Is “Horizontal” Accounting Software Dead? Where does Dynamics GP fit?

Michael Johnson is back with a look at Horizontal versus Vertical accounting software with Is “Horizontal” Accounting Software Dead?

Here is my take. Having use both vertical and horizontal accounting software, most vertical software absolutely sucks at anything other than its intended vertical. Many vertical packages are also half baked. They have little or no GL and poor reporting.Verticals targeted at say… AR heavy industries like TV and radio (something I actually know quite a bit about),  tend to have substandard AP and Payroll abilities, if any at all. Manufacturing packages are like this as well. They do great at tracking manufacturing costs and fall down at processing expense reports.

So where does Dynamics GP fit? It gets attacked for being horizontal because it has strong fundamentals. Seriously, ask some other Dynamics folks.GP is generally regarded as having the best GL of the bunch. The beauty of Dynamics GP is that because of it’s design and long history of embracing cooperation, there are a ton of third party products available to add the vertical stack for just about any industry.

A while back I consulted with a metals broker in Miami. They sold scrap metal from Asia to Europe and South America. They had significant shipping and tracking needs. They were groaning under the weight of a massive Excel spreadsheet. Yeah, there was a third party product specifically for that industry. I have no idea if the product is still around but they had a legitimate, specific third party option to choose from.

Additionally, the integration features of both Dynamics GP and third party integration products allow the integration of vertically focused applications to work with Dynamics GP. When I was Transit TV, we used a world class traffic system to manage TV style programming and AR. The AR requirements for TV are crazy specific and very data intensive. Imagine scheduling more than 31 million data points a year and then having to list the exact time of each 30 second spot on bill.. (30 seconds x 2 per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 24 hours x 365 days).

We managed that side in the vertical app, imported what we needed to Dynamics GP and ran everything else off of Dynamics GP. I even wrote the core SQL for credit reporting for the vertical because they didn’t have that feature. All of this was a small piece of a billion dollar, publically traded entity so there wasn’t much room for error.

The point is that it doesn’t matter what you call it. The finance chief will argue for a robust GL and strong financial reporting. Manufacturing will want world class manufacturing. Shipping will want world class warehousing and distribution. The best chance for companies to have it all is with a solution based around Microsoft Dynamics GP.