iCode Everest or Netsuite? - Looking for an "all-in-one" small business solution [Archive] - Small Business Computing & E-commerce Forums

Bryan

02-13-2005, 01:32 PM

Originally posted by mutahman
If $15000 seems high you will be floored with the quotes you get from iCode and Netsuite. I was really pumped with what we saw at iCode, then they came back with a $59000 quote. We were floored!

We design, produce and distribute storage cases for digital products (www.slappa.com) and we sell to retailers, importers and directly to customers online.

We are looking for essentially what you had listed:

- all in one business management(!)
- ecommerce
- CRM
- inventory management
- sales & shipping
- integrated payments system
+ we want our accounting working in the same system/database

The only thing we may have that you don't is multi-currency.

We only have 10 users yet the quote from iCode was $6500 for the base license, $13,000 for the additional 8 licenses and $27000 for implementation/training and on site expenses.

Netsuite came back with $20,000 for 3 years of license. In all, these companies who are pitching their solutions for small and medium companies are not realistic. $60,000 is not an enterprise wide deal for a fortune 1000, but at the same time it's not a solution you are going to get many 10 person, 2 year old companies to bite on.

Over the past week I've been tempted to start up another business that brings such solutions to market at a price that is really for the small companies of the world

Hey mutahman,

I actually ended up choosing 'NetSuite Small Business' shortly after posting this question, $90/month per user (not their full blown 'Netsuite Enterprise' system for $399/month per user, or somewhere in abouts that).

I met with them at their local office to discuss the product in detail and to tell them what we were looking for, our rep even pulled one of the web techs down a few times when we started to get a bit technical with what we were looking for in regards to the website functionality.

To date, I've been very happy with the features and flexibility of the system.

Major warning: the learning curve is steep.

To be fair, I did opt out of any training they were offering, and any setup work they quoted, to save an additional $5-6k. I felt that since I was starting from the ground up, and had no data to import, I could get by (I was also relying on my 3 years of business degrees to help me out - lets just say they were rusty!)

They did have a few 'getting started' type web seminars that I logged into and participated in, and I know they have other presentations in their "NetU" offerings that I have yet to try. Plus there is an online forum which you can subscribe to and seek help with others. I haven't hit any roadblocks that bad yet, and with the 'Small Business' application you get 3 free tech support emails per month... ...not much, but it's something, and I have yet to use those too!

The entire 'Help' sections were very well thought out, and quite extensive. Nice little things like if you're on a page in the application and select 'Help' it brings you directly to THAT page's help page, and tells you just about everything you'd need to know about the page your looking at. Also, all the input fields are 'help clickable'(eg. if you're staring at a box field that wants some type of information punched into it, but your brain simply cannot process what it's asking for, click on the field description to get a more detailed answers as to what it's expecting from you - neat! saved my butt more than a few times)

re multicurrency: The system is setup for it. I am currently using CAN, US, Euro and British Pound.(at launch time, it will only have CAN)

Pros & Cons:
Pros - too many to list quite frankly! highlights are everything you and I asked for and then some I've never even thought would be possible (eg set your minimum stock level, and when inventory quantities drop below that, warnings are sent, and a PO is automatically generated...). Dashboard is really nice, you can customize it to give you just about any sort of an up-to-minute info/report you'd like, so when you log in you have an instant overview of profit/loss, inventory sold, web stats, whatever! There's tons, I could go on and on, but I don't want to sound like a sales man, check it out yourself... ...I know iCode and Netsuite can give you access to a live demo of the application, should you want to mess around.

Cons - my biggest gripe is that the system was clearly built for people moving from QuickBooks, who are familiar with how that system was developed and works, rather than a 'lets build this in a logical way'. It's not hugely bad, but while learning the system you can't help but laugh at how it was laid out at times (okay, it may simply be that way to me being a System Administrator for MS products through the years - Win95/98/NT/2000/XP, NT/2000/2003 Server, Exchange 5.5/2000/2003, IIS, SQL, etc, etc - so you kind of get used to how things get laid out, it's not just MS, I work with Adobe and Macromedia product on a daily basis as well, and it's all about the same UI...). I didn't realize this until I signed up to a web seminar, where they demonstrate how easy the system is to use, because a lot of the functions are the same in QuickBooks and Netsuite. Great marketing to get people away from QuickBooks (#1 business app!), not the greatest for non-QuickBooks folk. Which is fine really, like any app, it only does so much, and when you've figured that out, you'll be fine like I am now. Or just take some training.

[as I’m rereading this, I should note that Netsuite has a variety of ‘Roles’ which are all customizable. When I log in, I log in as the 'Administrator' so I see all and can do all which may also be why it’s a little, err, ‘complex’(?). Should you change your ‘role’ to, say, an ‘accountant’, you’d only see accounting items and not shipping, website, POs, etc, etc – so my biggest con, may not be a con at all…sorry!]

iCode vs Netsuite
Originally I was quoted $1600 for an iCode licence. In the time I waited to buy (trip to Europe, meeting with tuners), they switched CEOs and direction. When I called them back to sign up, I was requoted $21,000. My reaction to Mr.iCode rep "ha ha ha ha ha - 'click'" (I admit, not very professional, but I'm a SMALL BUSINESS with LITTLE START UP $$$ - why would I want to sink 1/3 of my start-up funds into a software package?? morons I tell you! yes, you Mr.iCode CEO!)

In that time Netsuite had also released their new online product (no more "Oracle's Netsuite" requiring a $$$ Oracle backend, hardware, etc) which I am so glad right now that I chose! How can you go wrong with a 100% hosted app (that allows you to back-up!), accessible from any web browser, with everything built-in, +ecommerce website and hosting for $90/month?!

One thing I'd recommend to someone looking at Netsuite, or any licensing software package, is really sit down and think about how many licences you need. Does every employee require one, or can some 'share' (hey, if it's 'per licence' and only one person uses it at a time, it's still legal, no? :)) May save you a few bucks.

My eCommerce website should be live next Friday (finalizing legal, design, etc). Feel free to check it out. It’s honestly nothing special, key word here is “clean”. It's been a long time in production, but that all been because of my end, credit card processing companies(!!!), banks, website design, and not Netsuite. I think they had my company access setup in about 4 days.

Hope some of this helps future readers.

Bryan

mutahman

02-14-2005, 04:03 AM

Hi Bryan

Good news on your side!! I'm glad you were able to get things running smoothly.

The only concern I have with Netsuite is (as I menioned earlier)....we are growing at a steady clip and in 3 years time we will have dumped a LOT of our compny information/ transactions/ customer data into the system and who knows if in 3 years the license prices go through the roof (like you experienced with iCode). If that happens we're stuck and potentially screwed. When Netsuite goes public I am certainly buying the stock, but I'm not 100% sure the hosted model works for us

I really do appreciate the detailed response!!!!

Bryan

02-14-2005, 12:31 PM

The software does have the ability to download the data into IIF or CSV files.

That is currently how I am performing weekly backups.

As with any sideways move in software, you'd most likely need to perform some sort of import/export to transfer your data, so I don't feel it would be a huge deal to move away from Netsuite in the future should I ever need to...

mutahman

02-14-2005, 06:44 PM

Bryan

based on your comments about Netsuite I e-mailed them back today (actually mailed over to iCode as well). While iCode never responded, Netsuite came back and they are going to work with us to meet our target price without cutting functionality (they actually gave us a new quote today). We are now going through all of the small print, but I have to say, these guys wanted the business. I told them about my 2 concerns (pricing after the initial license and the transfer of files) and they are (a) writing into the contract that they'll not increase pricing more then 10% after the initial license and (b) noted that CSV files, as you stated, are easy and virtually free to download.

So while iCode (who was the front runner at least in my opinion) decided to be the snobbish, non-responsive, "we sell software to small business's that are not small business" company, Netsuite came and got the business.

It looks like, barring any unseen roadbumps, will be going with Netsuite.

Thanks a million for the feedback!!

MTM

Bryan

02-14-2005, 07:49 PM

hey, that's awesome. do I get a commission? ;)

in a few month, if you have time, I'd be interested in seeing a followup post with your feedback on the product.

good luck, and I hope all works out for you and the company.

ajmiller

02-15-2005, 07:11 PM

Anyone who is looking for a complete Web host with e-com, email, check out, the works... should check out TekInteractive (www.tekinteractive). They have great customer support, and are fantastic at what they do! For examples check out www.grabillhardware.com, www.doitbest.com, www.fwchamber.org. I would recommend Tek to anybody!

A J Miller

DMuse

02-17-2005, 11:50 AM

I have to admit I thought maybe that NetSuite was more focused on the mid-market these days, but muthaman's experience shows they still "get" the small business market.
I agree with Bryan that it would be great to hear how things work out down the line.
-Dan

mutahman

02-17-2005, 01:18 PM

we have the contract and SOW in hand....all looks good so we'll probably sign off in the next week

Our set up is a full soup to nuts implementation, with 8 users out of the gate, so it will be interesting to see how well we (as a group) take to the system and how much it helps.

I will surely keep you posted.

Weminuche

02-23-2005, 01:14 AM

Great info guys. Please keep us up to date. I am considering implementing NetSuite also.

Jim

cyberdov

03-07-2005, 06:30 PM

Sorry I joined this thread a bit late for Mutahman...
As a VAR for Icode, I think they have a great product - but in their direct sales operation, they don't get the customer service and support part. Fortunately they are moving more towards a Reseller channel.
As a certified Icode VAR we have been successful in supporting our many Icode installations, with better service and lower costs than Icode direct. We have implemented clients from 5 to 100 users, and continue to support them.
I'd be happy to discuss with anyone who is interested, and to provide references etc.

mutahman

03-09-2005, 10:49 PM

Cyberdov...thanks for the post. If I would have found you earlier I would have certainly talked with you. In short, Netsuite wanted the business and did what it took to get it (which for us was very aggressive pricing). While I did like the iCode software they just lost me with pricing. They just don't seem to understand that a 2 year old business with 7 employees cannot invest $40-50K in software and then spend another $10-15K on hardware and implementation. I believe someone over there needs to recognize that there are companies like us who want a full soup to nuts solution for 10 users for $10-15K. We are still in the implementation stages with Netsuite, so I cannot yet comment on the software (we're tinkered with it but not yet put it into play)....but from what they are doing they (at least in my opition) are playing the game the right way. They are building market share rapidly by creating LOTS of beach head accounts, they are agressively marketing the company and they continue to upgrade the features of the software. The thing that puzzles me about iCode is that software is free (I was in the enterprise software biz for 11 years)...so why they would choose to stick to their guns on pricing instead of playing ball and getting a killer international reference account is beyong my comprehension. As do all the software companies, sell licenses at 20% of the list and make your money on the services. The fact they would not do that sent me a message that they are not really out there for the small business like us, they want the medium sized business's

cyberdov

03-09-2005, 11:00 PM

I am also mystified by Icode's strategy. It does appear that they are moving towards a breater reliance on the VAR channel, which will be good for them as well as the customers (and of course the VARs). A 10 user license should be less than you stated - total (including implementation/training but without new hardware or customizations) should be $30K. Thanks for your reply.

nicker

03-17-2005, 07:09 PM

mutahman - can you provide any updates on the implementation process? We are considering netsuite and I would be very interested in any feedback you can provide. Thanks to everyone else, this thread has provided more unbiased info than I have found anywhere else.

SonicCubeMC2

03-31-2005, 07:22 PM

Hi guys,

I am not sure if this will help or not. I am from MerchantCompanion.com. If 90 percent of your business came from your website, you might want to consider our more cost effective solution. Our MC2 software is also an Order/Fulfillment/Inventory/CRM/Email Management package for small to medium e-commerce businesses. MC2 is designed for multi-user environment with enterprise-level departmental task management for more “visual” and logical processing flow. It is compatible with many shopping cart systems, so you are not limited to the shopping cart choices. As for the licensing, MC2 is per site, not per seat. Add additional stations as you need to streamline your business. For complete feature list, you can visit us at http://www.merchantcompanion.com. Thanks.

Let me know if there is anything I can help.

George
MerchantCompanion.com
626-820-0477

computerguy

04-01-2005, 10:06 PM

Another alternative will be Interprise Suite from Interprise Solutions once it is released.

It uses some new .NET technology that allows it to run as a desktop application like Everest or as a Internet based application like Netsuite.

They have a free 3 user version and the unlimited user version starts at only $1,500.

http://www.interprisesuite.com/

SonicCubeMC2

04-05-2005, 04:29 PM

jelessy

04-05-2005, 10:57 PM

Bryan,

I set my entire business up with Yahoo. You can do it for less than 5,000 as long as you don't get carried away with photography and a lot of useless pages.

Fred

jenny.c

04-05-2005, 11:58 PM

Hi computerguy,

Just a quick question. Can you import orders from shopping carts in Interprise Suite?
From the website, I can not find much about other shopping cart integration support.

I think the main difference between MC2 and Interprise Suite is that MC2 is focusing on small-to-medium "e-commerce" businesses and Interprise is more for wholesale/import/export businesses.

Best Regards,

George

Dear George,

Thank you for your question.

Interprise Suite is designed to be a complete solution that eliminates the need to use a multitude of applications to complete the day to day tasks of business. As such we plan on developing our own shopping cart solution, Interprise Cart, to fulfill the ecommerce needs of our users. This will eliminate the complexities involved in setting up and maintaining communications between two applications that were not designed to work together. Our customers want solutions that will work with the least amount of expense and effort and the peace on mind that knowing that one company has the expertise to be able to meet their needs from start to finish.

Interprise Cart will be fully integrated with Interprise Suite offering a complete ecommerce solution. The inventory module of Interprise Suite already has the web specific fields in place and we include a very nice html editor so that users can fine tune the appearance of their inventory items on a “per item” basis if needed. The cart will be designed around .NET 2.0 user controls and design templates so that virtually any website design can be implemented. Source code will be provided with for a nominal charge. Implementation options are as follows.

Real-time

In this setup the website is fully connected to the company data. The company data can be hosted on your website (your office workers connect to the data via web services) or locally (You have a T1 or DSL connection in your office with a fixed IP). If you choose to host locally, Interprise Suite can be setup to host your pictures at a different location with a higher speed internet connection. This will allow you to serve the html part of your pages locally – and the images from your ISP. This will allow you to scale quite a bit on even a DSL line.

Partially disconnected

In this setup your website is located at your ISP while your corporate data is located elsewhere. As web users are browsing your website they are running off the local database at your ISP. When web user begin a process that requires real-time data such as entering a new user/order, updating a customer record, etc. then Interprise Cart will connected back to the main system via xml web services.

Fully disconnected

This is like partially disconnected except that all transactions are done outside of the main company’s database and is updated periodically via xml web services.

For complete details please visit our website at http://www.interprisesuite.com/InterpriseCart/Index.asp

Thanks again

Jenny

computerguy

04-06-2005, 12:15 AM

SonicCubeMC2

04-06-2005, 08:34 PM

jelessy

04-06-2005, 09:12 PM

George,
An interesting view of an all Internet solution. I use Yahoo stores for my business at www.jelessycollection.com. If I hosted this business myself not only would it cost me a lot more money, but the reliability would be very poor.

Believe me when I say that soon computer operations will be a utility that you outsource either locally or to a lower cost country. Light pipes are very reliable.

Fred

SonicCubeMC2

04-07-2005, 01:32 AM

computerguy

04-07-2005, 06:26 PM

jenny.c

04-07-2005, 08:56 PM

Hi Fred,
I think you misunderstood my point. I was talking about the accounting/order management/operation back-end software solutions. Not the front-end website hosting solutions. I do agree with you on the hosting part. No one should ever consider hosting their own sites unless they know exactly what they are doing. But for a daily operation application, it should be available whenever you need the data. The more factors you depend on, the poorer reliability it gets. From my point of view, internet based operation solution is just the same as your online web mail service. How many times we got frustrated because our web mail service is temporarily not available or the internet connection is down? Some free web mail services even disappear without notice. What if this happens when the shopping cart is not working properly and customer wants to place order over the phone with your representatives? See my point here?

Best Regards,

George

Dear George,

Thank you for your question.

You are absolutely correct about the problems associated with running a website that is designed to work in “real-time” with the company’s backend data. Since the typical office does not have the redundant internet connections that an ISP location will have, even a temporary interruption of the Internet connection will cause the company’s website to go down.

We designed our “Partially Disconnected” Interprise Cart implementation (Described in above post) to overcome this problem. Like Interprise Suite, Interprise Cart is built off “Smart Client” .NET technology and will use a modified version of the Microsoft Offline Application Block http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnpag/html/offline.asp allowing it to continue many important functions (such as taking new orders) in the event that the internet connection in the office is down. Once the connection is restored then the new transactions will be uploaded.

Microsoft will be making many improvements to the offline application block in .NET 2.0 and this is one of the reasons why we are developing the Interprise Cart in this platform.

Jenny

rowen

04-10-2005, 01:12 AM

Too bad I joined this thread so late. During Fall '03 I spent considerable time reviewing Icode and Netsuite. We were using Peachtree and our business was reaching a point where we really needed a much more customer-centric system for processing orders, invoices, inventory, service, contacts, sales, etc... Our web orders were also increasing and the cart wasn't linked to the back-end. We do considerable mail-order and couldn't manage our list in Peachtree (double-entry everywhere).

Netsuite was impressive but we needed the complete version and price quickly added-up. Over a 3 year period we expected it would cost considerably more than Icode. If we added more staff than expected, it's per user/per month/year-after-year cost would outstrip a purchased license even quicker. On top of that, our access to the on-line demo did not run consistently fast. Didn't seem to matter whether we were using DSL or Cable access and some of the slower periods were late at night as well as 5pm. I wasn't comfortable with it.

So I bought Icode Everest Advanced, 5-user license, on Jan. 1 '04. I gave them $10k and expected to spend another $8k for implementation and a couple add-ons. We decided to wait to implement till we had a new accountant/IT person hired. We were ready to go by Sept. '04 and called Icode. Implementation costs had doubled and they wanted over $16k with a possibility it could hit $20k. I was going to go ahead but they were booked-up till early '05. We called them early in Jan. Now, they wanted to send a new quote! It came in at $37k not counting the add-ons we still needed. After adding those, the bill would be $45k with more due for the 2 new seats I wanted by that time. Can I even tell you how outraged I am!? Add in the original $10k and the cost of a pretty hefty new server, and Icode would have cost $60k for a company of fewer than 10 employees. That puts it into the same price range as a MAS90 or Great Plains implementation with local services. Granted, Icode is a better, fully integrated solution (in my opinion) but none of these guys seem to get the market for $1M to $10M small business software.

By the way, Icode doesn't want you to install on your own. You can't get any service or qualify for the annual maintenance plan until you pass a 23 page exam and pay them $2700 per try for a remote sysem-analysis performed by their engineer until you finally pass (probably after you've spent thousands more guessing what you'll need to fix).

So, Netsuite looks less expensive than it did a year ago but it's still too high and too slow and too inflexible. To those that are looking at the entry price for a single user, think ahead a couple years. If you're only going to have 2 or 3 people, it might be a good deal. If you're going to grow, look at the projected costs and think twice.

Now we're considerning ManageMore, Image Premier by Comtech Solutions and finally I've just become aware of the coming InterpriseSuite. I'm holding out great hope for the latter. It looks great and they understand the pricing of this end of the market. Fingers crossed!

Why do these software guys think you'll go from a few hundred dollars for QB or PT to $50k or more? Too bad Icode hired new execs from the mid-market (client companies over $100M). Though their program was so capable it was a bit harder to learn, it was a great solution that really fit the needs of the growing business market.

I've ranted long enough,

SonicCubeMC2

04-11-2005, 08:11 PM

Computerguy,

Sorry for the confusion, I might have made things more complicated than they should be. My points are actually simple. Point one, think if you can handle the worst case if you lost internet for 1 or 2 whole days before choosing internet based management software. Point 2, as software companies come and go, or as often as they change terms and conditions. It might be a better assurance to have the running piece of the software on your own computer than remotely hosted services.

Jenny,

Thanks for your explanation. But I wasn’t worrying about the shopping cart part of your package. I was worrying about the Accounting/Order Managing portion of this approach. As a programmer myself, I totally understand the technology portion of this kind implementation. However, as a business owner I would like to have my order information, customer information stored in the database locally. I would choose your third solution that is hosting the Interprise Suite Database locally in the office. At least in the worst situation that I lost internet connection for who knows how long, I will still be able to not only place the new order, but also search the old orders or complete any customer service related crucial tasks. Also, since Microsoft’s striped-down version of SQL server is offered as Microsoft Desktop Engine (MSDE) for free, a small business with little budget can enjoy the powerful SQL performance without paying for a full featured MS SQL server. As for the shopping cart implementation, I believe it will be vary valuable for businesses adding e-commerce capability to their existing channels. Our business model is the opposite. Our clients will first start an e-commerce website with the shopping cart system of their choice. While growing they will soon find the limitations of their shopping cart systems in terms of order/fulfillment/customer/support management. And that’s when we jump in, unfortunately we have to accommodate which ever shopping cart system they use.

Rowen,

For a company that will ask you to pay and pay more for simple things, it’s a company to avoid. How hard to write a nice installer that will do a self check to make sure the program itself is functional? Not to mention that you are paying $45k for the application. Take Windows XP Operation System for example, it is far more complex than any of the accounting software on the market. Still, anyone can put in the Windows XP CD in the CDROM and have a working system 30 minutes later. The business application consists of the database and the program. If it needs more than two installers, it’s a bad design. It makes me feel sad after reading your post. Small business is the best part of the economy. They don’t have money to waste. Still, people don’t have a heart to help small businesses grow. Even $10k can be used nicely to promote their businesses to the next level and the software companies are asking 4 times more just for the accounting software? Heck, for $40K, you can even develop your own customized solution to tailor fit your business. Many of this so called enterprise class software are even using Access database as the backend, the problem is, Access db is slow by design when used on a network and provides no self-maintenance capability other than the file itself. You also need to spend $$$ again for Microsoft Office License just to run it on each workstation. When the database size grows to couple hundred megabytes, it will be extremely difficult to use on the network with multiple users, not to mention multi-location VPN possibility. What do you do at that time? Pay a lot more for their SQL based “enterprise plus” edition again?

