At the recent Inforum conference in Paris (see Conferences) I was delighted to hear rumours on the grapevine that SunSystems is in the ascendant again in Infor’s firmament of software products.

SunSystems is the best mid-market accounting system in the world. Those of us who have been around long enough remember the SunSystems advertisements that borrowed the Carlsberg idea from the 1980s – Probably (crossed out) the best accounting system in the world. We all agreed.

It’s not as large a product or as broad a product, as SAP or Oracle, nor as powerful when it comes to sheer volume, but if you want globally consistent reporting in reasonable time, with low statutory risk wherever you’re operating, there is no better system. Its simple architecture – a single ledger, unlimited parallel ledgers for budgeting and accounting adjustments, its powerful multi currency and reporting currency capability, easy integration and, above all, its transaction analysis capability, are ideal in their flexibility, and the system can be configured easily as a core system for global roll out.

Consider the alternatives:

SAP Business 1 – a broader product and better looking, but not deep enough to squeeze through the statutory and corporate reporting hoops that SunSystems slips through more easily, wherever you are in the world.

Dynamics NAV – a fabulously flexible product (programmable, in reality) and applicable across a wide range of businesses, but its financial modules don’t come anywhere close to SunSystems’.

Dynamics AX – ditto. And AX is even bigger and more difficult to implement consistently.

Great Plains – a nice product for the Anglo Saxon world.

Of course, if you need manufacturing, or complex logistics functions, or retail, or any specialist ‘business’ functionality closely integrated with financial modules then you’ll probably put this first and buy a fully integrated system.

But, if you’re happy with best-of-breed solutions, for example if you’re running a hotel using Micros Opera, or a financial institution with highly-specialised, often bespoke, software for your front-office operations – then SunSystems is the best choice.

‘Cloud’ is all the rage these days, but I see no reason why SunSystems cannot be deployed in the cloud or in private hosting environments.

Infor’s CloudSuite has for the last few years received more marketing oomph from Infor than SunSystems, and there’s no doubt that CloudSuite offers broader functionality. But is it deeper? Can it as easily be designed for deployment anywhere, both in the relatively benign regimes of Anglo Saxon accounting and in the accounting jungles of Italy, Greece, Russia, Brazil and other more challenging accounting regimes, where you need to run the obstacle courses of negative debits and credits, provisional journal postings, correspondence accounting, cash-based VAT reporting, etc. SunSystems overcomes all of these – not always easily, but it can do it when many cannot.

The rumours I heard at Inforum are that Infor is beginning to recognise that SunSystems has some unique strengths, and that CloudSuite Financials isn’t going to be an easy ‘upgrade’ for current SunSystems users.

Long live SunSystems!