Selecting the right software solutions for your organization is a substantial responsibility and it can be an arduous task. You want to compare enough solutions to demonstrate you have done your due diligence, but comparing too many solutions can lead to a never-ending search. Having been through this process—both as the solution being evaluated and evaluating other types of software for our own use—we’ve developed a vendor scorecard template for evaluating financial close software. Here’s how to use it.

Why Use a Vendor Scorecard?

In business and in life, you expect to be held accountable for any decision you make. Using a vendor scorecard during your search for financial close software helps ensure your rating and evaluation of each solution is consistent, unbiased and documented. Because vendor evaluations can often go on for weeks or even months, a vendor scorecard provides a centralized location for your evaluations and can help you remember the capabilities of each option and make the business case for your selection.

What To Do Before Scheduling a Demo

 Whether you have a fully fledged RFP process in place or not, these are the areas you should prioritize and focus on. Before you schedule a demo, do these four things:

1)     Align on the key stakeholders.

Make sure you understand which teams will benefit from the solution and determine who from each team should be involved in the process. Among those stakeholders, be clear about who is the decision maker, who is the recommender (person or people researching options and weighing in), and who needs to be consulted and possibly have the right to reject a selection (this could be IT).

2)     Develop an objective.

What has led you to search for a software solution? Document your team’s biggest challenges and needs and identify the desired outcome. This will serve as your North Star throughout the search.

3)     Make a list of must haves vs. nice to haves.

Software solutions often come with a long list of amazing features, so it’s important to agree on features the selected solution absolutely must have and list any others as nice to haves. This helps ensure the team doesn’t make a decision based on a shiny new or unique feature of solution that may be missing a key requirement.

4)     Ensure you have the right people in the room.

When you schedule your demos, make sure to include the necessary people involved to properly assess whether the solution meets your needs and technical requirements. This includes representation from the CTO or CIO’s office, who may not be end users of the software, but play a key role in ensuring it’s a good fit.

Now you’re ready to start comparing.

How to Use Trintech’s Vendor Scorecard Template

Our vendor scorecard template is pre-filled with common concerns or factors that have helped guide others in their search for a financial close solution that’s the right fit for their needs. It covers obvious things like features, cost, security, and user reviews, and other important considerations like vendor support, usability ratings, system performance, and intangibles, like whether it feels like a good fit culturally. Our template is easy to edit, so you can update the criteria according to your objectives or RFP.

Score each section from 1-5 (5 being the best) and provide a basis for each score that includes specific examples. Each section is weighted based on common concerns from our experience, but again, you can edit the weight of the criteria scores according to your priorities, just make sure the total weight equal 1.00.

Feature Set

Leading off your search for software, create a list of features and capabilities you desire. Identify which features are must haves versus nice to haves. Be sure to think about future needs to ensure the software remains relevant as your organization grows and evolves. When assessing financial close solutions, your initial focus may be on reconciliation tools, but it’s important to evaluate how you’re managing journal entries, for example, and whether you’ll need a comprehensive solution in the future. Additionally, consider your current volumes and potential growth. Will the software you’re considering be able to scale as your business expands?

While some features may fall into the “nice to have” category, software is an investment and implementations take time. Don’t be shortsighted by only focusing on current needs.

Vendor Support

Vendor support can be a lot of different things. It includes obvious things like customer support (can you get in touch with tech support easily and in a timely matter), training and onboarding. Rating vendor support also includes researching things like the vendor’s reputation via review sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights and inquiring about the frequency and quality of updates and maintenance. It’s also helpful to understand what level of self sufficiency a solution allows: what changes require professional support (usually with a fee) and what can be handled in-house by admins.

Cost

The actual cost of software solutions can sometimes be difficult to nail down. That’s because there are up-front costs, ongoing costs, and things like return on investment. If you’re lucky, the time savings or cost savings of software the chosen solution may replace can completely negate the cost. At Trintech, we’ve had customers achieve instant ROI (link to coming soon case from Forum Credit Union or other) from their investment (check out our ROI calculator). Asking about ongoing costs and self sufficiency can help you to get an idea of if the vendor will wind up nickel and diming you for every request or enhancement.

Security and Compliance

Financial data cannot be treated lightly. This is why you want to ensure you have representation from IT or information security when comparing solutions to ask the specific questions they will have. You need to be confident the solution meets your security requirements and let’s face it, the members of the finance and accounting teams may not be the best people to assess this.

If you don’t have representatives from these teams, here are a few important questions to ask:

1. Do you offer single or multi-tenant cloud hosting?
2. Is on-premise hosting an option? (Most organizations prefer cloud hosting, but some industries, like financial institutions, still require on-premise hosting.)
3. What features does your solution have in place to help me monitor and maintain compliance?

Usability

At the end of the day, any solution your team deems too difficult to use will not be successful or at least not well received. Research and ask around to see what other users have to say about a product’s ease of use. For complex or high-stakes decisions, you may be able to request a Proof of Concept (POC) to assess the vendor’s ability to meet your specific needs before making a final commitment.

Performance

Ask the vendor to provide documentation showing their performance speed during peak usage and the up time of the software. This is standard data for software providers and something they should be able to provide.

Customer Feedback

When it comes to gathering customer feedback, ask around. Chance are, you have current and former colleagues who have experience with the software you are considering. Then, see what other users of the software have to say on 3^rd party review sites like G2 and Gartner Peer Insights. Finally, ask each vendor to provide case studies, references and testimonials of existing customers.

Vendor Software Demonstration

With our vendor scorecard template, this section is where you can rank a provider for some of their softer skills or just get to the bottom line.

1. Does the solution meet your primary objectives?
2. Do you get the sense that the vendor truly understands your challenges and can answer your questions, or do they just want to sell you software?
3. Is the vendor someone you’d want to do business with?

The software may check all the boxes, but there can still be red flags. While the person on the demo may not be your main point of contact as a customer, you can get a feel for the culture and attitude to determine if they align with your expectations and desires. Maybe they’re too pushy to get you to agree to a deal. Maybe you get the feeling they have overstated their capabilities.

Conclusion

Our complimentary Vendor Scorecard Template can help you compare financial close solutions in an organized and consistent manner. While we hope to be considered in your search, we offer this tool for anyone researching financial close software. We’re proud of the industry-leading solutions we offer, but at the end of the day, success, to us, is helping people in the accounting and finance field find the right solution for their needs, even if it’s not ours.

Written By: Lindsay Rose

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