Best Regards,

George
http://www.MerchantCompanion.com

jelessy

04-12-2005, 10:26 PM

Very interesting thread everyone. Small business hosted solutions are more reliable and less costly than home grown self hosted applications. I will do some research with our Tatum Partners,(www.tatumpartners.com) and post which applications are best for a small business.

Fred Held Partners.

Carstone

04-14-2005, 06:08 PM

I just want to thank everyone for their well thought out comments and their time. This thread has been very educational to me and EXTREMELY timely. These companies have been courting me, too, and I have been holding off because of the same concerns stated. Interprise was a new name to me and thanks to this thread, I am checking them out. They appear to be much more realistic in their pricing for us little guys. I am now beta testing their software and am anxiously awaiting their store solution.
Thanks to all.

jelessy

04-17-2005, 12:56 AM

Hey, yahoo stores does all what C-Suite does and more for far less. It is time to wake up and smell the coffee.
Fred

sac9829

04-23-2005, 11:57 PM

Hi Guys

Im from Australia and am looking for an all in one online solution and seem to only be able to find one company in Australia which is offering this solution:

Netsuite

Does anybody know of any other companies which offer their products to Australian users.

sloan

04-25-2005, 05:02 PM

Icode has the makings of a good product but they have no clue how to deal with their customers. We have been on Everest/Accware for 4 years hoping and praying for improvements in their customer service. Instead they wanted $5,000 plus for unlimited support and maintenance on 10 seats per year. I am an expereinced user and don't need that sort of hand holding.
Now they have a new program, denying their users access to their forum, prior support tickets and bug/enhancement requests unless they are on maintenance. Maintenance now costs more and only includes a small discount off of the per incident fee that goes for $300+ per incident on top of the maintenance charges.
My efforts to negotiate with them have been not fruitful.
So basically unless I pony up $5k per year I am hung out to dry along with several other icode users I suspect. I will be looking for another package soon I suppose unless they change their tune.
Pretty revealing that icode had the forthought to register icod****s.com before any of their disgruntled users got to it.

sac9829

04-27-2005, 02:42 AM

SO would everyone agree that Netsuite is the product of choice?

cyberdov

04-28-2005, 10:17 AM

Icode users who have implemented, trained, and get support through VARs have a better experience than those who have dealt directly with Icode. A quality VAR has a direct interest in the customer's ongoing satisfaction and will be there to support the users for the long haul. Icode has VARS all across North America (including Pavey Associates, where I am the NY Partner).

ann_nyc

05-16-2005, 08:35 PM

Thank you all for your input - this has been a very informative discussion.

I am still early in my search for the right solution for our company, so I don't have much to add. I would investigate Icode with a degree of caution based on what rowan and sloan had to say. Denying liscensed users to forums, raising pricing, etc... doesn't seem like a company I would want to invest in with my time, money or my company's data.

Cyberdov, I appreciate what you are saying, having been a VAR in a past life, but I can't see how having to go through a reseller would make Icode a more attactive option. Although it is a positive to have a knowledgeable VAR for a product, I would still want to know that ultimately, the company that produces what I am purchasing will be as responsive to me, the customer, as my VAR.Icode users who have implemented, trained, and get support through VARs have a better experience than those who have dealt directly with Icode. A quality VAR has a direct interest in the customer's ongoing satisfaction and will be there to support the users for the long haul. Icode has VARS all across North America (including Pavey Associates, where I am the NY Partner).

Thanks

Skyytek

05-19-2005, 02:33 PM

Thank you Jenny and Computerguy. I actually told one of my importer friend to try Interprise since our Merchant Companion 2 does not manage shipment schedules and import/export related functions at this moment.

One thing I do not like about complete internet based solutions is that you are giving too much trust on your internet connection. Since most offices will not have business-class T1 service, the best they will get is probably business DSL which is not 100% "Solid" in real world. You are taking the risk that if the internet connection from your office somehow got interrupted, you will not be able to run your business at all. Another concern I have is that if they "quit", you would lost everything. You might have the backup data, but you will have to find another solution that will "take" the data. We see many businesses still run ancient DOS based applications, why, because their developers had long gone, so no more new versions for them. Luckily, they still have the software and can still perform their daily routines. If they were using internet or service based solutions, they will have nothing to run their businesses in this scenario. A business succeeds on its plan A, but a business survives on its plan B. We always have to prepare for the worst case imaginable.

Best Regards,

George
George,

The disaster recovery point is something to consider. It is important for all companies to have a disaster recovery plan. However, the loss of internet connection worry is a bit of a red herring.

Internet connections have excellent uptime track records. It is much more likely that the drive on your a server in your office goes down or that you get a virus or worm that lose your internet connection. Moreover, web-based applications such as Netsuite can be accessed from anywhere. So here is your disaster recovery plan in the incredibly unlikely event that your Internet connection is down:

(a) Have a coffee. It will be back up in a few minutes.
(b) Go anywhere that has an internet connection and keep doing business.
(c) To help with (b) use a virtual PBX such as SkyyCall from Skyytek and your customers will never know that you aren't at the office.

Over 8,000 companies are using Netsuite as a fully hosted net apps. No problems. Servers, back-ups and data security are taken care of as a matter of course.

Mark Walker
Skyytek Canada
www.skyytek.com

Skyytek

05-19-2005, 03:10 PM

By the way, folks.

Here is a powerful demonstration of the power of Netsuite. Skyytek was just named one of the top 15 accounting VARs in the world by Accounting Technology.

See story here(http://www.skyytek.com/s.nl/sc.7/SS.2221/ctype.SS/category.80/id.13/.f)

A really interesting aspect of the story is how small Skyytek is and how rapidly our sales have grown compared to the other top 20 VARs. NetSuite allows Skyytek to punch WAY above our weight, partner effectively and grow very rapidly.

As a direct result of this, we are offering special pricing until the end of May to celebrate. Contact me for details.

So if you are thinking about moving to Netsuite, Netsuite Small Business or NetCRM, now would be a good time.

Mark Walker
Skyytek Canada
mwalker@skyytek.com

dands

06-23-2005, 07:50 PM

We paid more than $100K for an iCode "implementation" and we are still not up and running more than two months after our scheduled completion date. All attempts to work with iCode to try to fix the situation have been met with a "not our problem" attitude, and their proposed solution to every concern has been to ask us to pay large additional fees. They are also very specific about letting us know that despite their recommendations and regardless of what we spend, they will not provide any guarantees that anything will work. Read the very limited terms on the invoice and you will get a good feel for what iCode is like to work with. "Thank you for your order. No returns are permitted and refunds will not be issued for software licenses or services."

jelessy

06-23-2005, 09:08 PM

Dands,

Go to www.tatumpartners.com and get one of the very experienced Information Technology Partners to help you. I used to be with them before I took on this CEO position. The important thing is for you to get your business processes running the way you want them. What ever iCode needs to supply believe me a Tatum Parnter will be more than capable of making that happen.

Best,

Fred

cyberdov

06-23-2005, 11:41 PM

dands has a sad and frustrating story which is unfortunately not unique. Those of you out there who are considering a software sytem implementation should consider using the services of a reputable VAR with good references. A good VAR will stand behind their estimates and work. For example our VAR organization has put in the extra hours required at no extra charge, if we originally underestimated the effort required.
And if you want to talk to us about salvaging a botched Icode implementation, please talk to us - we have done several of those as well and we will get it to work if it is at all possible. You can contact me via email.
Dov Weinstock
dov.weinstock@nycadvantage.com
www.paveyassociates.com

Skyytek

06-24-2005, 10:43 AM

Dands,

cyberdov is absolutely right.

The important thing to remember is that software companies are focused on selling software. VARs are usually focused on the quality of implementations - that is their competitive advantage. Most high quality VARs have a significant practice fixing botched implementations.

Although we are a NetSuite VAR with iCode experience, I can also hook you up with some iCode specialists. However, some of the folks on this thread should be able to give you perspective and references to help you decide on a course of action.

Good luck.

ppolishook

07-23-2005, 11:46 PM

Great thread everyone!

I run a small manufacturing company that does essentially no business via the web, although we'd like to start having our customers (businesses, not consumers) order online. We currently use a ten-year old version of Epicor Vista as our ERP/accounting system and we need to switch systems soon.

We are considering Quickbooks Enterprise (10 license version for $3,500) and NetSuite. I know that Quickbooks doesn't offer the webstore. NetSuite would seem to win hands down in terms of features vs. Quickbooks, but I'm extremely concerned about speed, particularly for order entry.

I've heard a few complaints that NetSuite is slow. So I'd love to hear from any NetSuite users about their experience regarding the speed of using NetSuite.

Thanks,
ppolishook

Jeff ransom

08-04-2005, 02:09 AM

There are several Icode solution providers throughout North America that sell and support the Everest product. You are able to receive top quality service and support at a reasonable cost.

www.ibsnw.com
Intelligent Business Systems LLC

bladinaction

08-09-2005, 02:53 AM

Here's our Icode sob story.
We were a fast growing clicks and mortar business (1.5M/year in 2001). We were looking for a solution just like Everest promised to be. You save money on payroll, one software for multiple locations, point-of-sale etc.
So we purchased a 10 user Everest license in Feb '02. Same as everyone else, they told us it would be up and running in a week if we hired their "implemetation engineers" to come on site for a week. So we paid $38000 for the whole deal and had them come out.
October '02 we scheduled them to come out. They had two guys come out (one was in training), and after a weeks time, nothing was working. All they could say was that the brand new Dell servers we bought would be reformatted(because these guys had messed them up so bad, they were the only ones that touched the machines). They couldn't even import the data from netsuite (which we were using for accounting at the time). So, they sent the qualified onsite guy back two weeks later. The software was "not ready for primetime". So we started using it without our previous data. We were on the phone with their support crew virtually every day because this or that didn't work right. Two weeks later they sent another support guy out (at our expense!) because they said we needed him to rebuild our database. Only one catch, all the information we had put in over the two weeks we were working on the system would have to be thrown out! So we bit the bullet, and got it done.
After that we spent at least 10 hours/week on the phone with their support folks (who speak hardly intelligible English by the way) and over the course of the first year submitted over 100 support "incidents". An incident was a situation where something didn't work right.
Here we are paying them to tell them whats wrong with their software! Thats not how it works...We should have been paid for being their lab rats.
We have talked to many Icode users and all of them have the same feelings and thoughts on this subject. No one is happy.
We are not lawyers, but if one of you out there reads this, you could probably make a lot of money off this situation. I don't know how they can get away with this FRAUD, but it has to stop before there are more victims.

If anyone would like to buy our 10 user license, you can get it at a bargain price of $20,000.

P.S. I don't know much about Interprise, but hasn't anyone noticed that their website looks and feels a lot like Icode? Who are these people?

rowen

08-18-2005, 02:40 AM

I don't think the Interprise people are related to Icode in any way. Interprise is written in the Phillipines while Icode is done in India. Some of the Interprise people were previously affiliated with Comtech Solutions (Image Premier) in Houston. Comtech opened a development office in the Phillipines and some of those people now work at Interprise.

I have a working demo of Icode and I also bought a 5 user license at $10,500 that isn't installed. They want more than $40k to get it going. I was supposed to get implementation somewhere between $8k and $20k but everytime I tried to schedule a date they raised the price. I like the working demo but it isn't always easy-to-use and I don't think my people would get as much out of it as they could due to the learning curve.

I also have a beta release of Interprise. I love it. Very intuitive user interface and it looks like there is a clear and logical way to customize it if necessary. The beta is buggy but then again, it is a beta version. Whether or not the first release version runs smoothly is anybody's guess. It's supposed to be out by the end of the year. If you're in a position to wait and see if they make a good start, then it might be well worth the wait. The biggest difference from Icode currently is the price!

cameraworld

08-22-2005, 10:21 AM

I'm a small business here in Australia ( www.cameraworld.com.au ) we purchased Everest Advanced a little over a year ago, we received our 'support charge' three months ago and it has increased more than 400% over the original pricing, they apparently have changed direction.

We paid it and the service is still the same rubbish as before, every release has consistant fatal bugs and we are about to sign up with NetSuite with still 9 months of support available from iCode (Shows how much their product is making our business suffer!), their support and product are rubbish! The supposed developers in Australia & Singapore complaign that they have huge trouble customizing the product due to the dreadful and more than $200US and hour support from iCode out of India, also everytime they load an update my site has to be virtually rebuilt from scratch.

Once my NetSuite site is finished, I'd be happy to give you the software for free! But personally the product is a bottomless pit for money with no return.
The CRM is a joke, the site cannot even be picked up by web crawlers so no organic rankings and the site goes down on average once a week. We pay for both iCode direct support & local supplier support, the Australian sales agent is so sick of iCode Indias pathetic support that he is dropping the product all together.

I may sound bitter, and I am, but the product honestly is average at best and even worse their support is tragic especially when you calculate the cost.

Do yourself a favour and look at NetSuite or some other product from a major supplier with 'local' support the less you have to deal with hardware, software and maintenance the more time you can have on driving your business making profits for you.

dands

09-06-2005, 12:18 PM

After several more months of trying to work with iCode, we have abandoned our Everest installation. We are now in the terrible position of having to decide what to do about the now $120K plus we have lost to this fraudulent and unreasonable company. Do yourself a favor and stay as far away from iCode as you possibly can.

DMuse

09-06-2005, 01:38 PM

Are you working directly with iCode or with a reseller?

Jason

09-09-2005, 07:57 PM

I have experienced all of the above.
All of us are in the same situation, we got fulled one way or another, they sold us a product that looked good, but had no real good backend, crashing all the time, crawlers can not pick up any pages, on and on ,
we should all get together & go after Icode guys legally,
they made our life misreble, lets make theirs worst, we paid them good money , & they took it & ran, now no real support , no good product.
one advice to all of you do not buy Everest.
We should all go to the district attorney & file a complain, may be at east we can get our money back.

danw

09-20-2005, 06:03 PM

danw

09-20-2005, 06:23 PM

OK, so I read all of the messages in this thread. I am hearing that most people are very upset with ICODE, I don't think I heard of 1 person say they like it. However it sounds like everybody is in the transitioning phase to another product like NetSuite or Interprise (when it comes out).

So are there folks out there that can rave about a solution (ICODE, NetSuite, etc.) that they have implemented and are very pleased with in all aspects (price, service, support, functionality,etc.)?

icodevictim

09-20-2005, 06:43 PM

I am in total shock right now, the level of service being delivered by Icode is the worst I have ever seen in 12 years with CRM, ERP and Finance system I have never come close to this level of frustration.

They sell software that doesnt work and then refuse to assist you.

As far as I'm concerned this company is fraudulent and needs to be stopped. Any of you other Icode Victims want to get together?

iCode employee

09-21-2005, 04:35 PM

There are two sides to every story.

The iCode customer satisfaction rating has continued to improve over the last 2 years as illustrated by the customer survey conducted on an annual basis every April.

The iCode product works and works well. This can be attested to by the thousands of customers currently using Everest Advanced and the significant number of customers willing to be referenced as to how Everest has had a positive impact on the way they manage their business.

iCode is willing to assist any customer who has a current maintenance contract. As with any software company, customer support is not free. iCode offers customers the option of either having an annual maintenance contract with unlimited calls to customer support or the flexability to pay by the call.

If you have a legitimate issue, please email me and I will look into the situation.

Randy

09-22-2005, 01:24 PM

I have been an Icode customer since 2001. I have found them to helpful and very supportive. I can not figure out who you are and why you are so bitter towards them? I have been in business for 52 years and find them to be a value oriented company with solid solutions.
Here's our Icode sob story.
We were a fast growing clicks and mortar business (1.5M/year in 2001). We were looking for a solution just like Everest promised to be. You save money on payroll, one software for multiple locations, point-of-sale etc.
So we purchased a 10 user Everest license in Feb '02. Same as everyone else, they told us it would be up and running in a week if we hired their "implemetation engineers" to come on site for a week. So we paid $38000 for the whole deal and had them come out.
October '02 we scheduled them to come out. They had two guys come out (one was in training), and after a weeks time, nothing was working. All they could say was that the brand new Dell servers we bought would be reformatted(because these guys had messed them up so bad, they were the only ones that touched the machines). They couldn't even import the data from netsuite (which we were using for accounting at the time). So, they sent the qualified onsite guy back two weeks later. The software was "not ready for primetime". So we started using it without our previous data. We were on the phone with their support crew virtually every day because this or that didn't work right. Two weeks later they sent another support guy out (at our expense!) because they said we needed him to rebuild our database. Only one catch, all the information we had put in over the two weeks we were working on the system would have to be thrown out! So we bit the bullet, and got it done.
After that we spent at least 10 hours/week on the phone with their support folks (who speak hardly intelligible English by the way) and over the course of the first year submitted over 100 support "incidents". An incident was a situation where something didn't work right.
Here we are paying them to tell them whats wrong with their software! Thats not how it works...We should have been paid for being their lab rats.
We have talked to many Icode users and all of them have the same feelings and thoughts on this subject. No one is happy.
We are not lawyers, but if one of you out there reads this, you could probably make a lot of money off this situation. I don't know how they can get away with this FRAUD, but it has to stop before there are more victims.

If anyone would like to buy our 10 user license, you can get it at a bargain price of $20,000.

P.S. I don't know much about Interprise, but hasn't anyone noticed that their website looks and feels a lot like Icode? Who are these people?

Randy

09-22-2005, 01:27 PM

Why are you complaining here, I have been an icode customer since 2001 and I have not problems with the product working. I have been in business for 52 years and have found Everest to be a solid solution to run my business on. You must not be a real company.

ave experienced all of the above.
All of us are in the same situation, we got fulled one way or another, they sold us a product that looked good, but had no real good backend, crashing all the time, crawlers can not pick up any pages, on and on ,
we should all get together & go after Icode guys legally,
they made our life misreble, lets make theirs worst, we paid them good money , & they took it & ran, now no real support , no good product.
one advice to all of you do not buy Everest.
We should all go to the district attorney & file a complain, may be at east we can get our money back.[/QUOTE]

Randy

09-22-2005, 01:33 PM

I have read some of the information posted on this site and I can't believe my eyes. I have been an Icode Customer since June of 2001. I have found them to be helpful and willing to work with me to solve any and all problems. I have migrated to their new product from Accware and I have been impressed with working of the product. The product is solid and stable and works fine for our 52+ year old company. I'm shocked that web site like this would cause any customer to not want to buy the product that was being slamed. The parties that write the articles that I have read show no credibility what so ever as the statements that are being made look more like Fraud and bad mouthing than fact. I personally made the decision to go with Icode products and my business is running fine. I'm guessing that your readers of this site must be out of business or close to it. We like the product and we are using it daily. I continue to see results from the Icode Everest product and will look forward to being a user of it for quite some time.

I am in total shock right now, the level of service being delivered by Icode is the worst I have ever seen in 12 years with CRM, ERP and Finance system I have never come close to this level of frustration.

They sell software that doesnt work and then refuse to assist you.

As far as I'm concerned this company is fraudulent and needs to be stopped. Any of you other Icode Victims want to get together?

Randy

09-22-2005, 09:48 PM

Bryan thanks for your version of things, now you starding a new business so I quess that you have not looked at Great Plains software. The product that you are referencing must be for a business with no Enterprise budget. I guess if you have few to none employees and your are counting every penny that you should consider any low cost option to run your business. Everest is for Companies that are looking for a long term solution that runs on a stable platform. I have been a customer of Icode's since June of 2001. I compared their product to 24 other software products and found their sollution to be superior with features and performance beyond the industry leader. I don't think that any product is perfect. I'm not sure where your comments are coming from but they are hardly accurate.

Starting a new business from the ground up, and I'd like to do it right the first time.

I was leaning towards iCode Everest Advanced, and planning on hosting the entire suite on a server at my ISP... ...but have just come across new information on NetSuite's hosted solution, which is sounding pretty good too...

What I'm looking for:
- all in one business management(!)
- ecommerce
- CRM
- inventory management
- sales & shipping
- integrated payments system

...is that everything?

Am I on the right track with iCode, or should I be looking at a wider range of solutions?

I contacted CoreSense, but the $15,000 startup fee left a sour taste in my mouth...(I don't think they fully understand the 'small' in 'small business'...!)

It's only myself for now, with another person possibly joining me in 6 months. I'd like to 50-90% online sales, but also have the ability to access a type of POS internal to the office (it's an automotive performance shop that sells performance and OE parts, as well as having a 'service' component and shop with face-to-face customer relations...)

Thanks for any help.

Randy

09-22-2005, 09:59 PM

I'm not sure how are what criteria that you use in evaluating software. I have been running a sucessful busines that is 52 years old. What about recurring expenses. What you are saying here makes no sense. I'm sure your product must be a rental product with recurring cost annually. What about support i'm sure that your figure does not include any support from the company and that you are paying for support and for training extra. And does your prodcut run on your own server or are you renting time on their system to run your application? Everest is in a whole different class to what you are refereing to product wise. You are bad mouthing a product that has features beyond maybe what your business can afford? hey don't buy the product if you don't want it. But to spend time bad mouthing the Everest product on this blog makes no sense.

If $15000 seems high you will be floored with the quotes you get from iCode and Netsuite. I was really pumped with what we saw at iCode, then they came back with a $59000 quote. We were floored!

We design, produce and distribute storage cases for digital products (www.slappa.com) and we sell to retailers, importers and directly to customers online.

We are looking for essentially what you had listed:

- all in one business management(!)
- ecommerce
- CRM
- inventory management
- sales & shipping
- integrated payments system
+ we want our accounting working in the same system/database

The only thing we may have that you don't is multi-currency.

