Acumatica is an ERP that many Sage partners have gravitated toward to diversify their offerings from Sage and Microsoft.
Please note – My day job is consulting on Sage 100 accounting software which I’ve been doing since the late 1990’s. Therefore I am not independent with respect to any comparisons made here.
In my view, Acumatica is not pure SaaS in the sense that they still run on a hosted cloud environment. Sage 100 does the same thing though with a different (user-based) pricing module than Acumatica which is consumption-based.
Sage 100 is trying to offer a more seamless cloud product by recently introducing Sage Partner Cloud which is Sage 100 hosted on the Azure cloud and maintained by a local Sage partner.
The latest unofficial customer count I saw for Acumaticais 10,000. For Sage 100 the last public count I spotted was 24,600.
Acumatica has a WILDLY enthusiastic reseller channel though I’m not entirely sold that the solutions are materially better than Sage – Acumatica is certainly earlier on the adoption curve since it is younger ( founded 2008 ) whereas Sage is later ( founded 1988 ) on the adoption curve.
For specific purposes where I need to ensure I can ship and receive in somewhat of a heads-down mode – I don’t think Acumatica ( or any cloud solution ) is as compelling as Sage 100.
If you were a pure finance user ( what I refer to as GL, AP, AR ) and had stringent IT requirements that made applying upgrades and adding on-premises solutions problematic then I think pure cloud ( SaaS ) makes more sense.
There is, however, a price to pay for cloud computing.
Almost all the solutions charge a premium for hosting and they justify that by claiming an ROI that presumes you are offloading all of your servers ( and IT staff ) and workstation maintenance which may or may not be realistic.
Ultimately, what many of these hosted cloud-based accounting systems become is very similar to what you have now with remote desktop connections to a central server.
That server can be housed in your offices or remotely.
The big downside to giving up your server control is that more than a few cloud hosts have been hit with ransomware and while those attacks are cleaned up you have no choice but to sit and wait for updates.
If you continue to maintain your own servers then you still have to deal with security but presumably, in the case of a breach, you have more control over how quickly your IT people respond.
TL;DR:
Cloud computing makes sense to me when I can also make use of a true multi-Tennant (the shared application on a shared environment that the publisher is responsible for upgrading ) and where I don’t have significant integrations ( Spoiler: Add-on integrations for multi-tenant/cloud-hosted apps are just as expensive in the cloud as on-premises).
Much of the other current accounting enthusiasm can be more about resellers retooling their businesses and diversifying away from solely Sage or Microsoft offerings than what offers the best ROI for customers.
The enthusiasm of resellers is a direct reflection of where publishers have focused their efforts. Virtually all new accounting solutions are being offered in some type of cloud configuration.
Should you give up your Sage 100 and move to a different solution? For most users in the wholesale distribution industry I suggest the decision is not an easy one and may be different for each company depending on what issues they are trying to resolve with a change.
For other companies the question may be similar to that faced by car purchasers considering electric vehicles.
Should you buy an electric vehicle today? It depends on your use case.
Should you consider electric when you trade-in your current vehicle?
Perhaps – and more so because in several years all that might be sold is electric vehicles and the range and charging station availability will be significantly better making the decision easier ( perhaps because there is no decision as auto manufacturers announce plans to abandon combustion engines in favor of electric).
