Software Help Shop management software

[JOE1]

We have been wondering which software would be the best option for our shop management.
We have been checking SignTracker but it does not do invoicing, and the part that it does, you have to re enter everything to quickbooks for IRS and accounting purposes, we even called them and personally asked them. You can import to Quickbooks but you actually have to enter everything twice.
I have been checking Cyrius, but apparently it goes up to $10k and it is a little bit complicated to learn.
So, this morning we found P3 Honoscop, but I have been checking and nobody that I know is using it.
Any suggestions? What would be the easier way to have tracking of everything and do accounting in one shot - if possible?
Our main concern is that we don't want to have to manually enter everything twice, once to our management software and then again everything to quickbooks.
We will appreciate any help,
Thanks

 

[Nuagedesigns]

Switched from Cyrious to shopVOX a little over a year ago and it was the best thing we have done.

 

[JOE1]

Thankyou for your answer! Quick question: Can you do invoicing or billing your customers directly from there?

 

[TXFB.INS]

Switched from Cyrious to shopVOX a little over a year ago and it was the best thing we have done.

How about the connectivity? there are numerous threads regarding lag and slow connection? have you seen this?

 

[Signed Out]

Switched from Cyrious to shopVOX a little over a year ago and it was the best thing we have done.

Really??? I'm the opposite, have been considering a switch to cyrious. Curious what you didn't like about it compared to shopvox.

Shopvox is a pretty good product and definetly helps with productivity, but has a lot of flaws and missing features that paying customers have been promised are coming for over a year now. I really dislike that shopvox is cloud based. They claim it is better for consumers because the platform is constantly being updated. But the truth is that the platform was rolled out too early and incomplete. The "updates" are mainly fixes to things that should have never been broken or missing. After 1.5 years on shopvox, some important fixes have been made, but not all, and lately it seems to be getting harder for them to fix and improve things as it seems the foundation is made of sand... Simple things like tax exempt customers for example, when you price a product for them the sales tax is not charged, but when imported to QB it categorizes the products as "taxable" This creates a huge headache come time to pay sales taxes. The worst part of that bug is they didn't even know about it until I told them a few months ago. No fixes have been made, although they tell me they are working on it, but also they haven't informed their customers of the glitch. I posted about it in their forum, but who knows how many users taxes are all screwed up because of it.

There are other issues and missing features, but mainly I feel like I've been paying monthly for 1.5 years now to be a beta customer for a product that will never truly be a finished product.

So I've been looking a cyrious. I like that it is stand alone software, that I would own and house all data (yes shopvox is very slow sometimes, which is very very annoying, especially when you have a customer in your shop or on the phone and you can't give them any pricing because shopvox is down) I assume that cyrious isn't riddled with glitches and missing features since it's been around a while and I read lots of good reviews on it. Maybe nuage designs can shed some light on that for us?

 

[shadowgrapher]

We do screen printing and digital printing and purchased Cyrious to help streamline the quoting / order writing and order tracking. I spent almost two years trying to get it to quote properly before giving up. Every time one glitch got fixed another one popped up. I spent lots of time waiting on them to fix problems only to do testing to find out it still was not fixed. I finally gave up. A year later I spoke to them at the show and the assured me that if I subscribed to their monthly maintenance that they would get the bugs worked out. After paying for maintenance for over a year, nothing changed. Constant problems, very poor service, constant delays and missed meetings. I giant waste of my time!!! I giant $8500.00 waste of money. I would not wish my experience on anyone.

 

[threeputt]

One employee at our shop has looked into GraphixCalc. Anyone care to comment on this product?

 

[Signed Out]

We do screen printing and digital printing and purchased Cyrious to help streamline the quoting / order writing and order tracking. I spent almost two years trying to get it to quote properly before giving up. Every time one glitch got fixed another one popped up. I spent lots of time waiting on them to fix problems only to do testing to find out it still was not fixed. I finally gave up. A year later I spoke to them at the show and the assured me that if I subscribed to their monthly maintenance that they would get the bugs worked out. After paying for maintenance for over a year, nothing changed. Constant problems, very poor service, constant delays and missed meetings. I giant waste of my time!!! I giant $8500.00 waste of money. I would not wish my experience on anyone.

Wow! Very interesting, not what I expected.

 

[Bigdawg]

I've used Cyrious for over 7 years now at our shop. Yes, we've had some issues now and again and there are some "holes" in it if you are trying to use it for contact tracking (we really haven't set that part up). But overall it has worked just fine. We put in our costs, margins and parameters and the pricing is pretty spot on. I was not a fan when I started using it, but it really is quite convenient. Yes - customer service can be a bit of a hassle sometimes, but we recently updated the machine that Cyrious was on and had major issues. Tech support was able to log into that computer and get everything working without any data loss whatsoever. Not sure why shadowgrapher had so many issues with it... It may be pricey, but it definitely does the job.