We only have 10 users yet the quote from iCode was $6500 for the base license, $13,000 for the additional 8 licenses and $27000 for implementation/training and on site expenses.

Netsuite came back with $20,000 for 3 years of license. In all, these companies who are pitching their solutions for small and medium companies are not realistic. $60,000 is not an enterprise wide deal for a fortune 1000, but at the same time it's not a solution you are going to get many 10 person, 2 year old companies to bite on.

Over the past week I've been tempted to start up another business that brings such solutions to market at a price that is really for the small companies of the world

Randy

09-22-2005, 10:10 PM

I have found Icode's support to be timely and results oriented. I'm shocked that you have made the comments that you have. My expirence with them since June of 2001 has been a company that cares about the customer and hangs in their to make sure that everything works. I had VAR support with another software package SBT which was awful. The VAR did not have the knowledge and the ability to handle my source code application issues. Icode wrote their own package and has been able to deliver complete support including if necesseary providing patch's to fix problems. I guess that your customers did not want pay for service.

Icode users who have implemented, trained, and get support through VARs have a better experience than those who have dealt directly with Icode. A quality VAR has a direct interest in the customer's ongoing satisfaction and will be there to support the users for the long haul. Icode has VARS all across North America (including Pavey Associates, where I am the NY Partner).

Randy

09-22-2005, 10:14 PM

Why did you not contact the management of Icode. I quess complaining to the world and hiding here is the only way you survive as a person. I have found Icode to completely support their products even in a situation like yours they Icode would have helped you. You must not have paid for support with a contract. You must have wanted something for nothing. You get in life what you pay for. You must not have needed the product if you did not persue the situation in 2002! I have been an Icode customer since June of 2001 and I have found Icode to care and support me, but wait a minute I was not looking for something for nothing. Were you?

Here's our Icode sob story.
We were a fast growing clicks and mortar business (1.5M/year in 2001). We were looking for a solution just like Everest promised to be. You save money on payroll, one software for multiple locations, point-of-sale etc.
So we purchased a 10 user Everest license in Feb '02. Same as everyone else, they told us it would be up and running in a week if we hired their "implemetation engineers" to come on site for a week. So we paid $38000 for the whole deal and had them come out.
October '02 we scheduled them to come out. They had two guys come out (one was in training), and after a weeks time, nothing was working. All they could say was that the brand new Dell servers we bought would be reformatted(because these guys had messed them up so bad, they were the only ones that touched the machines). They couldn't even import the data from netsuite (which we were using for accounting at the time). So, they sent the qualified onsite guy back two weeks later. The software was "not ready for primetime". So we started using it without our previous data. We were on the phone with their support crew virtually every day because this or that didn't work right. Two weeks later they sent another support guy out (at our expense!) because they said we needed him to rebuild our database. Only one catch, all the information we had put in over the two weeks we were working on the system would have to be thrown out! So we bit the bullet, and got it done.
After that we spent at least 10 hours/week on the phone with their support folks (who speak hardly intelligible English by the way) and over the course of the first year submitted over 100 support "incidents". An incident was a situation where something didn't work right.
Here we are paying them to tell them whats wrong with their software! Thats not how it works...We should have been paid for being their lab rats.
We have talked to many Icode users and all of them have the same feelings and thoughts on this subject. No one is happy.
We are not lawyers, but if one of you out there reads this, you could probably make a lot of money off this situation. I don't know how they can get away with this FRAUD, but it has to stop before there are more victims.

If anyone would like to buy our 10 user license, you can get it at a bargain price of $20,000.

P.S. I don't know much about Interprise, but hasn't anyone noticed that their website looks and feels a lot like Icode? Who are these people?

Randy

09-22-2005, 10:28 PM

Your expirence with Icode is completely different than mine. It sound like you purchased the wrong product and now want to complain after making the decision. I have been an icode customer since June of 2001 and never one time have they Icode ever told me something that was not true. I'm shocked that you are taking this public forum to vent. Why not call Icode and discuss your concerns with them as a company directly. I guess hiding behind a blog is the best way to solve your business problems. Good luck and much sucess in your future.

I'm a small business here in Australia ( www.cameraworld.com.au ) we purchased Everest Advanced a little over a year ago, we received our 'support charge' three months ago and it has increased more than 400% over the original pricing, they apparently have changed direction.

We paid it and the service is still the same rubbish as before, every release has consistant fatal bugs and we are about to sign up with NetSuite with still 9 months of support available from iCode (Shows how much their product is making our business suffer!), their support and product are rubbish! The supposed developers in Australia & Singapore complaign that they have huge trouble customizing the product due to the dreadful and more than $200US and hour support from iCode out of India, also everytime they load an update my site has to be virtually rebuilt from scratch.

Once my NetSuite site is finished, I'd be happy to give you the software for free! But personally the product is a bottomless pit for money with no return.
The CRM is a joke, the site cannot even be picked up by web crawlers so no organic rankings and the site goes down on average once a week. We pay for both iCode direct support & local supplier support, the Australian sales agent is so sick of iCode Indias pathetic support that he is dropping the product all together.

I may sound bitter, and I am, but the product honestly is average at best and even worse their support is tragic especially when you calculate the cost.

Do yourself a favour and look at NetSuite or some other product from a major supplier with 'local' support the less you have to deal with hardware, software and maintenance the more time you can have on driving your business making profits for you.

Randy

09-22-2005, 10:34 PM

Jason i'm wondering if you are one of the folks that did not want to move forward to everest from Accware. You sound like an underfunded company that might have purchased the wrong product in the first place. I'm sure that you should qo to quick books for 1500.00 and call it a day. If you needed this type of product in the first place then your business should have been able to handle the conversion to the new product. I guess hiding behind this blog is the way you survive in business and life. Keep up the good work. Looking at things positively Icode is a product that competes against Microsofts Great Plains which is double to 2.5 the cost of Everest Advanced. The Everst product does work and solves problems.

I have experienced all of the above.
All of us are in the same situation, we got fulled one way or another, they sold us a product that looked good, but had no real good backend, crashing all the time, crawlers can not pick up any pages, on and on ,
we should all get together & go after Icode guys legally,
they made our life misreble, lets make theirs worst, we paid them good money , & they took it & ran, now no real support , no good product.
one advice to all of you do not buy Everest.
We should all go to the district attorney & file a complain, may be at east we can get our money back.

Gromit

09-23-2005, 09:12 AM

Curt

09-25-2005, 10:19 AM

I would bet money that the three nasty messages above come from iCode or one of its VARs. That kind vitriol doesn't make sense for someone without a personal stake in the outcome...

icodevictim

09-27-2005, 01:23 PM

All of us are misrepresenting the issues except Randy who has nothing but glowing words:) give me a break!

Randy seems like an internal employee trying to imploy a method of damage control, how is it that with so many bad dealings with Icode you have a stellar one, and a relationship that would prompt you to post here over and over again.

Let's be clear, if you were a customer or had any business accumen you would not have claimed to compare Everest with 24 other products, that is rediculas.

Also, the price is similar to packages like Great Plains and MSFT CRM, they have better integration, but lack flexibility, stability and have really poor service.

Lastly, let's stop saying Everest is the premier anything, they have a "Codie" award that is irrelevant, they are in no way even close to the top as far as market share or innovation.

icodevictim

09-27-2005, 01:26 PM

Just as a quick note, I have 3 people ready to join in on legal action, send me a personal message if you want more information

icodevictim

09-27-2005, 01:33 PM

You have got to be kidding me, publish even 100 happy customers, Icode does not get <7M in revenue with 1000's of customers..you guys are very funny.

There are two sides to every story.

The iCode customer satisfaction rating has continued to improve over the last 2 years as illustrated by the customer survey conducted on an annual basis every April.

The iCode product works and works well. This can be attested to by the thousands of customers currently using Everest Advanced and the significant number of customers willing to be referenced as to how Everest has had a positive impact on the way they manage their business.

iCode is willing to assist any customer who has a current maintenance contract. As with any software company, customer support is not free. iCode offers customers the option of either having an annual maintenance contract with unlimited calls to customer support or the flexability to pay by the call.

If you have a legitimate issue, please email me and I will look into the situation.

cameraworld

10-06-2005, 06:58 AM

Your expirence with Icode is completely different than mine. It sound like you purchased the wrong product and now want to complain after making the decision. I have been an icode customer since June of 2001 and never one time have they Icode ever told me something that was not true. I'm shocked that you are taking this public forum to vent. Why not call Icode and discuss your concerns with them as a company directly. I guess hiding behind a blog is the best way to solve your business problems. Good luck and much sucess in your future.
Thanks for your opinion Randy, but I do not appreciate being told I 'hide' behind a blog, I have taken my complaint to iCode who apologised allot then took four days to get back to me and recommended I seek support from their 'experts' in Malaysia who would resolve the issues, these people they recommended are the same idiots from Singapore who brought my site down in the first place, once I pointed this out it took them another two days to have a US representative contact me who wanted to to book a time with me in about two weeks. This is not what I call customer service.

I am very happy that your experience has been so 'great' but I'd like to point out that mine wasn't and if I was in the US I probably wouldn't have had the same issues, but if you live in Australia then you will definitely have issues, even the Australian distributor has dropped the product due to the huge number of issues with trying to deal with India! Hardly a case of odd man out am I...

Finally I'd like to point out that everyone is entitled to their opinion even you... who is obviously the resident expert on everything to do with Everest.

jesse glen

10-08-2005, 12:37 AM

First of all thanks to everyone for this discussion, I was lost amidst a sea of software before I came here. I have a few questions:

Does Netsuite have simple POS capability? I would like to be able to barcode all of our items, and have a scanner add and remove them from the shared web/accounting inventory system.

And the big question of course, what package should I go with, Netsuite or Interprise? I'll give you the lowdown on the company I work for:

We have 5 employees at the moment, and could expand that to as many as 10 within a year. Likely going to hover around 7-8 for now. We sell retail items, and have an online store featuring around 3000 products. We also have a small retail store. What we are looking for is a system that will integrate our accounting, inventory, and online purchasing in one package. One invoice, and accurate inventory across the board. Presently we are using Quickbooks and Miva Merchant, and we want to dump them for something better.

Any opinions or comments are appreciated.

Thanks,
Jesse

Oh, P.S. to the Interprise devs, any updates on a full release?

rowen

10-08-2005, 04:48 AM

Netsuite will cost you many thousands more, especially over time. However, Interprise isn't released yet so you'll have to be patient. We have a similar number of employees and have decided that Netsuite will cost $8k to $10k per year to get the features we want. Remember, it's a yearly license. You don't "own" any software.

rowen

10-08-2005, 05:41 AM

Insults aside, Icode is a disaster.
I bought Icode so I know what I'm talking about (and I did try telling them the problem). The people that trash it here have REASONS! Wait for Interprise Suite or live with the capabilities of a "boxed" solution. Quickbooks and Peachtree get better every year. You can add-on CRM with ACT and there are service/helpdesk packages too. That approach isn't "fully integrated" but it can be done for just a couple thousand dollars vs. $50K PLUS for Icode or $10K per year (every year) for Netsuite. MAS90 and Great Plains are even more expensive. Beware of the new Microsoft Office solution. They intend for you to switch-up to Great Plains when you get just a bit bigger. Peachtree thinks you should move-up to their own MAS90 but you can put it off a bit longer by getting CRM and other features with the "add-ons" from third party people (MAS90 doesn't have CRM either nor does Great Plains without "add-ons"). The truth is, the sales guys of all the "mid-market" software companies have charts that tell them how much you should spend on accounting software for your annual revenue level. I'm over $2M now and find that Microsoft, Sage and Icode all want over $50k from me for licenses and services. Netsuite is less up-front but will cost more over 4 to 5 years. I grew my last company to $20M before selling it. My people developed an in-house system using Foxpro. My current venture is my third. I've spent hundreds of hours reviewing software and the beta of Interprise Suite. My advice is don't give any money to Netsuite, Icode, MAS90 (or MAS200) or Great Plains until you're well over $10M in revenue (and I think you can avoid them then as well).

If you plan to stay a 1 or 2-man operation, with a healthy stream of revenue, Netsuite is a pretty good deal if you can live without some of the "enterprise" features. You won't need a hardware helper or a server and e-commerce is built-in. But it may cost you alot over the long run if you need alot of people on the system.

Quickbooks has more third-party add-ons than Peachtree but has always been weaker in inventory and distribution until the promised 2006 version. We're still using Peachtree. The 2006 version is much faster over the network than previous versions and the look-up tools are better. We use ACT for CRM - pretty basic but good enough. There is an ACT add-on called dbLink that gives you a way to include even more customer database stuff through ACT while keeping the accounting stuff linked from Peachtree. Very simple to run and very affordable!

If you want a budget-level integrated package (and can't wait for Interprise) look at ManageMore and ImageAccounting from Comtech Solutions. Both are priced in the low thousands and have all the features you mention.

iCode employee

10-11-2005, 08:16 PM

Hey iCodevictim a couple of points to think about;

1) I suspect your issue with iCode is not legitimate because if you were interested in resolving your problem you probably would have taken me up on my offer to look into the situation, and you didn't.

2) Randy is not an internal employee and has no vested interest in iCode other than being a loyal, satisfied customer.

3) iCode has been in business for 11 years and that would not have been possible if our customers felt has as little regard for iCode as you do.

4) get your facts straight...we are NOT <$7M in revenue and we Do have thousands of customers.

All of us are misrepresenting the issues except Randy who has nothing but glowing words:) give me a break!

Randy seems like an internal employee trying to imploy a method of damage control, how is it that with so many bad dealings with Icode you have a stellar one, and a relationship that would prompt you to post here over and over again.

Let's be clear, if you were a customer or had any business accumen you would not have claimed to compare Everest with 24 other products, that is rediculas.

Also, the price is similar to packages like Great Plains and MSFT CRM, they have better integration, but lack flexibility, stability and have really poor service.

Lastly, let's stop saying Everest is the premier anything, they have a "Codie" award that is irrelevant, they are in no way even close to the top as far as market share or innovation.

iCode employee

10-11-2005, 08:36 PM

Randy,

Could you be any more judgemental? People here are simply sharing their experiences. You've made it clear that you've had nothing but good results with ICode. Yippee for you...now why not try relating your experience without assassinating anyone's character?

Gromit, I disagree. While most participants do just share their experiences, there are plenty of judgmental comments and character assassinating going on that is not completely fact based...freedom of speech works both ways.

JPnyc

10-11-2005, 10:15 PM

Randy, amateur psychology has no place on the forum. Thank you.

davec

10-14-2005, 01:16 PM

What’s great is how Randy literally SPAMMED the board trying to derail any of the criticism that Icode has been under. I am glad you have been in business for 52 years, but some of us want to be retired long before we hit your age. We aren’t looking for products that are “ok” “satisfactory”. We want products that amaze us and not only meet our requirements but far exceed them with tools and features we never even though of.

The thing I want to point out is that products like Netsuite, even though it is a yearly fee, are allowing customers to make 10x 100x 1000x that amount of money.

How valuable is your business to you? Is spending $10,000 a year worth the 10 million a year you gross in sales? What about the things that have no monetary value? Your employees come into work, answer the phone, and in general deal with customers that have no idea about your products, how frustrating do you think that is? Do you want them to deal with the added frustration from horribly implemented solutions, or would you rather them zoom along with the tools they need and make an extra $50,000 in sales that day?

Its all about how efficient you can relay your information inside your company, and then use that information to give your customers the best possible service that you can. Keeping your customers in the loop and coming back year after year is a sign of success. Software like Netsuite allows a company to maintain and expand their operation to multiple locations, multiple states, and even multiple countries.

Most people here seem to be small business, and that’s cool. Some of the people reading this thread have to decide on a solution that meets the needs of today as well as tomorrow. The company I work for is a distributor and a manufacturer of industrial products. Our sales are in the millions each year, and that’s not including anything from the website. So at the start of this thread, it was about what is the best solution for me, but now its turned into a flame war between employees of these products and customers.

Let’s try to stay somewhat on topic =)

davecove

10-14-2005, 02:27 PM

You know, iCode is a mamber of the DC area BBB (www.dc.bbb.oeg) I just filed a complaint against them over their policy of not refunding the incident fee when the issue is a bug.

It is unconscionable (and I suspect illegal) that iCode breaks their own product and then charges every customer that calls in for a solution to a bug a non-refundable $195 fee to address it. At the best that leads to a dis-incentive to produce a bug-free product. iCode actually makes less money when it produces a bug-free product. Rush a release to market and make more on the support. At the worst it leads to purposeful bugs with the intent to make more money on the support.

As for legal options, I don't think that the district attorney is the right forum. I think that this is more a job for the state Attorney's General. If anyone else thinks that the 'pay for bugs' policy is illegal (fraud I am thinking) I would encourage you to send an email AND a fax or letter to your state's AG.

Dave

Speedyg

10-15-2005, 06:16 AM

Hi There,
I just came across the website and read Netsuite.
We are a company in South Africa and have been
fighting to find an all in one solution. After contacting 10
different companys such as Vcommerce and others
we opted for Netsuite, and are currently implementing it.

Why? Because they actually returned emails, took their time
and were willing to consider a South African company and a "small"
business and had a partner here.

Bryan, we are in the same business I'd love to have a chat with you.
www.speedworkz.co.za (old website)

Gromit

10-17-2005, 10:08 AM

I'm not a big fan of character assassination, fact-based or otherwise. Clearly there are a lot of people here who are less than thrilled with iCode and who have tried, with varying degrees of success, to resolve them with the company.

If you are indeed an iCode employee, I would think you'd alert your management to this forum -- they should know about the complaints and take steps to correct what could be a huge PR problem for the company.

danw

10-19-2005, 11:01 PM

I've spent the past few weeks looking into this and I think I'm coming to the conclusion that NetSuite is the way to go. The reasons are:
1. Fully hosted solution - we are a small company and I would rather not hire infrastructure people at this point. Sure I could buy SW and then find a place to have it hosted, but NetSuite provides it all for a reasonable price.
2. Comprehensive functionality - It seems that they have pretty much everything I need and I can customize if required at a later point.
3. Large Revenue/Customer base - They are in the 100s of millions in revenue with 1000s of customers.
4. Backed by Larry Ellison - large revenue/customer base combined with Larry Ellison indicates they will be around for a little while at least!
5. so maybe in the long run I pay a bit more, this will probably save me a bit more in the short term which is more important to me. I would rather pay less now and have a robust solution running quickly at a lower cost. This will allow my business to grow quickly and buy the time the costs end up catching up with me (4 -5 years down the road), I hopefully over the hump and have grown the company significantly and it becomes less of an issue.

Any thoughts on my reasoning???

Dynamo321

10-20-2005, 08:42 AM

I hear great things about Interprise Suite

JMaguire

10-20-2005, 11:37 AM

For what it's worth, I'm a journalist who has talked with a lot of e-commerce owners about software platforms, and I'm impressed with the positive buzz about NetSuite. It seems like a company that offers a reasonably priced product that's well-respected in the industry, and the company is on its way up.

iCode employee

10-20-2005, 03:36 PM

Davecove

You can't really believe that iCode deliberately creates bugs in the code to create a revenue opportunity. Do you really believe the company is less profitable if it creates a bug free product?

Application software unfortunately has bugs from time to time. iCode offers it's customers the opportunity to purchase an annual maintenance plan whereby customers may call customer support for assistance (an unlimited number of times) on a variety of subjects including "how to" questions so the customer can better utilize the application. Customers on the annual maintenance program also receive all the upgrades and enhancements to the product free. (Incidentally, this annual maintenance fee is lower than all of our major competitors.)

I realize you don't like being charged for assistance but try to understand that there is a cost involved with customer support and iCode does not, under any circumstance, try to create issues in the software so we can charge for the issue to be resolved.

Dynamo321

10-20-2005, 03:46 PM

Our corporation handles it:
Software bug reports or help: Always Free
How to questions: Chargeable $7 per call billable in 10 min increments.

Yes every application will have bugs. It is hard to write a 100000 page word document without one spelling mistake and having every chapter back link to multiple chapters in a flawless manner. In large applications like ours and the one we are debating recursiveness is always a pain. The intent though is of course to never have bugs.

We have worked tirelessly over the last 7 years to ensure our software is relatively bug free however the statement still remains true: Where man meets computer, there will always be a bug :)

InfoSourcing

10-24-2005, 03:24 PM

Hi,

My 2 cents here, few extended thoughts on “your reasoning”.

I've spent the past few weeks looking into this and I think I'm coming to the conclusion that NetSuite is the way to go. The reasons are:
1. Fully hosted solution - we are a small company and I would rather not hire infrastructure people at this point. Sure I could buy SW and then find a place to have it hosted, but NetSuite provides it all for a reasonable price.
2. Comprehensive functionality - It seems that they have pretty much everything I need and I can customize if required at a later point.
3. Large Revenue/Customer base - They are in the 100s of millions in revenue with 1000s of customers.
4. Backed by Larry Ellison - large revenue/customer base combined with Larry Ellison indicates they will be around for a little while at least!
5. so maybe in the long run I pay a bit more, this will probably save me a bit more in the short term which is more important to me. I would rather pay less now and have a robust solution running quickly at a lower cost. This will allow my business to grow quickly and buy the time the costs end up catching up with me (4 -5 years down the road), I hopefully over the hump and have grown the company significantly and it becomes less of an issue.

Any thoughts on my reasoning???

1. Fully hosted solution - Yes, fully hosted solution would be the next wave in software. Keeping up with technology and passing on the benefits to consumers is very important. NetSuite does that very well, for their hosted solution they have given a rich user interface with help of AJAX technology/tool, making the applications equally good to desktop/thick client usability.

2. Comprehensive functionality - "One size doesn't fit all..." being a hosted solution you lose certain functionality such as POS, which is sole functionality requirements for retail industry.
Being hosted solution helps start-up companies to have web presence at easy, but gets painful to grow in terms of capitalizing on new marketing trends such as SEO and SEM, which is a must in today's world and don’t want to be dependant with vendor.

