Advantage

Avantages

Our entire team on one platform for projects + accounting? And people love it? Is...such a thing even possible? It is - and it is Advantage. Having worked with Quickbooks, Netsuite, Sage, Foundation and all manner of home-grown horrors... Advantage is a wondrous breath of fresh air. I'm the IT Director and have not had a single incident or technical issue with Advantage (beyond your occasional password reset). The times that I have reached out to technical support have been largely for information / usage questions as I learned. They greeted us, recognizing our number, and were enthusiastic, professional, and unbelievably swift to answer any question or to solve any issue.

I love that the software is hosted (at least for us). A joy to not have to deal with local servers, network shares, etc.

Inconvénients

1 - long term - having 100% web based Advantage would be neat, but Citrix Receiver works perfectly on our Macs and PCs.

2 - The logins are a little weird (generic strings, rather than a custom username). Users will of course forget those, or write them on a sticky on their monitor (bad). We ended up making a chart of people's user logins and keep it in 1Password. Not a huge deal.

Avantages

It is solid and performs as it should. Advantage make continuous helpful updates so it is relevant. The updates are painless. But what I like the best is the customer service. I have used this company for over 20 years and I have NEVER had a bad experience. Everyone has solid background of experience and is not only helpful but polite. We joke that we have learned more about proper process controls by using the system properly. The system makes it easy to perform work controls properly.

Inconvénients

We are hosted - if we could export all the reports in excel or pdf easily (I have noticed many reports are being added and love it when we can email them).

Avantages

We've been told it is a better tool for us to track how many hours everyone is using and estimate time we will need for new projects.

Inconvénients

We changed to this for project management and time tracking. It is one of the most frustrating interfaces I've ever seen. Nothing is intuitive. You have to click so many times to just get to the thing you need.

Avantages

When switching to Advantage, we were looking for a tool that allowed us to more seamlessly integrate our billing, media and project management needs all in one platform. Prior to the switch much of our media billing needed to be manually entered into the system, as all buying took place on third party sites. With the switch to Advantage, we were able to integrate our media campaigns into the Advantage software, cutting down on the manual work needed in the billing process. Additionally, we loved the project management tools, and robust reporting capabilities available.

Inconvénients

Any new software implementation is a challenge. There is a lot of work that goes into the setup of Advantage because it is such a robust tool. Really understanding how all the pieces fit together for your business and for the systems daily use is very important and one that must be addressed at the start of the process. We are still learning all the aspects of the impacts of choices we made during implementation. With all that said, the advantage team has been with us every step of the way to help us maximize the tool for our agency. They are always open to software enhancements, and so any minor inconveniences we have faced they have heard our feedback on how to improve it for us.

Avantages

The human component. They have a tremendous support team that really takes the time to understand your business and how you can most effectively benefit from the myriad of features both on setup and implementation.

On the software side, there are a lot of options so you'll always be able to find a way to make it work the way you need it to.

Inconvénients

It can be quite overwhelming and confusing. There are aspects of usability that I believe require more steps than necessary. However, this is often the case with software that's built to service a variety of business types and sizes.

Again, I'll point out that their staff and support are phenomenal and even in times of confusion are right there with you to guide you through and get you effective solutions to the hurdles you're encountering.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi passer à Advantage

Avantages

The breadth of offerings from this ERP system is fantastic, especially for an Agency to streamline their media, accounting, timesheets, project management, resource management and dynamic reporting functions. Their customer support is phenomenal as well and always willing to help my company out even if they don't agree with our setup or processes. They are always pushing out enhancements, new features and bug fixes which keeps you up-to-date and moving with technology.

Inconvénients

There are some limitations to some of the functionality and features with this system that makes it aggravating to easily get some actions accomplished. Ex: timesheets could be easier to do if you could add multiple lines at one time or upload a spreadsheet or have an API tied to our other internal systems. We wish licensing was a little more affordable, especially if we had this hosted on premise at Advantage. The frequency of upgrading the system becomes a bit tedious to me but I understand it's needed.

Avantages

Advantage has been specifically designed to fit the needs of a PR or Advertising agency. Its flexibility allowed us to adapt the software to support our existing processes. It's made our team more efficient and gives us much more insight into our business data and metrics. Project management capabilities improve communication, budgeting and scheduling across the organization.

In a long career, Advantage has the best client support team with which I have ever worked! Calls are answered immediately, problems are addressed and the Advantage folks are a delight to work with. Even better, many of the customer support folks have worked at PR or advertising agencies so they really understand our challenges and can offer "best practices".

Lastly, it is a cloud based system so our team can work from anywhere with no need for server access.

Inconvénients

This is a complex system and the learning curve is steep. The first couple of months on the system were a real struggle (this is where that outstanding client support really comes in handy!). New users should be prepared that implementation is a big project that requires both dedicated resources and management support.

Aqua, the program used by most agency staff, is a good user experience but the accounting system is old code and it looks & works like old code. Some of the menus are not very intuitive and it can take a while to figure out how to use them.

Avantages

The ability to track hours, projects, and create jobs and purchase orders with this software is so easy and intuitive that I need almost no training in my last two positions to get up and running. I love that I can figure things out and basically train and trouble shoot for myself

Inconvénients

It has so many more capabilities that I don't think our staff is using because we don't know what we don't know. Also, when an upgrade happens it can take a bit to get used to the new look and functionality, but isn't that true of any software?

