expected to find a simple Balance Sheet and Income Statement, but did not. Accubuild is more than happy to charge you to design these reports.
Finally, it took us an entire fiscal year to learn that you may not enter data in the future fiscal year, without closing the current year. I'm not aware of a single company who can close a year on the last day, and not make adjustments issued by their CPA. We were told to create a duplicate company and work in that company until the previous year was closed. Then we'd have to import that data into the old company. $300 accounting programs allow you to go 12 periods into the future; why not Accubuild? Naturally, this was learned after we remitted the annual update fee, which I've been told is non-refundable, even though we've bailed on the software package.
We have since switched back to Peachtree, and will upgrade to the 2008 Construction edition for less than $800. Accubuild's price tag is excessive, given the learning curve required, time spent on data entry, and costly tech support to obtain the simplest reports.
This may be a good package for some companies, but I would strongly urge you demand a demo version for your use. If you are aware of other discussion areas this would be useful on, please reply with that link.