3. Large Revenue/Customer base - Hmm this is good point, but again as we have seen when companies grow big you either hit the ceiling or you grow fat for your legs :) and you may crash like QuickBooks with millions of users who can't grow beyond 5/10/15 users (with enterprise maxing out at 15 users)

4. Backed by Larry Ellison - True good in a way, but history of Larry shows he can do what he wants to do, who knows if he takes all of us for a boat ride in his yatch - Rising Sun

5. Long run - Calculating the ROI is tough, let's say if you are selling some fast moving products and would like to cash out then I would suggest a powerful ecommerce with good backend office mgmt tool, would increase your online sales and you see a greater healthier ROI.

a) For now NetSuite is commanding in the mini-ERP space, however there are new-comers joining the race, look out for Interprise and Evolution, they have right technology for serving SMB and their cost is much better than NetSuite, only drawback is they yet to gain credibility.

b) Everest is not a bad software, reading the comments on this forum tells the tale of the management resulting in such an outcry, but it has a good integrated solution though, better than obsolete solutions like Accpac, Great plains, Peachtree and QB where the applications are not integrated and are based on old technology.

It would be interesting to see Microsoft’s new Project Green application supposed to be released in 2007 integrated with MS office.

Ideally the Future of ERP is based on "Software As A Service (SAAS)" where you rent/lease the service for conducting your e-business at easy. I would give 5 star ratings for NetSuite and re-visit in 6 months time frame and check if it still holds good.

Dynamo321

10-24-2005, 05:55 PM

1. Fully hosted solution - Not to disagree but I will disagree. I believe a blended solution will be the wave of the future. Fully hosted solutions will always have the limitations of needing a hosted connection. When you can work online and offline in a seamless manner a new type of experience can be found. There is only one business application that I know of that does this flawlessly. I know others have tried and failed or are trying in some way but still have a long way to go.

2. Comprehensive functionality – Once again here is where a blended solution does the best of all worlds. With a semi-disconnected application you can benefit for local POS and other application data while instantly sharing that data around the world. That is again why I believe a blended solution will dominate the marketplace in the months and years to come.
“Being hosted solution helps start-up companies to have web presence at easy, but gets painful to grow in terms of capitalizing on new marketing trends such as SEO and SEM, which is a must in today's world and don’t want to be dependant with vendor.”
I completely agree with you and that is why again in my opinion a blended solution is the best way to go. You still maintain control while realizing full versatility.

As for the other thoughts: Great points info-sourcing and great point of view. You rock as always!

I think this is the best link any modern business should read:
http://darwinproductions.net/Presentation/ShowSlide.aspx?SlideID=3C6B75A3-6D09-4D0A-9D28-FD6E73D30293&FileName=%7e%2fPresentation%2fWhyChooseEvolution.x ml
If not for a company to purchase the solution but to simply understand what can be achieved with a semi-disconnected reality as this is what new technology is bringing to the table. Soon the old limitations of the past will become exactly that: A thing of the past.

Gil10018

10-25-2005, 10:50 AM

If you are truly looking at a small ecommerce site, I believe a hosted solution would suffice for day to day business needs. Now... if you're looking at things that require real time automation, for example, please consider that a hosted solution is limited to your connection speed and as such might be an additional bottleneck in your business flow. Consider that you are shipping packages from your a warehouse, your flow might look like this: your shipper will need to pick the products (are you considering barcoded products with serialized inventory?). Scan the invoice, Scan the items (are you able to connect a bar code reader to the platform you're choosing?), seal the box, print the label and go to the next invoice. In general, this might take up to 20 seconds. If you're using a hosted solution, the data transfer over the web might take 20 seconds in itself, not withstanding the physical labor desribed above. Also consider automation, a HUGE request from our clients. Does a hosted solution offer Business Process Management (BPM) or Business Activity Monitoring (BAM)? Consider that in today's market, business is most always time of the essense. Does your system automatically react to situations? Can you build intelligent automation in a hosted solution? Consider a real world scenario... We have a client with a 5 man crew that ships over 1000 packages a day. I cannot imagine how to accomplish this without automating a multitude of processes. Mind you that this company started 3 years ago with only a husband and wife team. Take care of your bottlenecks by automating your processes. Not only will this increase your capacity but will lower your costs and most likely increase your customer satisfaction! A hosted solution is a bottleneck in itself.

I hope this help,
Gil
Devix Group LLC
http://www.devix.com

Dynamo321

10-25-2005, 11:05 AM

Right on Gil.

natureday

10-30-2005, 11:10 PM

You should put money into a business like that, and don't go the cheap route cause you are going to own it for life (hopefully.)

rsingh

11-02-2005, 02:14 PM

I would like some feed back on Southware. I am helping new racing parts company pick accounting software. The plan on being both click and morter.

Thanks

DMuse

11-08-2005, 09:26 AM

Just wondering if folks saw that Everest Software (used to be iCode) announced version 3.0 of Everest Advanced yesterday.

Part of the announcement was a new software developers kit and a focus (or maybe "refocus" is a better word) on developing channel partners.

It will be interesting to see if opening up the software lets resellers help SMBs get their money's worth.

coopertool

01-01-2006, 01:00 PM

InfoSourcing

01-03-2006, 12:53 AM

Hi,

If such thoughts cross your mind next time drop me an email info@info-sourcing.com or visit my website http://www.info-sourcing.com/ERP_Enterprise.htm and maybe I have a solution that fits every budget and every customer to keep them happy...

I exclusively help Everest customers, coz of in-depth knowledge in the enterprise software and passion to succeed.

Everest is a grt integrated software with a bad customer satisfication not sure why? I will let icode mgmt figure that out ...

coopertool

01-04-2006, 03:53 PM

To all existing everest software owners, I wish you the best. If you are a small business and you looking for solution, I warn you ahead of time, do not consider everest. These people are crazy. What I am telling you here is first hand experience. I bought a sing user from which has now expired the service contract. After reading this forum I called them today. Lo and behold. Below is a copy of the quote they sent me to renew my service. I know we have reps on the forum but unfortunately, this came directly from the company. Remember this is only a single user. I am sure they gone senile.

It was a pleasure speaking to you. Per our conversation, the support renewal pricing for your license is:

Base license (Accounting and Inventory): $1040
Ecommerce: $800
Databridge: $240
POS: $400
MailBridge: $192
PageBoost: $240
CRM Studio: $800

I have not included Payroll or Pocket Everest, per our conversation.

jazzcat

01-04-2006, 06:09 PM

Coopertool,

Did the software stop working? Or, does the software continue to work but the support contract is expired?

In either case, if I were in your position, I would write back and say that I'd be glad to pay $1,000 for all of those items OR I'd be glad to pay a consultant to move me to something else. Give them a choice: either they can continue to keep you as a valued customer and make $1,000, or they can continue to be unreasonable and make $0. There are lots of consultants and others here chomping at the bit to sell this kind of s/w - with Interprise you can get it for free, and there are other free or low-cost solutions as well.

rowen

01-04-2006, 07:00 PM

3 days ago the CEO of icode sent out a customer mailing via email and copied about 1/3 of his customers email addresses into the cc: block. An "ad hoc forum" immediately sprang into life as angry customers began hitting "reply to all" and asking if anyone was actually satisfied with Everest. You wouldn't believe how mad some of them are. A few are "satisfied".

A real forum was just opened up for Everest customers. Here is the link:
http://hstore.infopop.cc/groupee/forums/a/cfrm/f/51310998921

The administrator says you're invited to join and read comments from actual users and anti-users alike. He has posted a link to this forum so Everest users can become aware of other options and read the views of a larger community.

coopertool

01-04-2006, 09:39 PM

Jazzcat
I aint want anything more to do with everest. I pretty much told them go to hell. I will reccomend to all my clients to use Interprise Suite. I intend to support them 100%.
Did you not read that many of the people want to leave too?

ESE

01-12-2006, 11:59 PM

a little late in the thread but I just found it.

we are using Everest Advanced for www.eurostyleseast.com and personally I'm really pleased with the results....

but....

I would never recommend it.

Having a technical background I was able to skip the training. The learning curve wasn't too steep. I know if I didn't have such a background, I would have been in big trouble. The ecommerce site is lacking to say the least, and many little hacks had to be implemented to get it up to par with most of the other feature-full ecommerce packages out there. Accounting is antiquated and isn't even used. Luckily we didn't pay much for the software, as the only features that are worth anything are the inventory and sales/purchasing processes.

The lack of application customization is probably my biggest disappointment.

Our service contract is up and will not be renewed. When we require a new all-in-one solution, it'll be with a different company.

furniture guy

01-13-2006, 01:32 AM

Has anyone looked at Adept.net or AccTrak21 for in-house, integrated solutions instead of netsuite, or everest? Adept.net looks pretty good, except the web part is a little fuzzy to me.

EricS

01-24-2006, 12:40 PM

This thread started a long time ago but I will add my experience. Everest works great for us BUTTTTT almost all said before is true. I started a company using peachtree which got outgrown. Found Everest looked great bought into about 2 months before the supposedly restructured the company for a single user license $3500 ($2500 for license $1000 for like 10 1 hour phone calls for implementation). One really needs a strong IT background to get it going on your own I cant not count the hours in setting it up, reading and getting the knowledge I needed to make it work. Good now but not when you are busy trying to make a business work. I imagine that’s what a lot of the other peoples problems were but they paid for implementation it should have worked and worked right. We did not renew our contract with Everest because to get what we originally paid $2500 for now cost $5200 a year every year when we signed up it was $500 and we were told that it would not change. Everest is decent software in my opinion but there people skills **** they will not budge on their prices for support. And the support you receive is ok at best in my experience. At the $2500 price it was a great deal now I think it’s not worth it

Dynamo321

01-24-2006, 12:50 PM

You are not the first person to have said that. I am quite astounded at the number of truly frustrated customers Everest presently has. It hurts me to see companies spend well earned money on solutions that provide headaches at every corner. I believe this is one of the reasons why so many are flocking to our software.
I am sorry you had such a frustrating experience EricS. Thank you for your post.

asr_guy

01-24-2006, 09:36 PM

Another option to packaged products is to hire a solid e-commerce development company that can build a custom site for you based on open-source products. I work with such a company and they build SEO friendly e-commerce sites from the ground up. Then I add in web analytics to improve conversion, online marketing techniques, and affiliate systems to handle the sales channels.

I recommend customers hire an appropriate e-commerce consultant to do the evaluation of the needs and select either a package (e.g. like Evolution) + some tweaking or else go with a custom site.

Much of it depends on the amount of integration you need to do with other systems, which is the "gotcha" in e-commerce.

Regards,
Peter

lightguy

01-24-2006, 09:58 PM

Has anyone tested this package yet? www.distone.com

I have no idea what pricing is, but they claim to be "Small Business" not "Icode Small Business" I'm still having sticker shock from the quote from Icode. They just don't get the mass market of 1-10 users.

InfoSourcing

01-24-2006, 10:31 PM

Hmm a new one haven't heard about them, need to research more on this one ... But did you look into Evolution, Interprise Suite they should fit in your "small business" category....

Everybody defines small, medium and big the way they percieve it ... For me small, medium and big is defined by "how much would you like to spend for such a solution compared to revenue that is generated from your business, minus the pain points/headaches in automating it".

iCode's solution is not for 1-10 users for sure, with its growing cost, you are better of buying a branded solution like NetSuite ...
OR
If you are a 10 user company ready to invest 30K and recover the software cost within couple of years then any software would be a grt solution...

I would recommend to all business owners to do some GAP analysis, where in you create a spreadsheet and weigh every factor like cost, hidden cost, implementation, training, support, customization, running cost, etc then it becomes very clear who could be your software vendor and at what price.....

phil bonello

10-20-2006, 10:57 AM

Hi

I have seen all the issues here with Icode. I bought Icode advance about a year and a half for a project that never came off. But I am thinking of using it now becuse of the integration. What is really needed is the service, pos, ecommerce and accounting. But now I am having second thoughts. My first experience was good. Dont know about now.

Please advise
I'd be very cautious about working with this firm. We've been trying to work with Everest for 10 months and haven't implemented one item. They seem to have data intergration problems and have a documented history with us of not returning calls.

Rebecca Palm

10-24-2006, 07:04 PM

Hi Phil,

I'm sorry to hear about your bad experience. As a competitor of iCode, I'm just curious what type of business you are running and what your requirements are to go live. I'd just like the feedback on important issues for customers.

Thanks,
Rebecca

Comtech Solutions Worldwide, Inc.
www.comtechsolutions.com

mikewest

04-01-2007, 04:51 PM

This thread just keeps going with disappointed Everest users, so I'll add my experiences. We licensed our software through a VAR just before (A) Icode scuttled their VAR channel, and (B) jacked up the costs with no warnings. They had made numerous changes to their pricing structure over the previous years, never quite sure what market they wanted to serve, and, we jumped in when we thought they finally had their act together. How wrong could we be.

We were first very interested in Accware (now Everest) for the rich integrated feature set offered. Unfortunately, implemenation was hampered by the VAR being cut off from icode support during the shake-up. When I contacted icode for support, they were marginally helpful on issues that IMHO should have been better documented in the first place. Then, I got the sticker shock for renewed support contract. Icode had increased the cost of their software more than 500%. Grudgingly, we paid for the additional support. Icode wanted to sell us further "implentation" services for the new version of the software. At this point, they were claiming, once again, on their web site, that they were looking for VARs, but all the while, they told me that a VAR would never be able to offer the level of support that going direct with icode could give us. FYI, their VAR recruitment material references how extraordinarilly lucrative training and implemenation can be and they emphasize how the cost of training alone would likely far exceed the cost of the software.

Since then, we have decided that their product was a very poor value for an SMB, the market they claim to target. We did not renew the support contract and made do with what we had.

I also found their support forums to be frstratingly sparse. I never felt that there was much user to user communication and that this was a completely closed system.

Now, we are looking for something updated and I'm in the preliminary stages of finding a replacement. We're looking for something that is open, readilly supported, and affordable. That's why I'm 99% convinced that open-source is the way to go at this time. I don't think these options were ready for prime-time years ago when we decided on Accware (now Everest), but now, we're just cutting our losses and exploring the open source options.

As I said our search is in the early stages, but there are two (or four if you count the forks) products out there that might fit the bill. We're looking at The Apache Open For Business Project (http://ofbiz.apache.org/) or the derivative work opentaps (http://www.opentaps.org). The other contender(s) is Compiere (http://www.compiere.com/) or the fork Adempiere (http://www.adempiere.com/). Each has different strengths but, at first glance, the integrated feature set seems on a par with Everest. Integration, training, and customisation costs promise to be much lower than those for Everest.

So, there are definitely alternates to Everest, and my recommendation is to choose one, any one, so long as it's not Everest.

Good luck.

KCI Web

04-03-2007, 11:17 AM

We are now using Stonedege order manager www.*********.com
having used a different solution with very little support for the last 11 years, it is like a breath of fresh air- they have a room full of techies waiting to help with support plus an on line forum open to the public from their home page- show me another software vendor that offers that. My first request from icode when investigating everest was top let me on their forum for a few days- no way would they. order manager is based on Access and this is a limitation except they have been rewriting it since 1998 with the input from their users- most small to medium ecommerce sites, so they have an incredible array of features. The cost is just $1500 to get started and the enterprise version that runs on an MSSQL database (with access terminals) is about $5500. We generally process from 100-200 orders a day and crashed on a Wednesday-valentines day and got up and running on the following Monday! We are still sorting things out but have our quantity on hands live on the site and the order import is fine. The .NET programs don't seem to be ready for primetime IMHO with interprise still buggy and support is in the Philippines (do they have an actual release after years of promotion?), netsuite is too "big business" with salespeople that maybe used to sell cars, Evolution seems OK but support is really from the one guy that wrote it, Everest is a horror story as all in this thread know. Support is the name of the game for us and the guys at ********* are second to none. Call them up, they "go to my pc' to your machine- get it done and all with nice attitudes - a rare find in the support world! No, I do not work for them, but Barney runs his business the way I try to run mine and if I was a techie I wouldn't mind working for him!

KCI Web

04-04-2007, 09:09 PM

To clarify my post above, when I said that we crashed on Valentine's day, I was referring to our old software (not Order Manager from *********.com) We were sitting with broken software that we could not recover, and hundreds of orders to process. I made the decision to install Order manager on our network on Thursday night and start from scratch. We installed it on a server and a half dozen terminals, installed new charging software (got off of ICverify- a real dog - and onto PCcharge which seems really great so far), imported 8000 inventory items from our site, and by Monday we had 6 people trained. We started charging that day and have been happy campers ever since. The integration is amazing- fully integrated with UPS and Fedex shipping so we can just scan a barcode on the invoice and the shipping record is populated. There are too much features to mention here, but these guys have been working hard to create a great product. For small (under 10 user) ecommerce companies, I have not seen a better product.

Gary Harrison

04-11-2007, 08:51 PM

The .NET programs don't seem to be ready for primetime IMHO with interprise still buggy and support is in the Philippines (do they have an actual release after years of promotion?)

Hi KCI,

I’m happy that you found a solution that meets your needs. Personally, I’m not a fan of all the import / export, upload / download involved with trying to connect a website with a order management system with a shipping system and with QuickBooks. Too much can go wrong and it makes it very difficult to provide accurate information when being audited since the data is so spread around.

I prefer real-time coordination between the website and backend system from both a database and business logic level. This way whether a customer orders online or over the phone they get the same exact options and prices. Also things only need to be setup one time reducing the ongoing cost of maintaining multiple databases.

Just to clarify on the Interprise Suite release, we had a open beta period where we brought outside companies into the development process of the application. This lasted for about 18 months. With nearly 1,000 companies in over 50 countries making suggestions there was a lot to incorporate. The application has been released and we will be issuing a new version later this month that will incorporate a number of new features such as the ability to run multiple websites from one company data file and a fully integrated shipping system.

While you may not feel that .NET applications are ready for primetime there is no debating that .NET applications are the absolute future. I think that any company making a long term investment in technology should think about what kind of technology they want to be running in 2010, 2014 and beyond. As the former principal of a company that created and marketed a very nice access based accounting system (4.5 stars in CPA Software magazine) I can tell you there is no comparison when it comes to scalability and data reliability between access based and .NET based systems. Unfortunately there is also no comparison in the development time as well since it only took about 8 man years to create in access what we have taken over 200 man years to create in .NET. As for access client programs that connect to SQL via ODBC - We tried this with my former company and found this to be pretty useless since you can not use any of the SQL stored procedures (which is the main benefit of using SQL) and the ODBC layer slows data access.

To clarify on support we offer support through our resellers, our U.S. office, our U.K. office and our Philippines office. Most North American support issues do go to the Philippines office first whereas most U.K. / E.U. support inquiries are handled in the U.K. first. Our Philippine based support agents each have a college degree in accounting or computer information systems making them highly qualified. Since you mentioned Netsuite it may be appropriate to note that they also base much of their support from the Philippines as well.

http://news.inquirer.net/infotech/index.php?index=1&story_id=59737

I’m curious to know that since you are not a customer how did you experience our support department?

KCI Web

04-12-2007, 10:31 PM

Thanks for the reply. I agree that a .NET solution would be perfect- if it worked, had adequate support and worked at a reasonable price. I have faith that they will someday.
I run a company and we have many people depending on our software working. We don't have the luxury to beta test or run version 1.0 of anything. That being said, we have been and are still interested in .NET apps. I recognize them as the future and we have been investigating them. Interprise seems very well laid out and the integration with aspdotnetstorefront seems phenomenal. The sales pitches and slick web sites rarely tell the whole story, though, and your software is very new.

We participated in a demo of your program during which it crashed for your worker repeatedly. This is somewhat understandable as it was still in beta (but had been in beta for over a year!), and I wish you luck. I may very well want to get on board with you all, but I will have to see that it is ready for prime time first. It will likely take some time to get the features in line with what the customers are looking for. I will download the single user when I get some time and give it a run.

Right now, *********.com offers an incredible solution out of the box and phenomenal support. The uploads, downloads et al are inconveniences, but it works and allows us to offer the shopper the best experience and our back office can breeze through the order management.

Your type of app is the future - Please get the rest of it right - immediate support for users, rapid updates in response to users' needs, fair pricing, and how about a public forum on the site? Good luck.

Gary Harrison

04-16-2007, 06:49 PM

randyschuster

04-29-2007, 09:24 AM

This blog was unbeleivable!

Some of points are valid however - google can't crawl the website prior to version 4.0. and my other bitch is I can't manually correct a control account.

I am a self proclaimed computer guy (no real training), so all the piddly details of the systems don't cost me money to fix.

1.) The software doesn't easily support case pack. - my solution - custom numeric field for case pack. and create my own pick tickets through crystal. - I prefer my own pick tickets, because I can put all sorts of controls on them and also print them in spanglish. My cost: 5 hours my time. If I paid for it probably over $1000.

The list goes on and on.

Personally, I absolutely love the program. Wouldn't dream of changing. We are a very small company - two owners, two customer service and one shipping manager. We add six seasonal warehouse employees for a few months. We ship Christmas related products from June 15th through December 15th. We processed over 12,000 orders last year and plan on growing our transactions by 10,000 orders this year. We run credit cards on about 15% of the orders at the ship stations.

We are very confident that our Icode software won't crash during our busy season. I implemented the software myself so the cost was under $10,000 for 5 users. (only reget during installation: I wish I would have paid a little money to have them help me with the chart of accounts) I paid $2500 more for an additional website, and I just paid $5000 for 5 more users which will be used to add another 5 shipping lanes in our warehouse. I think maintenance fees are about $5,000 a year give or take.

ICODE support is good. For $199.95 (although I would have paid $200 :) They fix technical problems and help with migrations to new servers. I personally don't purchase the unlimited call plan, but prefer to pay the $200 when I need them. Usually about twice a year.