Avantages

With a distributed workforce and five separate companies Advantage gives us great insight into financials and project management while allow.

Inconvénients

Set-up for Advantage to match our business was complex because our business is complex.

Avantages

The software support is outstanding, always prompt in answering a question or troubleshooting problems. I've never had to wait on hold for any length of time, call are promptly answered by representatives that know this product well and get you the answers you need.

Inconvénients

The Report Writers could definitely be more user friendly, I often find them difficult and time consuming to setup.

Avantages

Advantage believes in upgrading and improving the software. Others in the space have not provided significant upgrades to their buying software and it shows. Advantage has a running list of improvements and asked for client input to ensure their products are user friendly! Their customer service is above the rest.
The feature that has the most impact for our agency is the ability to filter in Broadcast Worksheet. The filtering options saves my agency time and money because I can filter by day-part, CPM and build my broadcast plans so much faster. I love that it calculates the reach and frequency for you even if you are buying a market where you do not subscribe to Nielsen or Comscore. This has been extremely useful in assisting the agency in getting new business! The reporting available is also a great resource!

Inconvénients

Again, Advantage has a great customer service team so they have been able to find me a workaround for what I was trying to accomplish.

Avantages

For the most part, this software is better than any I've used before. I'm not the most tech-oriented so it is relatively easy to use and intuitive. This software is very robust and we don't use it to its full capacity but would like to use more of its capability. Advantage has the best customer service people and availability that I've experienced in numerous software systems.

Inconvénients

Finding and running reports can be cumbersome as there are two sources for reports. I believe Advantage is phasing out one of them to be able to just use one. There are small things on certain reports that I would like to see but Advantage always seems open to hearing suggestions. Also, there are so many reports and ways/options, as well as custom reports, it's somewhat overwhelming.

Avantages

The financial part, like putting in PO's and invoices was easy to edit and go back to.

Inconvénients

Things just seemed overly complicated and the software wasn't optimized for Mac users so it was sometimes difficult to use.

Avantages

Fantastic customer support. Product is really flexible and customizable.

Inconvénients

The product is Windows-only. Even though there's a web-based version of the software, you still need to use Windows to set some of the advanced features. The product is not well supported with detailed documentation and as such it's difficult to set up and learn. Advantage sells the service of installation to such a degree that they compete against their own documentation. As a result, training is placed behind an expensive paywall that must be purchased for as long as you use this product.

Avantages

Time entering is convenient, checking workload and calendars is convenient. Good reference -- nice to be able to say "check advantage for everything" but that goes for a lot of CRMs.

Inconvénients

There are no resources for Advantage online, so good luck learning how to use it. Customer service gave us next to no context on what we needed to find out, and it is excruciating to enter tasks if you do not have a template set up.

Avantages

It has a lot of features and integrates job data into the general ledger. Support staff are always available.

Inconvénients

Nothing is intuitive, not flexible or user-friendly. You learn through trial & error the correct way to set things up to get the results you need.

Avantages

We have our project management, media planning and buying and accounting all in one package. The company is very proactive in keeping up with technology and the market.

Inconvénients

That our server is on the eastern seaboard of the USA, and we are in NZ so there are timing issues with being able to contact support.

Avantages

I was excited the most about the ability for buying and accounting to talk to one another.

Inconvénients

So many things about the software that I didn't like. One, it was cumbersome to use. Two, set up and deployment took forever. There were issues with our Office 365 two factor authentication. There were glitches that were not passed along to the development team, or noted in our account.

Avantages

It's easy to log in. That's about it - I hate Advantage.

Inconvénients

SO hard to use, not user friendly, oftentimes lags. Use anything else.

Avantages

Advantage is relatively easy to use and makes our accounting easy!

Inconvénients

Integration with our existing software was easy - however, there are some minor issues that could be addressed (i.e. Listing of $$ amounts on the invoice listing when looking up invoices - you have the invoice number, date and a description, but no $$$ amount.) Time Sheets (it would be nice if when entering time that the same job number and function couldn't be used more than once per time sheet)

Avantages

The media modules is intuitive and has many layers of features to individualize the process.

Inconvénients

I know have been features, I wish I had. Can't remember them at the moment. They are small things that would make things more seamless. I know a couple of in the works for future releases.

Avantages

It does what we need it to do and is fairly flexible when we want to do something "a little different".

Inconvénients

It seems like their are patches and updates quite frequently. I get the need to fix data safety/security features, but minor updates to features or updates to features that we don't even use can be a bit annoying.

Avantages

I like the time tracking feature for the most part.

Inconvénients

This software takes a while to get the hang of. There are so many ways to access the same features, which can make things confusing. Additionally, sometimes the program saves automatically, like in time tracking, but other times, like in the tasks, you have to manually save.

Avantages

We've been using Advantage daily for 10+ years and are quite pleased with it. Tech support is great and very eager to help with any and all issues.

Inconvénients

I really can't think of any cons, other than some users find it a little difficult to do specific things due to the complexity of the application features.

Avantages

We have spent years getting Advantage to work for our 100-person agency, and it has much of the functionality we need.

Inconvénients

Despite investing lots of time and money into configuration and training, Advantage seems to slow us down. Project management and expense reporting are not fast or easy to use.