Unanet A/E

We ended up finding Unanet for our DCAA Compliant Accounting.

What really impressed us was how easy the software was to use and operate. They had a stellar customer support team that was able to get back to us very quickly with any question we had.

The system was a bit expensive but we knew that coming into it.

Project Management: Being an engineering firm, we are very project driven. InFocus has proven to be effective project management software. Project Figures or Project Central (both provide drill-downs) provide managers information at their convenience. Project set up is fast and accurate using the template feature. Setting up templates does take a fair amount of time, but do it once, do it right. Predefined settings prevent staff from entering time on projects to which they are not assigned or at incorrect rates.

Financial Management:
Cash basis is always as of end of month, so clients need to be aware of this. The canned financial statements met only our basic needs. We do, however, have the capacity to design our own financial statements within the software. Doing so involved a steep learning curve, but once mastered, works very well and allows a great deal of customization. Support is excellent and very helpful (usually at no charge) at tweaking custom-designed reports. Once completed, the reports are quite nice. There are a large number of ‘extra’ reports within the software, but they are not readily seen. It would have been convenient to have more awareness of what was available at the onset.

Accounting Functions: Automated invoicing makes weekly billing a snap. This process is completed in less than half the time it used to take. AP can be paid via checks or EFT’s. For electronic payments, InFocus has a feature which automatically creates a file of preselected AP’s which can be uploaded directly onto our banking website.

Both timesheets and expense sheets are entered by the individual staff members, and then submitted for approval. This eliminates the duplication of effort used in the past when staff created timesheets and expense sheets in Excel, and then the information was manually entered by accounting staff into the software.

Overall Comments: Startup proved to be much more difficult and labor intensive than presented. The common “reason” for the conversion issues has been stated to be that we converted from QuickBooks. Get over it—reseller knew what we were using. On the other hand, not enough time and effort was put into pre-conversion groundwork. Being more educated on the settings of InFocus would have enabled more preparation of QuickBooks data that would have prevented many of the data conversion issues we had at the onset.

Performs regular accounting functions, including handling accrual and cash basis accounting. The project management and project reporting areas of the software while adequate, are not very robust.