RobbieB

05-10-2007, 06:09 PM

Wow, this is a great topic I read every post except Randys many many replies. It's unfortunate to hear all the bad icode stories, I wonder if that's why they changed names two times... if I read correctly they were also called accl something and now they're called everest? :/

Anyways. I wish I would have found this post a lot sooner. I've been looking for over a year now but when I first started I didn't know ANY of the proper terms so it was extremely difficult for me to start not knowing what to look for. All I knew was I needed something better than quickbooks/peachtree I would have saved a lot of time finding this topic sooner or atleast knowing the term, erp, crm, oms etc. I'm waiting on Interprise Suite Advanced edition. I hope that comes around shortly after SP1 because I really need the advanced warehousing features. I had looked into coresense, mainstreet commerce, order motion, mas 90, mail order manager, ecometry, salesforce and a couple others. MOM looked decent but after researching more, it didn't have accounting and it was built in foxpro which microsoft has decided to stop developing.

The most valuable information I got from this thread was if anyone is considering Everest... think HARD and TWICE before you sign that dotted line.

Oh I just wanted to add for anyone still considering opensource. I think VirtueMart is probably the best thing out there on the webside of things and it's capabilities are on par or greater than many commercial solutions. The backend to me seemed a lot easier to use and configure than aspdotnetstorefront and legarde storefront IMO. Basically it's a complete set of modules and components you can setup on a joomla website (and mambo i think). Anyone whos ever checked out cms should know about joomla and how much it kicks butt. especially compared to phpnuke... :eek: I just shivered while thinking about it lol. In regards to open source erp, the pickings are slim as are the communities that support them so just make sure you can really support yourself if you go that route.

lonphillips

05-13-2007, 06:47 PM

Has anyone tried Veetro yet? They say they are a one-stop solution, but I am leery...

The web site is http://www.veetro.com/ and it was listed as one of the 100 Sites in the Freelancer's Toolset.... http://www.cogniview.com/convert-pdf-to-excel/post/the-freelancers-toolset-100-web-apps-for-everything-you-will-possibly-need/

Chris_WI

05-31-2007, 06:01 PM

We too tried Icode's Accware (now Everest) in 2002. The implementation attempt failed, and shortly after we told them we were abandoning their product they tried to sell me the *new* Everest Advanced for only twice what I paid for Accware.

Five years have passed and we're revisiting the whole Ecommerce/CRM/ERP topic. I've spent many hours researching the various options, and here's a quick run-down of companies I've talked to so far:

http://www.mainstreetcommerce.com - Looks like a very good program. Very customizable. Written with the latest technologies in mind. As of now, a flat $15,000 license if they host it, or $20,000 deployed. Their intention is to meet 80% of your needs "out of the box" and customize the other 20% (at $125/hr) to your liking. Even the $15,000 is more than I want to spend, but they are either number 1 or 2 on my list right now -- does anyone have any experience with them? I spoke with the CEO and others, and have gotten good impressions from each person I've spoken with so far.

http://www.devix.com - This is the other company at the top of my list. If it were'nt for the $60,000+ price tag (they will lease it for 60 months), I think I'd already be a customer. This software seems to do everything but wash the dishes, and the customers I've spoken to seem satisfied (I called customers I found on my own, NOT customers from their referral list!). A MAJOR feature they have is something call the Business Process Accelerator, which they say allows you to set rules for any business function or process that can be logically defined. For example, send an email to any wholesale customer that purchased x product in the past but not in the last x days, then set a phone call followup for 7 days thereafter. They said they support all the price engine data feeds, multiple sites with one database, purchase automation, warehouse management, rma's, accounting, etc. They also have a 2-way API that integrates with QuickBooks if you prefer. Hosting starts at a reasonable $300/month, considering the size of the application and data files, and the high-end nature of their hosting. I'm also interested in hearing from anybody using Devix.

http://www.corezon.com - Has a quite flexible web site. I think they will quote you whatever price they feel you're willing to pay through, so be careful. I spoke with customers (again, customers I found through Google) who paid from $2,000 to $20,000 for essentially the same software. One customer stated they have to "hound" their support department to get problems resolved. Their backend is pretty powerful, but doesn't have as high-tech of a feel, and certain things aren't thought out as well as I'd like. They don't "integrate" with Quickbooks - only export to csv files and the like. Many features advertised online are "add-on" modules, and some advertised add-ons don't work (according to one customer, they bought Amazon integration 6 months ago and their support department still doesn't have it working with their site).

http://www.darwinproductions.net - This software -- Evolution -- is currently 3rd on my list. What I like about it is the affordable price tag -- currently $750 per seat for the backend solution, plus $2500 for the ecommerce module. Most things are well thought out, and it is also built on the latest technologies and with security and customization abilities at the forefront. A couple features that are critical to some ecommerce stores and that are commonplace in high-end standalone carts do not exist. For instance, each product can only be placed in a single product category, and product categories can only be 2 levels deep. Also, when doing a search in their backend software, it only searches from the beginning of a customer or item. So if you search for a customer with "Roofing" in the name it will not pull up "Quality Roofing Company"! I'm not convinced that customizing this software would be as simple as with some of the other solutions.

http://www.coresense.com - From conversations and demos, this looks to be very good software. However, it is expensive. They said to figure $30,000-50,000 for implementation, and then maintenance/support/hosting is about $2,000/month (they are strictly a hosted solution). They don't have an accounting component to their software.

http://www.bizautomation.com - probably a good choice for some people. Looks nice overall; they don't fully integrate with Quickbooks or other accounting software, yet they are still building their own general ledger application. I've generally seen that version 1.0 of any GL app is not completely thought out and is therefore cumbersome to use. Not nearly as big of an application as some of the others, but then again not as expensive.

http://www.interprisesuite.com - These folks have a really nice start on a great package. Best of all, their single user license is currently FREE! Unfortunately, version 1.0 SP1 was just released May 2007, and I had a very bad experience using version 1.0 of a product by Comtech Solutions. Ironically, a principal from Comtech at the time is now one of the lead players at Interprise Solutions. I'm serious, though, when I say they have a very nice product. Great framework, new technology, an unbelievable number of features, and an affordable price. As of May 2007 it is a flat $500/user, and add $1295 for the ecommerce module developed jointly with AspDotNetStorefront. Since I could get the free 1-user version, I had a chance to spend a lot of time with it before deciding it isn't polished enough for use at my business. I can't really point to 1 thing - just a bunch of "little" things, such as a lack of a "leave for now" button on the bank reconciliation screen. Without it, I could be 1 transaction away from finishing the reconciliation, and if I had to return later I'd have to restart from scratch. Mr. Gary Harrision, if you read this post, I'd probably have already purchased your product if you offered a 2-way API integration with Quickbooks. This way I could benefit from all of the wonderful features of your CRM/Ecommerce/Purchasing/etc without having to put up with the shortfalls of the verson 1.0 General Ledger like I described above.

http://www.comtechsolutions.com - This is the company that wrote Image Accouting Premier, Adept.Net, and now VisionCore. They are all 3 basically the same program, except Image Accounting is Access-based and VisionCore is .NET based and essentially a renamed version of Adept.Net, which was strictly a .NET version of Image Accounting. In 2005, Version 1.0 of Adept.Net was so bad that I asked to be switched to Image Accounting (VisionCore was not yet released). I can't speak for VisionCore, but the other 2 programs were essentially a lot of unusable eye-candy. They had a "built-in" dayplanner module that was actually a separate application that opened and closed every time you accessed it. Their web module was essentially non-functional. Now with VisionCore I see they partnered with AbleCommerce, which has a good reputation. On almost every screen was a half-implemented feature. They introduced a "loyalty" program, but it forced you to redeem points by writing a check to the customer, and ALL customers qualified for the program if you turned it on, with no exceptions based on specially discounted prices that some customers received. In other words, implemented just enough to say they included a loyalty program but not enough for most companies to actually use it. Sorry, I guess I rambled a bit there...

http://www.dydacomp.com - tested their version 4.0 several years ago. The whole program had an antiquated feel to it, and customers still complain wildly about their Sitelink ecommerce module. Now they are on version 6 or so, and when you read forum postings it seems most are complaints about speed, customization, integration, stability, technology (its written in FoxPro), etc. Unless it does exactly what you're looking for, I wouldn't recommend it.

http://www.*********.com - I haven't even called this place, and they aren't really ERP/CRM software (they are an order management solution), but I've read so many positive posts about Barney Stone and their customer service that I had to give him a mention.

http://www.netsuite.com - This company is just too big. They scare me because as a rule the larger a company gets the dumber it gets. They lose touch with what customers need. I've read posts about Netsuite quoting one price, then drop the price 50-70% though negotions. I've also read about customers having their monthly fees doubled or tripled after a contract period ended. They just seem way too unpredicable.

There you have it. My quest for a high-end ecommerce system integrated with CRM and Accounting, starting with ICode/Accware/Everest.

My only hope now is that I don't get kicked off the forum for such a long post. Anyone have feedback on any of these solutions?

Chris_WI

05-31-2007, 06:05 PM

Being in the office products industry, these are other packages I've looked at:

http://www.thalerus.com - Quite good, quite pricey, very rigid website structure.
http://www.digitalgateway.com - the new kid on the block, new technology, nice feature set, instead of doing their own ecommerce, they partnered with Structured Web.
http://www.structuredweb.com - I wasn't impressed by them. A lot of flash, but missing very basic web features. Very modular price structure (for example, $1200/yr to put your product catalog online (browse only), ANOTHER $1200/yr to enable your customers to PURCHASE products online, ANOTHER $1200/yr for access to a tool that lets you manage your own online content instead of going through their support department. Give me a break!
http://www.redcheetah.com What the do, they do nicely. But they're basically an expensive website.
http://www.omd.com - Has a nice new web module, but the back end is written in DOS.
http://www.eci2.com - Also a nice new web module, but the back end is written mostly in DOS. A few screens are still TEXT BASED without a Windows-style GUI!
http://www.varstreet.com
http://www.flashecom.com

For reference only, I'm listing these because they are related to this topic, but it took me a lot of searching to find them. they are easy to overlook:
http://www.ingeniasoft.com
http://www.escalateretail.com
http://www.ordersuite.com
http://www.tekinteractive.com
http://www.cuttingedgecomputing.com
http://www.colinear.comhttp://www.newhavensoftware.com (http://www.newhavensoftware.com)

Jacmo

06-01-2007, 02:04 PM

Chris - Great info! We've recently started our CRM/ERP search. This is very helpful.

I went to download Interprise and guess what?! It doesn't work with Firefox. That pretty much knocked them off my list.

We're currently a Quickbooks and Zoovy (ecommerce and order management) and really want an all-in-one, internet accessible solution.

RobbieB

06-04-2007, 05:16 PM

Hey Chris, Good compilation of links.

I have heard of Escalate retail. Their flagship product is called Ecometry and the base licenes is going to run about 50k (15 users) training and implementation apx 60k plus $13k for travel (they fly people out to help you). Website integration is an additional 15k The interface is a little old school compared to the newer .net apps. Most are windows apps but a few were dos based. They have modules that integrate with VIOP/caller id and stuff and their client brochure has some top brands...to name a few polaroid, vans, levis, nordstroms, kohl's, nautilus, sprint, thebudk catalog, tigerdirect.com, Wilson, petsmart, northern Tool

I had a simimilar experience as you with the beta of IS and also the initial 2007 release of IS. SP1 really takes care of a lot of things. You might want to give it another shot. I was about to mention VisionCore myself. I've been debating between VisionCore and Interprise Solutions. Both .net apps and they both have some good features the other one does not.

I recently started demoing VisionCore and have found it really easy to use. On request I was able to get access to their private support forums and the response time to my inquiries has been 1 day so that's pretty good. I like the way they handle creating customer records etc better than IS and also they've already got payroll working and multiple warehouses. IS on the other hand seems to have better marketing capabilities such as setting up ad campaigns/waves, and I like their "business intelligence" dashboards better than visioncore too.

I had inquired about mainstreetcommerce.com before and I'm not sure how new your price quote is but last year I was quoted $15k for the license and $500/mo for hosting, and I had no option for self hosting. They don't have accounting built in so you still need to do some integration with the accounting package of your choice. They have an ebay integration module but they charge 2.5% for each successful ebay sale. No point of sale either.

CoreSense is going to run about $1500/mo hosting (i forget how many users) and about 25k for implementation.

Another SAAS app i looked into last year was:
http://www.ordermotion.com/

Two other SAAS which I haven't reviewed are:
http://www.zoovy.com
http://www.volusion.com/

Lastly, http://www.newhavensoftware.com a non hosted solution that offers migration paths from Dydacomps MOM. Demo was only available by cd which expires by date hard coded on the cdrom itself. It was expired by the time I actually found time to install it. Wasn't able to get the time extension to work so I didn't try after that. It does not offer accounting either so again you'd have to find a way to integrate with the accounting software of your choice.

RobbieB

06-04-2007, 05:19 PM

I went to download Interprise and guess what?! It doesn't work with Firefox. That pretty much knocked them off my list.

Jacmo, I use Firefox and I haven't had any problems accessing interprisesuite.com or interprisesolutions.com. There's got to be something on your end. Try purging your cache or something. IS is definitely worth your attention, it would be a shame to pass it up because your browser was acting up one day.

Jacmo

06-04-2007, 05:43 PM

It is the cart, not the site. Didn't let me check out. I called. Asked them and was told that it is a bug their developers are working on. That their cart does not work with Firefox. Maybe I'll give them another call or attempt to checkout the free user version again.

Chris_WI

06-04-2007, 11:02 PM

RobbieB,
Thanks for the feedback about the programs you've tried. I requested a demo of VisionCore last week, but haven't installed it yet. As I mentioned before, my impression is that it is a .NET version of ImagePremier (which was half-baked in terms of fully implementing the features it contained). Hopefully they've fixed a lot of problems when rewriting it as VisionCore.

Since a couple people mentioned Zoovy, I just wanted to mention a competitor of theirs I came across -- http://www.kyozou.com. They sounded pretty good overall but had some limitations I didn't like such as only 2-level product tree navigation.

Jacmo,
You likely already know this, but the curent Interprise Suite website is being updated to run on the ASPdotNETstorefront web interface, but I believe their current site (as of 6/1) is still on some other platform. If you join their forum at http://www.interprisesolutions.com/forum they have a section strictly related to ASPdotNETstorefront integration. Also note that they to my knowledge they have not yet released the public version of the IS web module - I'd be very surprised if the final version didn't let people using Firefox use the cart. Just an FYI in case you were under the impression that what you currently see is what you'd get...

RobbieB

06-05-2007, 12:43 PM

Chris, definitely try VC again. I wonder if your experience with them was like my first experience with IS... beta :D

Again, there are things I like about IS better than VC but so far the VC support has been pretty good at responding and forwarding the feedback to the devs. I actually feel like they are more on top of the support than IS right now but I wonder if that's because I haven't tired them with too many questions and suggestions yet haha. Although, I do wish their support forums weren't private. IS definitely wins on that because its nice to see what other people are experiencing.

Personally, I like VCs customer wizard better and their handling of addresses (contacts/sites etc). The app seems a little faster than IS too but I'm on an older dual 1.8ghz Xeon so I guess that doesn't say much :P

[edit]
Okay well, here's some more info I found out about VC...
Point of Sale and Timeclock icons are put inside the app but they don't work. Turns out the features aren't yet implemented and wont be for a few more weeks.

CRM/marketing not available within the program itself, they are planning to integrate with salesforce.com

No generic shipping module included but they have made one that works with ShipRush by Z-Firm.

So, looks like I'll be putting my research effort back into IS.

Jacmo

06-07-2007, 08:42 PM

Thanks, Chris. I was under that impression. I like companies that 'eat their own dogfood.' I'm doing an InterpriseSuite Demo next week. Have had two courses of Mainstreet and am chatting with Devix which I must say I find quite interesting. Netsuite demo on Tuesday.

Has anyone heard of www.profitcenter.com (http://www.profitcenter.com)? I saw them for a second at IR2007 and they said they do everything but payroll and HR.

Gary Harrison

06-16-2007, 04:31 PM

Wow, been a little while since I’ve been here and I’m surprised by all the activity.

Chris_WI, wow you have probably done the comprehensive review of software on the market. Nice job! It reminds me back when I owned United Treasures and was looking for affordable software to run that business. To answer your question in the post we will continue to improve and we will add a “leave it for now” feature to the bank reconciliation later this year when we add the ebanking features.

Jacmo, Yes we had a firefox issue but that was fixed with our new website. Sorry for the inconvenience.

RobbieB, If you like VC you’ll love Adept Suite which is available for free. As you go through the features it will look very familiar : )

http://www.download.com/Adept-Accounting/3000-2064_4-10573830.html?tag=lst-0-1

It is completely unsupported and installation is pretty “hit or miss” on newer systems since it is based on .NET 1.1 and MSDE technology.

Couple of things to keep in mind when evaluating VC against IS.

First, opening up the SQL port to the internet is not “web services”. Although you can get a program to operate over the internet that way it is not recommended because 1) it opens your company’s database to hackers / viruses 2) PCI compliance requires that your database server not be accessible via the internet if you store credit card number on them and 3) becomes very slow as the database size increases. IS uses true web services where all data requests are processed by the web services before being sent to the database. This allows you to have the web services in one location and the database in another protecting the database.

Second, if customizing or extending the application is important to you I invite you to compare the SDK’s. Our SDK kit is free www.connectedbusiness.com, allowing developers to see first hand how it works before spending any money with us. Already companies like AspDotNetStorefront (eCommerce) and Premier POS (Point of Sale) are using the SDK to create complimentary products and soon you’ll be able to purchase plug-ins from websites like http://www.interprisesuiteplugins.com/ to expand out the application.

Regarding the new customer wizard I posted a video for you on the Interprise forum so let me know if you need that link.

I know that this forum is for those looking for a “all-in-one” small business solution, but after working for the better part of the past decade trying to accomplish that I can tell you it is not possible. The problem is every software company only has a certain level of “core competency”. When I was part of the Adept .NET development team we wrote a rather poor ecommerce module and POS system in it. While our group was great at doing ERP systems, we did not have the same level of core-competency that eCommerce or POS software companies which “live and breathe” their market.

With Interprise we decided to spend much more time making an extendable platform so we can partner with the “Best of Breed” companies like AspDotNetStorefront and Premier POS (Point of Sale) to provide fully integrated solutions to the platform. It has taken us a lot more work than we expected to accomplish this, but we really believe that companies will be much happier with integrated “best of breed” applications that seamlessly work together.

Sincerely,

mb168

06-27-2007, 09:07 AM

Lastly, http://www.newhavensoftware.com a non hosted solution that offers migration paths from Dydacomps MOM. Demo was only available by cd which expires by date hard coded on the cdrom itself. It was expired by the time I actually found time to install it. Wasn't able to get the time extension to work so I didn't try after that. It does not offer accounting either so again you'd have to find a way to integrate with the accounting software of your choice.

Newhaven doesn't actually run the ecommerce portion, its by a company called CommerceV3 (http://www.commercev3.com) and you can demo the product live with them. It actually integrates with many order management systems including MOM, Ordermotion, Stone Edge, Colinear, Newhaven, InOrder, Natural Order, and a few others.

BrokenGlass

07-11-2007, 12:23 PM

Thank you all for this very informative thread. I've knocked several options right off our list and added several others since I came here a few months ago.

I have some questions I hope someone can help me with:

1) Is all of Interprise's support and sales from overseas? I see a US office listed but the person we emailed with had "slightly" broken English. We understood what he meant, and he was VERY nice and helpful, but we are a little concerned about investing in something and then having trouble communicating if there is a problem.

2) Is anyone here actually using Interprise to run their business yet? I know they're new, which is probably why we're having trouble tracking down some "unbiased" customers. (Which is something we did with Everest and Netsuite -- we found people other than those listed on their Featured Clients pages, and several of them pointed us to this message board with their comments!)

Thanks for any help you can give!

BrokenGlass

07-18-2007, 11:25 AM

Has anyone tried Zoovy.com? Your thoughts?

Jacmo

07-18-2007, 11:49 AM

BrokenGlass - We are with Zoovy right now. We've been with them since 2003. They've done a fantastic job for us. You have to jiggle the handle here and there but they are a great bunch of people and have a pretty dang nice cart with good quickbooks integration. I don't consider them a true 'all-in-one' which is why we're most likely moving to Devix soon. Zoovy helped us grow leaps and bounds but now... we need something more.

BrokenGlass

07-18-2007, 11:57 AM

Thank you, Jacmo! We're still trying to figure out what exactly we really need and this has been a great thread.

BrokenGlass

07-23-2007, 10:47 AM

One of the components we can't find anywhere so far is an "all in one" solution that will also work with (or, better yet, includes) a way to manage our subscribers' subscriptions to our PRINT magazine.

Anyone know of ANY of these programs that can do that, too? We understand it isn't a common need and we'd be happy to pay for the added function to be programmed or included.

Netsuite and Everest both said, "Sure, no problem, we can engineer that" but given the things we've heard about them, we're hoping to go a different direction. Thanks!

BrokenGlass

07-24-2007, 08:27 AM

Thank you, Barney! That's very helpful.

Two quick questions for you:

1) I see the deliveries can be scheduled "daily, weekly, monthly or annually, or on specific days or dates." We have a bit of a strange, flexible schedule. Is there anyway to trigger a delivery manually instead of having to schedule it?

2) We don't actually ship our publication from our office, we send a drop-ship list in the form of an excel file to our printer. Is this possible with Subscription Manager?