 

[JOE1]

Sorry guys, I feel lots now...Lol.
I would like to hear a little bit more of what you guys recommend. Definitely the bug problem especially with tax exempt customers - which we have a lot, is a big issue.
Hopefully someone can recommend a good software to automatize operations.
thanks a lot!

 

[dypinc]

We have been wondering which software would be the best option for our shop management.
We have been checking SignTracker but it does not do invoicing, and the part that it does, you have to re enter everything to quickbooks for IRS and accounting purposes, we even called them and personally asked them. You can import to Quickbooks but you actually have to enter everything twice.
I have been checking Cyrius, but apparently it goes up to $10k and it is a little bit complicated to learn.
So, this morning we found P3 Honoscop, but I have been checking and nobody that I know is using it.
Any suggestions? What would be the easier way to have tracking of everything and do accounting in one shot - if possible?
Our main concern is that we don't want to have to manually enter everything twice, once to our management software and then again everything to quickbooks.
We will appreciate any help,
Thanks

Like you I have looked at a lot of software but came to the same conclusion about having to enter everything in Quickbooks again. Have you every taken a good look at Quickbooks layout designer? A found out you can set it up to put in a lot of extra fields which I have used to create a simple work order form that can follow the job as well as multiple users can add information from other workstations. I am a pretty small operation but it seams to work pretty well for me. And I really should spend more time with it as I believe I can add much more functionality to it. You just change the Current Template drop down list to what every layout design you want to use for entering your info and them back to the Invoice template when you want to create an invoice.

Now this is the Mac version of Quickbooks because we are all Mac based except for RIPs. I have another division that has to do mail-order and they are pretty much forced to use the Windows version of Quickbooks because of the shipping modules. I don't much care for it either so I have never really messed with its layout designer but I would assume it must be similar to the Mac version but maybe not.

 

[Steve Sexton]

Has anyone tried Casper. Any comments on there product.
Steve

 

[FatCat]

One employee at our shop has looked into GraphixCalc. Anyone care to comment on this product?

Yes, we are interested for this at our shop too. I've actually had an old copy of GraphixCalc pro on my machine for 5+ years that I still use. Looks like GraphixCalc is having a 1/2 price Black Friday sale this Friday, so I am tempted....

 

[GB2]

I just went through a webinar on Printsmith. Apparently this is a management program primarily designed for the printing industry but from what I saw during the webinar, it can easily be used for the sign industry as well. It seemed to do everything you would want from such a program and it was fairly easy and intuitive to use. This is a program that has been around for awhile but I never hear anyone talk about it. The only thing I don't know yet is how much it costs as I'm presently waiting for a quote. You should definitely put it on your consideration list though.

Another program created primarily for the printing industry is Printers Plan, which I know is very popular though I have no personal experience with it. Again, although these were created for the printing industry I think they have crossed over and can be used in the sign industry as well. These programs already have built in support for wide format printing and can easily accommodate custom sign jobs. I'll be looking this one over next.

 

[JJM7288]

We are a fifteen year Cyrious customer and it is one of the best investments we've made. I admit the transition form Cyrious SMS to Control was difficult and time consuming. We would not want to be without Cyrious Control. The negative experience above was not our experience.

 

[dale911]

I'm a 1 man shop doing mostly wholesale printing to the trade and still decided to add Cyrious control after having difficulty in juggling all the jobs coming in. Pricing is based on how many invoices you do a month. I'm nowhere near the amount needed to move up to the. Ext tier so it cost me about $2500. Since I do a lot of textile printing aside from wide format printing, it is awesome. I will note that I haven't gone in and setup pricing for the textiles so it's not anywhere close and I put in my pricing as I go. The one thing I am unhappy about is that I paid about $2500 for the software and they give you one year of tech support. the subscription based is the same as owning it but you can't open it if you cancel your subscription or something. The benefit of the subscription is you don't have to pay $800 a year for tech support which includes software updates. I kind of feel like I got hosed since I don't get software updates. I haven't paid for it in he last two years and several features have come in that would be nice to have. I may get support again in the spring to get caught up.

I watched the signvox demo twice and tried signtracker, graphixcalc, and did the Casper demo. I think cyrious is the best thing available and it will grow with me as business grows. I'm still on the smallest version doing close to $200k and still have a lot of space left before needing t upgrade.