Thank you for your assistance!

sf954

08-13-2007, 11:34 AM

I've been using NetSuite CRM+ for a month now on a $70/month/one-year plan and have very few good comments to share. First and foremost, the technical support basically doesn't exist. The downloadable software used for integration with Microsoft Outlook is not compatible with Windows Vista or Microsoft Windows Mobile 5.0/6.0, which means you have to pay for an extra service to access data through your mobile phone. The representative neglected to mention this, even after explaining that it was an interregnal part of my business. The calendaring system is, for lack of a more creative term, a joke; the trial version I was given had scripting implemented that allowed extended functionality, so when I asked the sales representative if certain things could be done using NetSuite, he replied simply, “Yes, they can be done” but neglected to mention it required scripting. If you’re just looking for a simple web-to-lead CRM and calendaring functionality, I recommend the almost free SugarCRM on SiteGround hosting. Salesforce.com is a step in a better direction, but after looking into the workflow functionality, it costs more than my negotiate NetSuite package. I’ve taken the time to write this and other response to help people avoid the mistake I made by going with NetSuite from my small business. The company refused my request for a refund, so I’m stuck with them for a year. Research wisely and insist on a fully-functional trial of any CRM you’re considering.

Switchables

08-17-2007, 03:23 PM

Hi everyone.

I'm new to the forums, but I found this great post while searching the internet. A lot of the posts regarding Everest were from last year, or even a little more dated, so I'm wondering about more recent experiences.

After a little research, I've been looking at Everest, Interprise, Golden Accounting System & ManageMore.

I'm a small Wholesale company into our 2nd year in business. We're about 750,000 revenue this year, and forecasting 1.2mil next year. We have a small manufacturing side to the business where we hand-make all our POS displays. Most of our inventory is bought from one supplier overseas.

Right now we're using Quickbooks, but very unhappy with the very basic options it offers and we're looking to work our way into a more CRM solution for our business to take advantage of marketing opportunities.

Most important issues I'm trying to address within my business are:
1. Integrating bar-code scanning to Shipping & Receiving
2. Detailed Sales Commission reports for Sales Rep Comapnies
3. Comprehensive quantity price discounts for both Purchasing and Invoicing (each/case/carton)
4. Kit/Group items without a limit on items into the kit/group (or a very high limit)
5. Extensive marketing campaigns - bulk e-mail, bulk fax, promotional opportunities that link through the entire system (incl. ROI on promo's and leads/sales generations from them)
6. Order & customer procurement tracking/documenting
7. Credit Control/Maintenience for our Net customers with easy Finance Charge & Statement implementation into the customers account
8. RMA's!!! Quickbooks does nothing for RMA's! I'm looking for a great system for this.
9. Improved Backorder management.

Those are my biggest concerns for now. Other features aren't as important right now, but I don't want to ignore a potential programs scalability.

We only have 1 warehouse/shipping location.
We don't serialize/bin anything now, but we will in time.
We don't drop ship now, but we may look into it if a program makes it simple and profitable enough.

Anyway. I'm looking for a little guidance on the programs I listed, or possibly some alternatives. I don't want to attack a fly with a machine gun and go for something way beyond my needs at the moment, but I don't want to buy something I'm going to outgrow in a year or two either. Perhaps a good middleground that can last me 5+ years.

Thanks,

Matthew Birchler
Switchables
edit by admin:no contact info permitted on the forum thank you

louie

08-20-2007, 12:04 AM

I looked at Golden Accounting as well - however it is visual fox pro and a few folks in the know suggested I stay away.
Managemore I was told doesn't work with remote order scanning which is crucial for us.
Accountmate looked good - but with a price tag of $42,000.
Everest - I'd like to hear comments from more recent users.
Interprise - this is the one I've been waiting over 2 years for. An Interprise pro has said it still isn't quite ready for a high transaction business like ours.

Have you looked at Peachtree, MYOB or Quickbooks Enterprise?

Louie

joshuak

08-21-2007, 01:57 PM

You may also want to take a look at OpenMFG and its kid-brother, PostBooks:

http://ww.xtuple.com

One benefit of these apps is that they run on Mac and Linux as well as Windows. They offer CRM, Accounting, and ERP.

tww

08-24-2007, 11:58 AM

...to help people avoid the mistake I made by going with NetSuite from my small business.

I want to second the advice to be careful with NetSuite. They have a technologically beautiful system but we discovered alarming errors, omissions, and shortcomings. To make a long story short, they signed us up cheap, made clear promises that they failed to deliver, and attempted to raise our renewal fees at alarming rates. I wish others better luck; NetSuite has potential to be an awesome system for some companies.

joshuak

08-24-2007, 01:19 PM

To make a long story short, they signed us up cheap, made clear promises that they failed to deliver, and attempted to raise our renewal fees at alarming rates.

I wonder what would happen if SME's everywhere started demanding service level agreements. I.E., at the same time you sign a contract with a software vendor, create your own addendum that specifies what happens if they don't deliver. For example: "We are tendering your contract in consideration for the future value that we will derive from features X, Y, and Z that you have promised. If you do not deliver features X, Y, and Z by January 1, then you will refund us all monies paid..." If they blink walk away and await their next move. (Consult your attorney for the exact wording and tactics to use here...)

Also, never sign any agreements that include an arbitration provision.

If they made clear promises that got you to sign up, I'd say sue them in small claims court to recoup your costs.

Also, I'd consider using open source software like SugarCRM or PostBooks ERP - that way, if the vendor renegs on a promise, most other competent IT shops can continue to support you.

Cheers,
-J

beego

08-31-2007, 04:12 PM

Volusion or Yahoo Merchant Services Experience?

Does anyone have any experience using Volusion? I'd love to get some discussion going regarding its relative strengths and weaknesses. I'm just starting a small customized gift business and trying to find the best hosted, SEO-optimized cart and catalog that will allow me to get up and running quickly. Of course I'm also looking for a platform that's open and extensible and thus capable of growing as my business grows. (I'll worry about implementing a more robust accounting/ERP/CRM/order management system once my business gets some scale and the market proves that there's demand for my products).

I reviewed Netsuite and found its feature set (and pricing) to be a bit overwhelming given that my business is just starting.

I'm also considering Yahoo Merchant Services and would value any thoughts on the extensibility of their cart/catalog product as well.

My thanks in advance to this very helpful community of experts.

SidePocket

09-15-2007, 12:47 AM

The two all-in-one solutions I am currently evaluating are Interprise Suite (www.InterpriseSuite.com) and Evolution business management software (www.DarwinProductions.net).

They each appear to be relatively new startups with their own strengths and weaknesses attempting to gain traction in this space.

However, unlike the bigger brands (NetSuite, Everest, etc.), they seem to be geared more towards smaller businesses and with pricing structures that seem to be much more affordable.

Cheers!

RockEnt

11-05-2007, 12:07 AM

I've been working for a company that uses Everest (prior to that, we also used Accware) for about 6 years now. It's far from perfect - probably at least partly due to the fact that we access it through a VPN over the internet via TS (RDP) - but it does a good job and keeps track of things. I've recently been given the opportunity to buy out the store I'm managing and take over as owner. I don't have the money to invest heavily in software like Everest, but I'd like similar functionality for some things at least. I may even have to forego anything fancy for a few months (maybe go with an OS program linked earlier in the thread), just until I get a decent revenue stream built up.

I'll basically be buying the existing customer base, and as it stands we do about 600k/yr, and do anywhere from about 10-50 transactions a day, depending on the day. Those transactions range from simple transactions (cash-and-carry), to service work and also building complete systems. I need something to control inventory, handle POS/Sales Orders, and would like to do all my accounting through it as well. Though I suppose that's not a heavy concern, as there will only be two of us to start. I've looked at a couple of programs so far.

Dynacom, which was kind of clunky, and didn't seem very easy to handle inventory with (a major consideration for me). I had the same problem with MYOB. Quickbooks was better, but I'm still not sure if it's what I'm looking for. I've downloaded some of the OS programs linked to earlier, but I haven't installed them yet to play with them. Maybe I've been spoiled by Everest's inventory management, but I really don't want to regress on this feature. I'd like something which gives me a lot of control while keeping things relatively simple.

I'm considering Interprise Suite, though I'm a little concerned when I try to download the demo and get an error when I click "add to cart". However, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and will check with their sales dept. tomorrow (Monday) to see about getting that demo another way. In the meantime, what do you guys feel would be a good solution for a 2-man operation of this size that can handle the features I mentioned?

Fred333

11-07-2007, 03:52 PM

Great thread. I have learned tons about the various programs out there.

Rayzak

11-10-2007, 07:59 PM

I'm currently evaluating software for my new business and ecommerce integration is a must. I can't find something decent for my needs. I looked at the Interprise Suite, but it's very young and not yet solid project. It has no import-export functions (a must if you work with large quantities of inventory). You can't do basic customers-orders csv import (from paypal or eBay or anywhere else), can't do export-import of current orders in bulk (to import them to shipping manager and print labels in bulk and import tracking numbers back?) etc. What about if I have to export some reports? NONE! And as fas as I understand, they do not plan to implement those features. Look like they have them, but they sell them as plugins(maybe I'm wrong) :)
So I'm highly stressed right now - I like Interprise Suite, but lack of functionality scares me. (very sad, if it had fully featured import-export, I'd buy it)

I tried Peachtree, Abmis, Quick Books, etc - they do have some functionality, but not even close for someone who's willing to do ecommerce.
********* is using access, sorry, it's really stone age.

I looked in to ManageMore, it does look ugly, but seems like most functional piece of software I used.

In post #144, I saw Evolution software and will try it (if demo available) and see what it worth.

Any suggestions for good piece of software for eCommerce?

perniculous

11-12-2007, 08:21 PM

I would strongly warn those considering Everest. I work for a company using Everest, and the problems are numerous.
- upgrades and fixes cause problems. often the problem is fairly serious.
- ecommerce integration is there, but there are too many oddball errors that prevent orders from happening that support is stumped by.
- there are also oddball and quirky problems with the core application.
- cost is very high
- the wording of the licenses, user agreements, etc., is so tipped toward everest it borders on ludicrous. if something happens, you have no recourse, I mean NO recourse.
- great big promises and carrots dangled before you, very few actually delivered.

They are pushing so hard for sales sales sales they are not addressing serious problems reported by many many customers.

noblenull

11-12-2007, 10:56 PM

********* is using access, sorry, it's really stone age.

There is a SQL version of Stone Edge as well. If you're small, you can get away with the Free version, SQL Express.

Barney Stone

11-13-2007, 11:14 AM

********* is using access, sorry, it's really stone age.Sometimes the old solutions are still the best. With our Access application you get: open source code with hooks for custom functions and other tools to support customization, a widely supported language (VBA) and complete access to your data from anything that supports ODBC. So any import or export functions that are not already included can be added pretty easily. True, there are issues with using Access for data storage, particularly for higher-volume situations and those with more than 10 active users. So look at our Enterprise version and think of it as a Visual Basic front end to a SQL Server database.

or_josh

11-13-2007, 12:36 PM

Rayzak,

PostBooks by xTuple has csv import capability, and they are working on integration with eCommerce applications. The API is also very easy to use for any platform with database connectivity; they provide an example on how to use Excel to examine and create invoices on-the-fly.

Best of all it's free for as many users as you want. It's here:

http://www.xtuple.org

Cheers,
-j

perniculous

11-15-2007, 07:24 PM

I want to second the advice to be careful with NetSuite. They have a technologically beautiful system but we discovered alarming errors, omissions, and shortcomings. To make a long story short, they signed us up cheap, made clear promises that they failed to deliver, and attempted to raise our renewal fees at alarming rates. I wish others better luck; NetSuite has potential to be an awesome system for some companies.

Can you elaborate on that either here or in a PM to me?

Cheeseroller

11-22-2007, 04:06 PM

If you need an all-in-one system but don't need e-commerce, Soffront (www.soffront.com) is worth a look.

I've spend the the last 5 months on and off looking at the different packages (I defy anyone to do this continually, it's depressing work dealing with pushy salesmen and trying to sift through the marketing to find out what a product actually does). Eventually it came down to a shortlist of NetSuite, Aplicor, Entellium, Evolution, Everest iCode, vtiger (based on SugarCRM), Interprise Suite, SalesBoom, Salesforce and RightNow.

I run a small distribution company with offices in the US and Sweden. Our main requirement was to find a web-hosted SFA/CRM system that from any PC would allow us to access the system, send and receive emails (with attachments stored on the server), create quotes/orders/invoices, had a strong self-service customer portal and would allow me to monitor the kPI of the companies.

We weren't interested in a full accounts package because we use external part-time bookkeepers who didn't want to learn new software. In the US, QuickBooks is used and in Sweden a local swedish program.

- RightNow weren't interested although we were willing to pay for a minimum 10 user license as stated on their website.

- Aplicor, which was my preferred choice, were only interested in 50+ licenses according to the salesman I spoke with. Still at least they were honest and didn't waste my time.

- Interprise Suite, after sending them my 5 page RFQ, received the reply from their UK office "I will have to decline to offer as we do not have the legislation in place for Sweden at this moment in time.". The reply didn't make a lot of sense (especially as we had made it clear that we wouldn't use the full accounts module) - so my impression was they are only interested in fast sales and don't have the internal or external resources to modify the program to suit the client. I had downloaded their trial and did find it easy enough to use at first look.

- Darwin Productions, Evolution : didn't reply to the RFQ

- Entellium : received an online demo and was quite impressed by the ease of use and underlying strategy. However, the deal killer was that it had no facility to generate quotes/order/invoices online (QuickBooks was recommended). The salesman I spoke with was polite, helpful and not pushy. Although he did follow up quite often, it was not overbearing.

- Everest iCode : was a close runner up except for two reasons. The comments on this forum and the CRM organisation - it felt like an accounts package with CRM added later (which of course it is). When the account is displayed, you have to right-click or use a menu drop down to access linked quotes, notes, etc. Just didn't feel comfortable. The salesrep I spoke with was not pushy, but very helpful.

- vtiger : one of our supplier companies uses the CRM element of this open source software and is quite happy. However, they also have the internal skills to manage a Linux server and modify code if required, which we don't. I didn't look too deeply into this as having looked at their Forum I could see that some questions had not been quickly answered by their support staff. Also a little nervous to base our company functions on a package that is largely developed and is supported out of India.

- SalesBoom : looked easy to use and had most of the features we needed. Those it didn't have we received a quote for development work with a resonable price. People were again helpful and not pushy.

- Salesforce : over a three month period we had three different salespeople. Pushy attitudes (like their jobs depended on sales which it seems they did), too ready to say yes, it can do that, without stating how. Reached a point where I couldn't trust them.

- NetSuite : pretty much the same experience as Salesforce. Multiple pushy salesreps. I really wanted to buy this software at the beginning - it looked perfect for us. But the attitudes of the reps and the avoidance of quoting prices just made me feel I was being lined up to be suckered. I also found comments on other forums regarding their poor (non-existent was the most common phrase) support and price gouging. The final straw was the disclosure during their IPO they they didn't have redundant systems.

Which left Soffront. I liked the salesman who talked straight and even admitted some of the products failings. He has been very helpful and peformed two online demo's. Prices were stated upfront and once we had decided which modules were required a written quote that included the cost of customising work was supplied quickly.

So we made the decision to go ahead three days ago. Two days later they had the software online for us - just the standard installation at this stage together with demo data. However, good enough to start looking deeper and reference the manuals that I downloaded and printed. Yesterday they have provided a deeper online training so that we can decide what needs to be modified to suit our company procedures and workflow. Another training follows on Friday on the QuickBooks synchronization and next week they will train our web developers on their API so they can integrate the website with the Soffront CRM and Customer Portal.

It's early days, we have to import our data (seems easy enough with their import and field mapping tools), customize a few fields, create some new fields and they need to create some quote/ordr/invoice templates to our specification.

The feeling right now is that this was the best decision. They've been very responsive after getting the order and I found out that the sales guy who was our contact had been with the company for more than 5 years - which gave a good impression.

Once we are up and running, the next step will be to integrate this with a shopping cart. Most likely we will use the module within the EZ Publish CMS our website is based on as we only have simple demands for this.

I'll provide an update in a few months. Thanks to everyone who contributed previous comments as these were very helpful.

bencohen18

12-07-2007, 10:39 AM

Has anyone checked out Visioncore by Comtech? Seems like a nice program.
http://www.comtechsolutions.com
Thanks.

Benjamin Cohen
www.azardisplays.com

perniculous

12-07-2007, 05:10 PM

Checked it out. Seems solid in most areas. Clean interface. The ecommerce integration could be tighter. Also, you'll need PCCharge to charge CC's in the system and ShipRush for shipping integration.

bencohen18

12-10-2007, 10:00 AM

Is anyone actually running their company with 10+ users using either Visioncore or Interprise?

planetshoes

12-21-2007, 02:53 PM

We were using two separate “on-demand / hosted applications” – one for ERP and one for e-Commerce. (NetSuite & Infopia) We initially made the selection based on what we perceived as low cost / low risk. We took the approach of purchasing the functionality we needed at the time for the lowest price … but we failed to select vendors that could keep pace with our growth. The hosted application from NetSuite was always crashing and because we did not manage the system directly, we had limited control and visibility into problem resolution. The frequency of vendor issues & outages was negatively impacting our bottom-line.

After issuing a Request for Proposals (RFP), we selected Everest to drive our back-office ERP and our front-office internet store front business. As with any installation, we had a few bumps in the first month or so, but after only six-months the benefits speak for themselves. We have had record-breaking revenues, which we largely attribute to Everest. Everest is quite scalable – increased our total brand inventory by 1/3 – more products has equated to more sales. We can tailor the storefront without requesting customizations, which can be costly and time-consuming, and we redesigned the navigation of www.planetshoes.com, which now lets users find products online faster and easier. We also have far greater control enabling better SEO which has driven more traffic to our site.

Gary Harrison

12-22-2007, 05:58 PM

If you like Visioncore be sure to checkout Adept Suite. Adept Suite is 100% free but unsupported. Also works with PC Charge and Shiprush...

http://www.download.com/Adept-Accounting/3000-2064_4-10573830.html?tag=lst-1

slee1299

12-28-2007, 03:25 PM

i've read this entire thread. lots of good info. has anyone checked into Allbase or ECI2? these are 2 my boss is looking at now. we are also very small, new company. 4 employees, we import/distribute hand-crafted mosaics from Europe. any input much appreciated.

mutahman

12-31-2007, 12:39 AM

WOW!! It's great to see how this thread has progressed over the past 3 years!! I was one of the original posters on this thread and since my original post in Feb. '05 (when we were first looking for a software to support our inventory, CRM, acctg. and e-commerce) our business is now 4 years old and in this time we've grown our revenues by 4X. 3 years ago when I was first in here looking for a solution this forum was a very big help, so I figured that since I am in "renewal mode" I should post our experiences in here, as they may help others.

We have been a Netsuite user now for just about 3 years and there is plenty of good about the system and a few shortcomings. We are a wholesale company (consumer goods) that wholesales internationally, wholesales domestically in the USA and we also have 2 e-commerce websites (www.slappa.com and www.slappa.co.uk The UK site is NOT on Netsuite but on Monster Commerce)

Netsuite has done a very solid job helping us manage our CRM, basic accounting, and e-commerce. Their user interface is very clean, their dashboards are very good, the ability to drill down on information from every section/report is great, the reporting is sufficient (you could add on crystal reports for additional fees), the CRM is good and we have NEVER had an issue with security OR downtime. Also with Netsuite, I have never worried about disaster recovery because I know they have things covered….this is one thing that I don’t think many buyers consider when trying to choose a solution. Their inventory management does a solid job at providing the basics (multi-locations, reorder levels, real-time levels for the sites). Their sales commissions capabilities are nothing special

The biggest issues we have encountered with Netsuite are:
(a) they are not an open system which creates serious challenges when trying to use Netsuite along with other software (IE they currently do NOT work with outside analytics software because they have an advanced analytics package of their own, yet their analytics cannot provide us with accurate ROI on our PPC campaigns). We have contacted 4 Netsuite integrators and none of them have a sure fire solution to this issue. 2 integrators told us they are now working on an integration, and according to Netsuite they will open the cart code sometime in 2008, but currently there is nothing Netsuite customers can implement to get accurate ROI information on PPC campaigns. This is a very serious issue for any companies that rely on PPC campaigns to drive e-commerce revenue. Another challenge is our desire to implement social networking aspects into our sites. Netsuite needs to address this in a cost effective manner
(b) the cost to add on new licenses or modules is very expensive (we were able to negotiate a great price for the first 10 licenses, yet their costs to add more licenses and modules are absolutely crazy).

Even though we are 80-85% satisfied with Netsuite, our current license term is about to expire and we figured it made sense for us to look at how the market, the players and the offerings have progressed over the past 3 years, and as such we have been, over the past 2 months, scoping out other solutions that may be a better alternative to Netsuite. One thing to point out here with regards to our assessing our options; we value (when evaluating all these companies) who they are. In other words, their management team, their track record and their customers are all factored into our initial decision as to whether or not a company "warrants" our serious consideration. I have seen a few posts in here “assuming” that Netsuite has the potential of being bad because they are a “bigger” company and in my opinion this is a very wrong attitude to have. Netsuite has been around, is backed by Larry Ellison (which certainly has it's bad points) but does tell us that they have the resources to continue to make their product better and unlike some of these other offerings, Netsuite is not going to be a flash in the pan that can go away in the next 12 months. Also now that they are public they are under heavy pressure to grow their business, which means they will have to get aggressive to keep their customers. It’s great that so many new companies have popped up in this space over the past 3-4 years yet we have to try and figure who has staying power and who doesn’t. As such, there are MANY newbie companies that offer solutions in this space that we just cannot consider because we see them as too risky.

So, while this is not an exhaustive list, here are the companies we have considered this time around:

Interprise Suites- I think we all want to love this company. Their website looks slick and gives us the impression that they know what they're doing, they are already on .net and FINALLY here is a software company that says they are for a small business and have actually priced their solution for a small business. But I have read far too many customer issues that seem to all revolve around the fact that this software, while on the right track, is not ready today to "cleanly support" a business like ours. One place from which I have gathered this info is the forum on their website
http://www.interprisesolutions.com/forum. One issue we have encountered with them is trying to get their folks to respond to a request for a demo, and after 2 weeks we still haven’t been able to get a response.
Gary have sent you a PM you so you and I can talk about some of these issues I have read about.