 

[Zendavor Signs]

We used Cyrious SMS / Control for 10+ years. It was very complex (Control) to set up, and usually required paying large "implementation" fees to get it to do what you want. Bottom line for me was that it was very expensive software that was very outdated. I personally love the cloud - it frees me from worrying about my server being up and running, updated, etc. We switched to Signvox about 4 years ago. There were a number of issues with data transfer, learning the new software, etc. There were also a lot of little bugs or annoyances with Signvox. After about 2 years, Rao and his team had most of them addressed. I was impressed with reported bugs actually being fixed in a reasonable amount of time (6-8 weeks or so). At this point, I was very glad to have made the switch. Signvox was very efficient, although a little limited in terms of customizing product pricing, etc. Then along came Shopvox, and support for Signvox pretty much died. Yes, there was tech support, but no new features were being introduced. Seeing the light, we switched to Shopvox early this year. In some ways, that was a more painful transition than Cyrious Control to Signvox. Shopvox has some of the "customizable" features that Cyrious Control had, but Shopvox is much easier to set up. Shopvox is getting there....slowly. My 2 biggest frustrations with Shopvox are:
1) slowness - overall Shopvox needs a kick in the rear. Jumping around Shopvox takes several times longer than Signvox. Sometimes Shopvox is painfully slow.
2) efficiency - there are too many basic tasks that take too many clicks to get done

I really wish the Shopvox team would focus on these 2 items instead of adding new "features". I'm not saying the new features are not useful or good, but the basics need to be addressed first.
Overall I am very happy with Shopvox and would never want to go back to Cyrious. Neither is perfect, but Shopvox is much more progressive. I just hope the Shopvox team can iron out these issues soon.

 

[cheinlein]

I use Corebridge and I know a lot of new owners from the Signworld family are going this way. What I've heard is that Cyrious is a dinasour but very stable and even though it's not the easiest to use, it has everything you need. Shopvox is just not ready to see the market yet. Those that I know that have used Cyrious and have switched to Corebridge really like it. I think it's great, but that's all I've used. It invoices and interfaces with Quickbooks.

 

[Signed Out]

I use Corebridge and I know a lot of new owners from the Signworld family are going this way. What I've heard is that Cyrious is a dinasour but very stable and even though it's not the easiest to use, it has everything you need. Shopvox is just not ready to see the market yet. Those that I know that have used Cyrious and have switched to Corebridge really like it. I think it's great, but that's all I've used. It invoices and interfaces with Quickbooks.

Does Corebridge come with usable products already set up? Obviously they would need to be tweaked but Shopvox came pre loaded with some, they aren't very good and getting pretty annoying trying to dial everything in. Especially since new pricing features have been being added slowly.

 

[Zendavor Signs]

We used Cyrious SMS / Control for 10+ years. It was very complex (Control) to set up, and usually required paying large "implementation" fees to get it to do what you want. Bottom line for me was that it was very expensive software that was very outdated. I personally love the cloud - it frees me from worrying about my server being up and running, updated, etc. We switched to Signvox about 4 years ago. There were a number of issues with data transfer, learning the new software, etc. There were also a lot of little bugs or annoyances with Signvox. After about 2 years, Rao and his team had most of them addressed. I was impressed with reported bugs actually being fixed in a reasonable amount of time (6-8 weeks or so). At this point, I was very glad to have made the switch. Signvox was very efficient, although a little limited in terms of customizing product pricing, etc. Then along came Shopvox, and support for Signvox pretty much died. Yes, there was tech support, but no new features were being introduced. Seeing the light, we switched to Shopvox early this year. In some ways, that was a more painful transition than Cyrious Control to Signvox. Shopvox has some of the "customizable" features that Cyrious Control had, but Shopvox is much easier to set up. Shopvox is getting there....slowly. My 2 biggest frustrations with Shopvox are:
1) slowness - overall Shopvox needs a kick in the rear. Jumping around Shopvox takes several times longer than Signvox. Sometimes Shopvox is painfully slow.
2) efficiency - there are too many basic tasks that take too many clicks to get done

I really wish the Shopvox team would focus on these 2 items instead of adding new "features". I'm not saying the new features are not useful or good, but the basics need to be addressed first.
Overall I am very happy with Shopvox and would never want to go back to Cyrious. Neither is perfect, but Shopvox is much more progressive. I just hope the Shopvox team can iron out these issues soon.

To provide an update to this response, Shopvox has upgraded their server and the response time is night and day faster now. This is a very positive sign. It makes doing quotes much more enjoyable.