Everest- We have again looked at Everest, and they are still attractive from the standpoint of their software and the pre-sales effort/attention. They are open source so we can do any customization we like, they have a stronger e-commerce offering then Netsuite and they are moving to the .net platform in 2008. I'm not crazy about their user interface and their drill downs are clunky (or I should say not as clean as Netsuite), but to us the biggest issues is still their pricing! while they pitch themselves as a solution for "small" business's, I believe they are priced for companies who are doing at least $4-5 million in revenues. I just read this interview with the Everest president which seems to support this notion http://s29294.gridserver.com/archive/2007/08/everest-softwares-edwin-miller-choice.html). Relatively speaking, $4-5 million in sales is small business, but I believe these guys, as many other companies offering such software solutions, fail to recognize how many $1-$5 million business's there are who need such a solution. I respect that they feel strongly about their software and as such they take the "we only offer very limited discounts" position, but they still fail to recognize (as do many other vendors) that a $50,000++ initial investment + training, hosting and maintenance fees is a very large investment for a $2million company. I believe if their sales OR marketing group did a study on how many deals they lost to pricing they would take action to correct this.

Based on the great post by Chris_WI on page 8 of this thread, we are now in the process of looking at http://www.mainstreetcommerce.com (haven’t heard back from them yet but when we do I’ll update this post)

Evolution (www.darwinproductions.com): I have been playing with their demo version the past 2 days and have a demo set up with them tomorrow AM. So far I like what I see with these guys. It’s an open system and except for the fact that I have to get familiar with their user interface (obviously I’m now very familiar with Netsuite so everything we look at will require some time) I like what I see. Also they have been VERY responsive to e-mails and initial questions (I have received 3 e-mail responses today—which is a Sunday)

http://www.comtechsolutions.com: I have downloaded the Vision Core demo but cannot get it to work. I’m waiting to hear back from them regarding getting the demo to work + them scheduling a sales demo for us. I’ll update this once we hear back from them.

www.corezon.com: we’re waiting to hear back from these guys also.

www.devix.com: also waiting to hear back from these guys, although their cost has us concerned

So while we are not yet sure that we are moving away from Netsuite, we are looking and will be making a decision over the next 2 weeks. I’ll post an update on our findings as we make progress.

Dom

slee1299

12-31-2007, 01:22 PM

mutahman,
feel as though i know you, having read everything you've written here. timing is everything, isn't it? thank you for the update. glad your biz is going so well. will look forward to more from you.
Happy New Year!

mutahman

01-13-2008, 01:33 PM

I've received many private messages asking for a status report, so here it is.

Evolution (by Darwin Productions): We used the demo version for a week, had a demo with them and it's a pretty good solution that is affordable. My e-commerce director didn't like the fact that the shopping cart is their own code, so we have taken them out of the mix. This seems to be a pretty good solution that doesn't have many customer references, which makes us uneasy with regards to this software having been used in prime time and as such makes us wonder what (if any) issues can pop up when implemented. Here are the customer references we were provided with (a few of these sites are still not working at the time of this post). http://www.eiki.com/, http://www.firstmobe.com/, http://www.eworldbuyer.com/, http://www.fromeco.org/, http://www.vpodsecurity.com/, www.zwickerevanslewis.com, www.sawaskty.com, www.feltrim.com, www.firstmobe.com

Vision Core (by Comtech): We have used the demo for 2 weeks, had 2 demo's with them and like most of what we see. this is .net based and on SQL server database, and is very open for customization. With that said, most small companies (we are in this position) will have to have an integrator help with customization (in other words if we want to take advantage of this "openness" we have to have someone outside write the code). Their shopping cart (Able Commerce is the software that seamlessly and in real time integrates with Vision Core and provides the e-commerce capabilities) seems to be very strong, and everything on the back end (Acctg., Inventory, CRM is also pretty solid. They have most of what we need, multiple currency, we can add as many companies as we want, multi warehouse. The way we would set up price levels is a bit whacky, and the fact that we have to "post" documents even after they are saved (IE if we create and save an invoice, it still is not posted to the system and as such I can see that some transactions can go "missing". Another thing I don't like at all (and this is probably because I have grown accustomed to Netsuite) is the customization of reporting. When you click on a report you have to always set the date range (before a report pops open) and to customize a report seems a bit complicated. Also, most of the reports are an "end point", where the information from that report cannot be drilled down further. For example, today in Netsuite I have a Daily Sales Report, when I open it it shows me each transaction as a line item and I can then click on one particular sale and it takes me to the detail of that sale, I can then click on the customer name to have it take me to that customer, I can then click on "transacctions" to see all the transacctions of that customer. My point is that most all of the content in Netsuite reports remains dynamic in that I can continue to drill down from the report to find supporting information. In Vision Core I will have to run multiple reports to drill down (Vision Core does some drill down in some of their out of the box reports, but not much. Also, my e-commerce director tells me that he can do some customization work to some of our custom reports to make them web based, this way we can pull info from the Vision Core database and have hyperlinks on chosen reports. The total cost of ownership makes this package very attractive, where a 8 user license with 3 websites and maintenence is about $12,000. This doesn't include implementation and migration of data (we have 3 years worth of data on Netsuite and it's a MAJOR job to bring all the static and transactional data over), yet it's a very affordable price for what seems to be quite a strong solution.

Interprise Suites. these guys have solidified out initial opinion that they are not ready for prime time. My e-commerce director did an initial demo, and then asked for a second demo. He didn't hear back from them for about a month, and then just 2 days ago received a mail from the guy he was communicating with telling him "sorry I was in the hospital for a month". I don't doubt that the guy was in the hospital, but I have lived and worked in Asia for 15 years, and worked for 2 years in the Philippines and in my experience, reliability and the Philippines are 2 words that just don't go together. In this forum I sent a private message to Gary Harrison and still haven't heard back from them. Lastly, I spoke with an integrator of theirs, who told me that he nearly went out of business because he waited for a year for them to get the product ready for prime time, and despite many 2007 release dates having been set by Interprise, they consistently missed the dates. He told me he finally got an e-mail from them in December (I believe it was Dec 18) where he was told SP3 was ready to roll. We're going to do one more demo with them in the next week or so (because I have not seen them do a demo) but right now I feel there is no way I would consider these guys.

Netsuite. I wish these guys would wake up and smell the coffee with regards to pricing. Yes their e-commerce needs work, specifically they need to open up their cart. I have talked with 3 integrators who are now converting Netsuite customers to other solutions and all 3 told me 1 of 2 reasons why each customer was leaving Netsuite....it was either because of pricing OR because their cart was not open. It's a shame that they are not addressing these issues because I believe Netsuite offers the absolute best back end solution for us small business's. I hate the idea of moving away from these guys, and will have more talks with them this week to see if there is any way we can negotiate a way to stay with them.

Everest. Solution good. Implementation a nightmare (spoke with 2 of their integrators). Pricing stinks. They are going to be moving to .net which means there could be problems with this new release. In short, we have taken them off the list because they simply fail to recognize that they are priced out of the market.

Mainstreet commerce: Again open platform is very attractive and these guys are the most customizable amongst everything we have looked at. but we need general ledger and they don't have it (we would have to plug in something like Quickbooks) and I don't like the idea of that. I have received a PM from someone who had a terrible experience with Mainstreet. I think these guys are onto something, but need to beef up their support and sales team (it seemed weird that the CEO was the guy who responded to our mail and gave us a demo....it's not that I don't want to talk with the guy who is at the top of the totem pole, but if he's doing demo's all day that makes me a bit uncomfortable as to the size of the company and their ability to support us down the road).

Corezon never replied to a request for demo.

The skinny is, we like Vision Core the most but I'm not sure if we like them enough to leave Netsuite. We're going to continue digging deeper and if there are other solutions that you guys suggest are "definitely worth a look" let us know.

I hope this all helps

or_josh

01-14-2008, 12:50 AM

Muthaman,

Did you try PostBooks?

http://www.xtuple.org

xTuple just released PostBooks 2.3.0, which works with the Yahoo! shopping cart. This product is backed by a company with many years of solid product use in production environments.

Best of all, it's free; in fact, it's open source. You can buy support contracts for $600 per user per year, but you aren't required to do so.

It also has a unique advantage in that you can use Windows, Mac, or Linux for the server OR client. What these companies implementing on the .NET platform don't seem to realize is that Windows won't be the dominant platform forever. When Microsoft stops selling XP and Vista is the only thing you can get, and folks realize that they can hand over lots of money to buy a machine with enough power to run Vista, and more money for Vista itself - or just use a more reasonably-priced machine with Linux - many folks will opt for the Linux route. If you use PostBooks you can do this; with many others you cannot. xTuple has a case study of a company using all Macs and no PC's here:

http://www.xtuple.com/news/casestudy-moline.php

(Note that OpenMFG is the 'big brother' to PostBooks and offers much more ERP functionality...)

mutahman

01-14-2008, 10:49 AM

or_Josh...thanks for the info. How are you affiliated with these guys?

I'll take a look at them. Have any of you guys heard of, demoed or use these guys? If so what was the experience?

Thanks

bencohen18

01-14-2008, 01:01 PM

Is anyone using Business Flow from MainStreet Commerce? http://mainstreetcommerce.com/
I would like some feedback regarding implementation and connecting their Website/OrderEntry system to other accounting systems. Also how they like the overall use of the program. Thank you.

BC

Barney Stone

01-14-2008, 07:37 PM

mutahman -

You've put an impressive amount of work into your search. I'm sure the info you've posted will be useful for a lot of merchants. There are just a couple of points that I would like to make:

First of all, there appear to be very different skill sets involved in creating shopping carts, order management systems and accounting software. There are few, if any, example of software companies that get all three right. So by restricting your search to totally integrated systems, you are probably ruling out some of the best examples of each in order to find one system that does at least a fair job of all three. Also, once you select an integrated system, if you decide you want to replace any one component (either because you are no longer satisfied with it or because a better alternative is becomes available), it may not be possible or practical to make that change.

Second, in response to your comments about having the CEO of a company reply to your information request. As you obviously know, you are not just choosing software; you are also choosing the company that produces, markets and supports it. It's like "Goldilocks": You don't want a company that is so big that your business is insignificant to them. Or one that is so small that they might not have the resources to survive and continue supporting their products. (Then there's open-source software, but that's a whole different animal.)

But size does not necessarily mean stability. Take NetSuite, for example. "In 2006, its revenue was $67 million and net loss was $35.7 million. For the nine months ended September 30, 2007, its revenue was $76.8 million and net loss was $20.6 million." Yes, they've gone public now, and have lots of money to work with, but do you really want to hitch your future to a company that's losing millions of dollars per year? What if they can't turn it around? Or what if they decide that your business is not profitable enough for them to bother with?

Then there's that small company CEO who's taking your sales call. That may be a sign of a company that is too small or too new to make you feel safe using them, or of a small but growing company with a CEO who still is actively involved in the day-to-day operations of his company and not afraid to talk directly to prospects and customers. (That sounds familiar, actually.<grin>) A better indicator of a company's stability might be the number of clients using their systems, and the ratio of employees to customers. Take a look at Ernie Schell's latest chart of order management companies at:
http://multichannelmerchant.com/opsandfulfillment/ordermanagement/systems_solutions_2/

There are some familiar names there that only have a handfull of customers, and others that have a ridiculous number of employees per customer. To my mind, either of those conditions should make you think twice about risking your business on their products.

I hope you find some of those comments useful.

mutahman

01-14-2008, 10:49 PM

Barney
I certainly do find your comments informative. I agree with much of what you say, although much of this topic (or the points you bring up) are not zero sum.

My own hesitations around integrating multiple solutions and preferring to go "all in one" certainly cut down the number of options I have, yet (for me personally) I would rather deal with one vendor VS. multiple vendors and integrators.

I believe for my requirements (at least over the next 2-3 years) for CRM, erp, acctg and e-commerce are handled quite well with the “all in one” solutions on the market. Is any one of them perfect…NO. Will a “mix and match” of different softwares provide me with the perfect solution…MAYBE. And it will most likely be quite expensive for the integration and customization of bringing an integrator in to make everything “real time, all the time”.

3 years ago when trying to find an "all in one solution" I had very limited options, both in terms of the number of vendors who supplied an all in one solution AND the features offered in the few all in one solutions available. But today my options have grown considerably (number of vendors and the advancements in their software). Are all these options "ready for prime-time"....unfortunately not.....but we still have more choices today and if these guys can stay alive for another 12-18 months it will be interesting to see how many choices of kick-ass all in one software there will be on the market.

As a small business owner I couldn't agree with you more about how important it is to have the owner accessible to every customer (and quite frankly, many of the medium and larger companies should have the owner more accessible to customers). In this particular instance I like dealing directly with the owner, but it also leaves me a bit weary to have Mike doing the demo's..all the time. With him doing the demo’s who is running the company? Who is handling the support? Who is managing the engineering? These issues, regardless of size, are all important to me with regards to how my vendor operates. My point is, he cannot be doing demo's all day long and getting much else done. It's a perception issue, and quite frankly, it's his job to give me (us) the perception that he's NOT a one man band.

It is not my intent to disparage anyone person or company, and I want to see all these small guys make a legitimate run at the likes of Netsuite (and the other "big boys")...but in order for these little guys (Main Street, Comtech, Interprise, etc) to last in this survival of the fittest landscape they will have to continue to make strides on the features, functionality and support they have and also work on how we PERCEIVE them to be behind the scenes (because let’s face it, none of us have done a vendor visit to see what is really going on at their site(s).

With regards to Netsuite, of course no company is immune to going under, and I sincerely believe if they do not address their pricing OR their lack of open source they are going to have a major problem fending off these competitors and turning around the red ink. But much to your point here, at least with NS we know their financial position and the fact that they have the money (from the IPO) and the backing (from Larry) to feed the beast for a while…we don’t know if any of these other guys may be in the same red ink scene, and if so how would they finance a turn-around (or even just buy more time).

I like your post because it makes many of us think past just the issue of “ABC software has this feature and XYZ doesn’t”.

I’m going to probably regret posting this next line (expecting to get inundated with PM’s) but if any integrators feel they can put together a kick ass, real time ERP, CRM, ACCTG and e-commerce build for us that would be $20-25K (including the integration and implementation) then PM me with what you have in mind and I’ll certainly take a look

Hope this all helps

louie

01-15-2008, 12:19 PM

I have been looking at a system from rla-assist.com called Esyst. Has anyone looked at this? Any comments? I am in the same position as you mutahman, waiting for the ideal package to roll out.

Would appreciate any comments.

bencohen18

01-15-2008, 01:42 PM

I am in the same boat as well...I like Barney's posts. I will look at the link that you posted for order managment systems.

Is anyone using an order managment system with a built in website that they are happy with? We would need it to connect to Microsoft Small Business Financials (Great Plains Lite). Has anyone tried AdvanceWare? Ideally it should cost between 5K-15K with implementation. Thanks.

Magneto

01-17-2008, 02:02 AM

www.netsuite.com
We've used NetSuite since 2001. It is very powerful software, and has been from the beginning. When it comes time for renewal, though, be ready for the hassle of the year. They must have training courses in irritation and negotiation. My recommendation to anyone signing up would be to request a written contract that no features would be de-bundled, and some kind of cost lock for a period of time. Anything you can do to avoid their renewal sales staff, the better. I think that most businesses that use the product, after determining the right package for their operation, will like it. Their support is not as good as it used to be. It seems to be fairly rare that we've needed it, though.

I think their achille's heel was their choice to focus on mid-market in ~2002. Identity crisis and hunger for faster profits. I don't think it served them well, and they lost a lot of customers (probably at renewal time). Packages and terminology changed every so often.

It is sure fascinating to see some of the upstarts that seek to eat NetSuite's lunch. Below...
www.netbooks.com
These people seem to have a very solid base. Their software thinks differently than the others I've tried, and I think it may be totally worth it to get your mind around it. I bet they will hit their stride during 2008 and be a big contender. I like that they have so much focus on true small businesses. The manufacturing (production), inventory and other features we tried were well done. As of this writing, I think they have a couple of broad strokes to add yet, but they say it won't be long. I was not a big fan of the e-commerce software they chose to connect to: CRE Loaded. I prefer www.avactis.com, head and shoulders above as it is far more intuitive.
www.sql-ledger.org
Impressive for open source. Host it on your own Linux or XP/2000 box for LAN or WAN. Very affordable. It would leave any buyer enough budget to bring in a specialist to make it their own. I'm keeping my eye close on this one.
www.cougarmtn.com
Their Pro package consists of a server that they install onsite. It is preconfigured and accessible over WAN and LAN. Sounds very cool. However, their salesperson never delivered the quote. It sounded to be between $7k - $10k.
www.interprisesuite.com
As discussed on this thread already. One to watch, I'm sure. I bet they'll do a pretty good job with some refinement.
www.mainstreetcommerce.com
No impressions either way, yet.
www.saasu.com (www.netaccounts.com)
I liked their trial. It is internationally oriented, and in time, I think they'll have a good system.
www.bizautomation.com
Another new one. Looks like it would be worth a try.

www.intaact.com
If you call for a quote, expect to be interrogated for an hour. Then make sure you're sitting down when they quote you. $10k for the license, and another $20k for integration, setup, fees, destination charge, etc. They claim to be a competitor to NetSuite, but I don't see that. Their website is very attractive, yet cryptic and unsubstantial. I suspect they are trying to hide the price and lack of features.
www.efinancials.com
Very new. Still in beta. Looks like they have the model right.
www.epeachtree.com
Ho, hum. Moving along.

www.nolapro.com
Very intruiging. I'm watching them closely, too.

www.objacct.com
This almost seems like a kit for developers. Looks loaded. No idea on price.

www.intuit.com
Intuit's Quickbooks Enterprise looks quite powerful, but it networks over the WAN with thin-client technology, which is frankly cheesy. $3k-$6k.

www.microsoft.com/dynamics
I only took the presentation tour, which was expectedly professional. I kind of got turned off when I heard of all the integration with MS Office. Great. Buy more expensive Office licenses for multiple users. We were successfully weaned from that to OpenOffice. Can't go back. But, hey. Anyone want to look into it further?

www.plexus.com
Manufacturing oriented. No experience with it yet.

www.distone.com
I couldn't get past their web design. Look away. It's hideous. Maybe I'm a little touchy, but spend several days researching accounting software, and you'll start disqualifying them for anything.

www.ronpaul2008.com
Best site on economics, markets and policy I've seen yet. Don't know how well they'll do. This one depends on the electorate.

I wish all researchers grand success in their businesses. I think I'd rather get a tooth pulled than go through another bout of researching accounting software. I hope this post will help someone speed through their own search.

Magneto

01-17-2008, 02:37 AM

www.netsuite.com
We've used NetSuite since 2001. It is very powerful software, and has been from the beginning. When it comes time for renewal, though, be ready for the hassle of the year. They must have training courses in irritation and negotiation. My recommendation to anyone signing up would be to request a written contract that no features would be de-bundled, and some kind of cost lock for a period of time. Anything you can do to avoid their renewal sales staff, the better. I think that most businesses that use the product, after determining the right package for their operation, will like it. Their support is not as good as it used to be. It seems to be fairly rare that we've needed it, though.

I think their achille's heel was their choice to focus on mid-market in ~2002. Identity crisis and hunger for faster profits. I don't think it served them well, and they lost a lot of customers (probably at renewal time). Packages and terminology changed every so often.

It is sure fascinating to see some of the upstarts that seek to eat NetSuite's lunch. Below...

www.netbooks.com
These people seem to have a very solid base. Their software thinks differently than the others I've tried, and I think it may be totally worth it to get your mind around it. I bet they will hit their stride during 2008 and be a big contender. I like that they have so much focus on true small businesses. The manufacturing (production), inventory and other features we tried were well done. As of this writing, I think they have a couple of broad strokes to add yet, but they say it won't be long. I was not a big fan of the e-commerce software they chose to connect to: CRE Loaded. I prefer www.avactis.com, head and shoulders above as it is far more intuitive.

www.sql-ledger.org
Impressive for open source. Host it on your own Linux or XP/2000 box for LAN or WAN. Very affordable. It would leave any buyer enough budget to bring in a specialist to make it their own. I'm keeping my eye close on this one.

www.cougarmtn.com
Their Pro package consists of a server that they install onsite. It is preconfigured and accessible over WAN and LAN. Sounds very cool. However, their salesperson never delivered the quote. It sounded to be between $7k - $10k.

www.interprisesuite.com
As discussed on this thread already. One to watch, I'm sure. I bet they'll do a pretty good job with some refinement.

www.mainstreetcommerce.com
No impressions either way, yet.

www.saasu.com (www.netaccounts.com)
I liked their trial. It is internationally oriented, and in time, I think they'll have a good system.

www.bizautomation.com
Another new one. Looks like it would be worth a try.

www.intaact.com
If you call for a quote, expect to be interrogated for an hour. Then make sure you're sitting down when they quote you. $10k for the license, and another $20k for integration, setup, fees, destination charge, etc. They claim to be a competitor to NetSuite, but I don't see that. Their website is very attractive, yet cryptic and unsubstantial. I suspect they are trying to hide the price and lack of features.

www.efinancials.com
Very new. Still in beta. Looks like they have the model right.

www.epeachtree.com
Ho, hum. Moving along.

www.nolapro.com
Very intruiging. I'm watching them closely, too.

www.objacct.com
This almost seems like a kit for developers. Looks loaded. No idea on price.

www.intuit.com
Intuit's Quickbooks Enterprise looks quite powerful, but it networks over the WAN with thin-client technology, which is frankly cheesy. $3k-$6k.

www.microsoft.com/dynamics
I only took the presentation tour, which was expectedly professional. I kind of got turned off when I heard of all the integration with MS Office. Great. Buy more expensive Office licenses for multiple users. We were successfully weaned from that to OpenOffice. Can't go back. But, hey. Anyone want to look into it further?

www.plexus.com
Manufacturing oriented. No experience with it yet.

www.distone.com
I couldn't get past their web design. Look away. It's hideous. Maybe I'm a little touchy, but spend several days researching accounting software, and you'll start disqualifying them for anything.

www.ronpaul2008.com
Best site on economics, markets and policy I've seen yet. Don't know how well they'll do. This one depends on the electorate.

I wish all researchers grand success in their businesses. I think I'd rather get a tooth pulled than go through another bout of researching accounting software. I hope this post will help someone speed through their own search.

jf0721

01-17-2008, 09:45 PM

Mainstreet is a FL based small company that seems to have an ecommerce platform that seems to look ideal for online retailers. It is competitively priced that looks barely affordable enough for an SMB to buy it.

IT is written in .net and uses MS SQL Database. They seem to have a robust backoffice that can be wired to have a website that can have a custom look and feel.

So far so good, right? Well, that is the mousetrap. The company does not understand that software is only as good as the company's service level, which is non-existent. They have no appreciation for their customers or care if they stay or leave. Since they get paid for their license fee upfront, they have no interest in keeping you as a customer anyway. The CEO who runs the company has no ethics, very difficult to talk to. Their deployment of the software is what it comes down to. Their resources are limited and therefore they make their customers wait forever. They always want to get paid upfront for their "professional services", which is for deployment but anytime you express your dissatisfaction, they are ready to suspend your work.

Bottom line, this company needs to educate itself and clean up its act to appreciate their customers. They need a professional CEO who understands software = service and put in place a proper project management process.

Otherwise, they will go down in flames and hurt many companies in the first place.

My recommendation is to make a solid date specific product deployment plan that is associated with payment, which includes their license fee. Once you pay that you are stuck anyway. And tie in penalties if they delay. They will agree to anything until you make payment, after which they won't even hear you.

They need a good lesson and a shake up to realize their true potential.

I will be happy to provide further info if anyone needs it.

CSR

01-23-2008, 01:56 PM

MainStreet Commerce

MainStreet Commerce has recently announced that BusinessFlow is available for $950 a month - with no up front license fee, no per user fees, and you get all of the software. You can also cancel if you have an issue. Services are optional and you can have your own developer work the project.

Customers say that customer service/tech support is rapidly improving.

CSR

01-24-2008, 12:34 PM

jf0721

01-26-2008, 08:03 PM

There are absolutely legitimate concerns and a heavy dose of truth in the delays as professional services has been very busy. When someone wants MainStreet to do project work for the company, they have had to wait for a slotting which has been sometimes 4 or 5 weeks out. Acknowledging is hopefully a strong indication that there is a sincere desire to improve.

During the past few months, the company has been working hard to correct and improve this and make more resources and documentation available. This has involved implementing a support portal, providing 2 hour "hot topic" conference call sessions, and beefing up support for third party developers who can do implementations of BusinessFlow.

There most definitely is an appreciation for customers. Hopefully, the blend of strong software along with improved project management process, and just generally trying to reach out in every way to provide assistance will benefit everyone.

According to this posting, they start a project in 4 or 5 weeks as "Professional Services" is busy. How about 4 or 5 months after several lies? By the way, when they do start a project, they don't finish it either. They simply say "we are done, we now want to hand it off to your developer". If we have our own developer, why do we need their "Professional Services". Of course, since they charge by the hour, if you ever find thngs they did wrong, they don't want to touch it or they simply want more money to do more work. They have no accountability what-so-ever.

Stay away from this company at all costs.

We regret ever having to go with them. They are not worth the cheap price ticket. They end up costing you so much business in the long run.

mutahman

01-28-2008, 07:57 PM

Here is another company worth looking at....compiere (www.compiere.com)

They say they are "open source" and yes, you do get the source code when you buy the product. But it's not "open source" in the most true sense whereby the developer community influences the feature enhancements and upgrades built into the product. All the built in feature enhancements and upgrades are built in by the company. Another thing to note, while the truest of the true "open source" solutions are free, these guys (while they do offer a free version of their software) are really moving toward a proprietary model. You can download a free version of the software, but it doesn't have as many out of the box features as their "professional" paid version. The paid version is probably the best software I have seen go against Netsuite (at least for our needs). It has solid CRM and accounting functionality, the out of the box reports, drill down and dashboard are all solid and of course (because you have the source code and they have what they call an application dictionary) you can do any customization you want.

These guys are also much more cost effective then Netsuite. The minimum number of user licenses you can buy (if you go the paid route) is 10, and the cost is $7550 per year. It's a web based solution, and it's a yearly subscription fee. You can either host it on your own servers OR have it hosted. You will incur implementation costs (without servers it can run anywhere from $7K up, depending on how much tailoring, customization and data moving you have to do).

One thing you definitely need is an integrator you feel comfortable with. We had a meeting this morning with an integrator that just didn't give us the feeling they were all that knowledgeable...so while we do like the software, we are going to now look to find another integrator to work with. We do have these guys on the shortlist.

thinkcomp

02-05-2008, 02:54 AM

Hi,

I ended up developing my own all-in-one suite to run my own company, if anyone is interested in taking a look. It's like NetSuite. Chances are you guys will delete this post as self-promotion, but I don't really care. I just figured people might be interested in hearing about another option, especially from a member on the board. I'm not saying you have to buy it. Even some criticism would be nice, so I know how to make it better.

Aaron

roban

02-05-2008, 04:41 AM

Hi,

.....Chances are you guys will delete this post as self-promotion, but I don't really care. I just figured people might be interested in hearing about another option, especially from a member on the board. I'm not saying you have to buy it. Even some criticism would be nice, so I know how to make it better.

Aaron

Not at all Aaron. I didn't delete your post because I thought it was helpful.:)

mutahman

02-09-2008, 01:50 PM

Aaron, with all due respect, I believe your statement "It's like NetSuite" is a bit broad and misleading. It seems to me your product is a Saas accounting software, but does not offer CRM or SFA. If I'm wrong please let me know.

Roban it seems this thread has branched off to cover many different solutions...it seems it started as a "I'm a small business solution looking for an all in one ERP system" and now has posts in here that "compare" software(s) that are not really/exactly in the same space. In this thread we are now seeing "accounting" software being compared to full on ERP/CRM/ACCT/Ecomm software.

I just think it may be easier for new users to find info on the type(s) of solution they are looking for IF this thread was split up.

Just a thought

thinkcomp

02-09-2008, 02:59 PM

Hello mutahman,

Without going into too much detail, I would like to point out that my statement about Exponent being like NetSuite was not intended to be misleading, nor was it misleading in actuality. It does, in fact, contain several features that are directly related to customer relationship management, sales force automation, and e-commerce that you might not be aware of. Furthermore, your insinuation that people should not be comparing systems in different spaces seems unusual in light of your previous post about an open-source downloadable program, Compiere, which seems to be, in my opinion, quite a bit different than the predominantly closed-source web-based systems being discussed here.

I do agree that this is a very long thread, but especially given that my post was approved by the administrator just like everyone else's, I don't think that my mentioning one more alternative out of many, many others really hurt anyone.

Aaron

Magneto

02-09-2008, 07:04 PM

I like that people will present this kind of stuff here. I had no idea that Exponent was out there. I thought I was a good searcher on the web, but never came across it.

I think the market is ripe for this kind of application. There are so many accounting packages that miss the mark and disappoint in too many ways. I think the NetSuite model is pretty good, once you remove the hose-your-customers-at-renewal mentality, anyway.

EJ

mutahman

02-10-2008, 12:02 PM

Aaron, I was not trying to fire a shot across your bow. As per one of my previous posts that refer to "perception being reality" and the responsibility the software provider to "skew" our perceptions of their products I believe my post in response to yours is consistent. Your site positions Exponenet as an accounting solution and it came across to me that this was an "accounting" solution (not an accouting, CRM, ERP and e-commerce solution).

If there are CRM, SFA and e-commerce features in your software then I am interested to look further into what you have as we are in the market and seriously considering everyone. I have no issue with your post....my comments were around software features (IE comparing apples to apples with regards to features, in that Netsuite/Vision Core/Everest/Interprise, etc) are "all in one solutions" for a small business.

Regarding your latest post, I don't know that "open source" VS. "closed source" is an issue at all, especially since solutions likes Vision Core and Interprise now offer their source code.

Again, if your software has CRM, SFA and e-commerce functionality please

Ranchmama

02-12-2008, 08:00 PM

I am a very small business person. One woman show trying to get some drop ship business going in the gun industry. I am bound and determined to not spend a load of money doing this. I will be the first to say I am not familiar with all the different things that has been discussed on this thread.
I am using Zen Cart for my internet presence. http://www.zen-cart.com/ So far so good. I do have to pay a computer guy to do my set up for me with the credit card processing and the shipping rates. Well heck, he is just doing it all since I am not that talented. Just try to get a credit card company to approve you if you sell guns on the internet! Not a easy task even with a walk in store front. I did it though and am still plugging on the other details. This is what the program says it will do.
multiple customer modes,unlimited category depth, multiple sales and discounts,multiple display modes, XHTML template system, unlimited extra pages, multiple ad banner controller, multiple shipping options, multiple payment options, newsletter manager, discount coupons,gift certificates, featured products, quantity discounts
I am small so this will work for a while. There is also a easy populate module that is free but I had to get the paid version since I have over 14,000 product logged in to get the rest of the stuff on the net. Everything is switched off at this time until I have all the nit picking things worked out with shipping and someone trained to update inventory quantity and prices. My computer guy is slow but he is the only one I have found in several states that can do what I want him to much less at a cheap rate. Once I get this stuff put together I need to go in and smooth out some of the looks on the website but it will get there. Anyway.... Between Open Office and Zen cart and what other freebies I run across I might get this done. Hope this is information that will be useful to someone that needs to save some money.

Ranchmama
http://www.gunslingersgear.com

dcleeds710

02-13-2008, 03:59 AM

I don't know if econostores has all the features you need, but it is an all-in-one solution.

CSR

02-14-2008, 08:21 AM

A note from MainStreet CEO Michael Sandler. At MainStreet, we are quite proud of our software package and our dedication to professional services and support. As posted above, we have a user that is upset. Despite the comments posted, we have reached out to this user and still sincerely welcome the opportunity to help this user within the constraints of the project resources and budget.

More broadly, we are always seeking to improve and our participation in this forum provides the opportunity to acknowledge issues (such as we did in a previous posting included below for reference), provide insight, and get feedback. As our user community benefits, so do we.

[Previous posting (for reference): There are absolutely legitimate concerns and a heavy dose of truth in the delays as professional services has been very busy. When someone wants MainStreet to do project work for the company, they have had to wait for a slotting which has been sometimes 4 or 5 weeks out. Acknowledging is hopefully a strong indication that there is a sincere desire to improve. During the past few months, the company has been working hard to correct and improve this and make more resources and documentation available. This has involved implementing a support portal, providing 2 hour "hot topic" conference call sessions, and beefing up support for third party developers who can do implementations of BusinessFlow.]

To give insight into the pricing change...we eliminated the up-front license fee for hosted deployments so that companies feel comfortable trialing BusinessFlow. It is $950/month subscription with no per user and no per module fees. Users may cancel their subscription if they wish. While this is a sign of our confidence in our software, it also acknowledges that because BusinessFlow is complex, it may require trial for a company to thoroughly evaluate how they will operate on the system and determine their use of the SDK to customize BusinessFlow for their company. Although BusinessFlow is standards based, there is most definitely a learning curve for a developer using the SDK and companies need to accurately scope their deployment. When a subscription starts, professional services are not included in the $950 as some companies do not require any assistance and therefore do not need to pay for assistance. So, we have not bundled it.

On deployments...we have been investing very heavily in the usability of the SDK to support third party developers. This is critical to our ability to scale and is consistent with the core values of the package - open and flexible. We are also working on our project management process whereby we require more definitive specifications if MainStreet engineers are to be used for a project. Because the software is flexible, in times past, we have used that flexibility to craft solutions for clients through our professionals services without having a detailed specification. While we would like to continue that creativity in our engineering, driving more clarity into solution specification will be good for the client and good for MainStreet to define success and reach it.

These changes and genuine efforts are part of our investment and commitment to the continued success of BusinessFlow and the BusinessFlow community.

Best Regards,

Michael Sandler
CEO
MainStreet Commerce
800-595-6246 Ext 85
msandler@mainstreetcommerce.com

mutahman

02-14-2008, 11:56 AM

Michael

I know the current strategy around MS is to not offer General Ledger because your findings lead you to believe most customers/companies have an existing GL software they prefer to "tie into" M.S., but I was wondering if you have re-thought about this.

Are there any plans to add built in General Ledger functionality into BusinessFlow? If you had it we would have probably chosen to go with you guys.

We just made the decision to go with Interprise Suite and will, over the next couple of months, be migrating our historical data and our 3 websites over to I.S.

Once we get this migration completed we will report back to let you know how it goes.

We really did try everything we could to stay with Netsuite, but it just didn't work out...

Hope this helps

CSR

02-15-2008, 12:36 PM

Question from Mutahman posted above: I know the current strategy around MS is to not offer General Ledger because your findings lead you to believe most customers/companies have an existing GL software they prefer to "tie into" M.S., but I was wondering if you have re-thought about this. Are there any plans to add built in General Ledger functionality into BusinessFlow? If you had it we would have probably chosen to go with you guys.

Mutahman -

We are in discussions with companies like yours to get feedback and determine what will be the best way to proceed. The most likely outcome will be to provide specific feeds and/or connectors (tightly pre-configured) to packages such as Microsoft Dynamics and QuickBooks.

As you noted, in many deployments of BusinessFlow, it is serving an order entry/ order management hub in the enterprise with integrations through our synchronization layer into ERP packages, WMS packages, analytics packages, 3rd party logistics providers, etc. This deployment (best of breed) fits with BusinessFlow's architecture which focuses on being open and flexible.

That said, you and companies like yours have our attention, and I will keep you posted as we further our thinking. We welcome additional thoughts and advice.

Best Regards,

Michael Sandler
CEO
MainStreet Commerce
800-595-6246 Ext 85
msandler@mainstreetcommerce.com
www.mainstreetcommerce.com

MrChristmas

02-19-2008, 05:41 PM

Mutahman,

What made you decide to take the leap with Interprise? As you've said in previous posts, they have a very new product with a number of issues that need to be addressed. I've been evaluating Interprise and VisionCore recently and have been equally frustrated with trying to get solid references. They appear to have lots of functionality but not much of a track record.

mutahman

02-19-2008, 08:45 PM

Mr. Christmas, good question. I'm going to answer this honestly, and I'm sure that the reasons as to why we have made our decision will be debated as to "is that the correct reason to make such a decision".

We have the option to extend Netsuite for 3 years, and at a very aggressive price. I personally feel very strongly about the capabilities of the Netsuite product. On top of that, the fact that we have been using Netsuite for 3 years and all my people know the product and all our data is in "their" database would make it seem like a no brainer for me to stay with Netsuite (or at least extent the agreement for 3 years while I look for the best replacement AND let the market and it's players mature). Yet, based on the experience I have had with Netsuite over the past 3 months, I feel compelled to get away from them as quickly as possible. Here is what happened----I started to work with Netsuite (for our current renewal) in December '07, and what I have gone through to get this renewal completed has been absurd. I have it written in my original contract that there was a price cap on the increase at time of renewal...well I had to escalate this all the way up to their executive team to get this ok'd. Once I went through this exercise and got the "yes we will honor the contract", I was then given a new sales rep., who lasted 1 day. I was then handed over to another rep (who at the end of Dec. was at that time on the job for 7 months). We spoke at length a number of times, he provided me with a new quote and I noticed that a feature that was originally part of my base license, was now added in as a separate module that I was being charged extra for. I brought this to the reps attention, and he told me that he was going to CES but will bring this up to his management team and get it fixed. I waited a week (knowing he was on the road). I then sent him a few mails in mid Jan, then a couple of calls...finally by the end of January someone answered me and told me that my sales rep had left the company. OK....so then I am handed off to another guy, a good guy, been with the company for 7 years. OK great, so a guy who has been there a while, knows what he is doing...finally!! I explain to him the whole situation, in all its detail. He says, ok understand. He then gives me a quote. I look a it and say, OK. then I get a mail from the VP of sales, saying that quote is a mistake and he and I need to talk in a week when he gets back from being on the road

Now, all this time we are looking at different solutions. The 2 that we are leaning toward are Vision Core and Interprise. In my mind vision core is the leader cause I have played with their backend the most, and while it's a step or 2 down from Netsuite, what they are missing doesn't kill me and I could pay an integrator to build these customizations for me. The reason I have VC over Interprise is because my original demo with Interprise was a debacle. But then my web guy tells me there is a new version of Interprise (SP3). So we look at it and this version is greatly improved over what I saw last time. I then contact Vision Core to find out if we can see a demo of the shopping cart (able commerce) along with the backend. I'm told, wait a week they (able commerce) are just finishing up their demo. I wait a week, contact VC again and I'm told, "we're waiting for able and when they are reasy we will have a demo for you"....ok. Then 2 more weeks go by and I mail VC and say "do you want this business or not", I get a mail back "yes we want the business, please be patient they will have the demo soon". 2 days later I get a mail with demo links...I think, great. I try to load the demo, but it's not a demo....it's 2 live versions I need to load on servers. I call a local VC integrator, and he says "yup, these are actual copies that need to be installed on a server and then you have to do the integration between able and VC....because it's not yet done....this is a job that will take a number of hours to do". I contact VC and able, and they tell me--sorry the integration will not be ready until later this year. I'm thinking, ok they are out.

Now all this time we are looking at many other solutions, and none of them is really giving me enough of a reason to leave Netsuite, even though I now want to get away from them. Then I get a mail from Interprise saying they have a new hotfix for their latest release. I load the hotfix, I'm playing with the system for a few days, I go on their user forum (sign up) and then sent 11 PM's to 11 different customers who have posted on the forum. 10 of the 11 answered me and all 10 said they would definately choose Interprise again if they had to choose, all of them saying "yeah there are some small issues but these guys are very responsive". We asked for a quote, got a great deal and said, let's do this.

We have now found what seems to be a great person to extract all the data (including transactional data) from Netsuite at a very reasonable price, and have a local Interprise integrator who seems eager to get this rolled out. so I am hoping that over the next 3-4 weeks we get everything implemented, customized and 2 of our websites up and running, and that WE wind up being the benchmark reference account for Interprise.

Hope this helps

MrChristmas

02-19-2008, 10:25 PM

Mutahman, I appreciate all the info. I too have been back and forth with Interprise and VisionCore and have looked at many other ERP products on the market as well including the big boys. I have not seen any product that has the potential (at least for my situation) that Interprise has but I have pretty much decided that it's not ready for prime time. I have looked at several of their demo versions including the latest SP3 Hotfix 1. Each time I am impressed with the functionality but disappointed with the buggy nature of the software. Conceptually, I think Interprise has it right and wish you the best on your implementation. If you get it going, I don't think there is a better product.

On VisionCore, I also have the email with the "demos" and there appears to be an integration piece. I will post back to let you know if it's really there or not. That said, I do know that the integration piece is limited and is not as well integrated as aspdnsf and IP.

If anyone has any suggestions, I'm open. We're an INC 500 company and have several high volume websites that I would like to move to a new platform. So far we've looked at Netsuite, MS Dynamics, SAP Business One, Mainstreet, VisionCore, Interprise, Dydacomp, Everest and a few others.

Magneto

02-19-2008, 11:24 PM

mutahman

02-20-2008, 02:08 AM

MR.C.

We have run into a few bugs and I do see the issues being encountered by those posting on their user boards but we haven't run into anything yet that was of major concern. What have you found as the major bugs?

We also know we will need to do a bit of customization to make this exactly what we want (both on the IS side and the cart side). We're looking forward to this.

With regards to VC, what I was told was that the "integration" between the most recent version of Ablecommerce and VC is more like a bridge vs. a true integration and was quite a project to implement.

This will be an interesting transition and I will let you all know how it goes...and I'll try to be honest and be as impartial as I can with what I report back.

Hope this helps

MrChristmas

02-20-2008, 08:23 AM

Mutahman,

The major issue for me has to do with user roles and security (this may not be a problem for everyone but it's a major issue for me). I've asked about it and they said they were working on it but I don't expect it to be resolved in the short term. My other hang up was lack of documentation. Normally, I wouldn't be so picky but if I know I'm going to have some bumps in the road with a product, I would at least like good documentation/help to steer me along.

I'm not able to send a PM...maybe I don't have enough seniority out here. Anyway, send something my way and I'll be happy to chat.

On VC, I do still have some questions on what is one-way, two-way, etc. I know that I will have to do some work on the integration piece but VC will provide the source code which will give me something to start with.

MrChristmas

02-20-2008, 08:39 AM

How about:

www.sql-ledger.com

I've gotten to really like MySql, after finding out how our website's built-in SQL server works with Cart32 (www.novak-adapt.com). It works extremely well for us, and it is based off some custom code I contracted out for.

So, step-by-step we're phasing ourselves gladly out of the NetSuite yearly renewal nightmares.

Eric

Eric,

Thanks for the suggestion. I saw sql-ledger for the first time in this forum the other day and found it interesting. On the surface it looks like a fine product however I need something that will cover basic CRM (quoting, activity management, leads, opportunities), support a sales team (territory, sales commissions, etc), B2B and B2C pricing schemes in addition to the accounting and web. I've looked at trying to combine several products together to accomplish this but the all in one ERP's seem much more practical.

Mr. C

gearshop

02-20-2008, 07:04 PM

Mutahman,

I have been reading your posts with great interest. I think I am in the same boat as everyone else reading this thread, I'm looking for a solid one piece solution. I have also been looking at Interprise Suite but have not yet taken the plunge. I think I'm gun shy after my experience with Mainstreet. I would like to find out who you are working with for an integrator but I am unable to send you a personal message (PM). Looks like the PM works on the Interprise Suite forum, what is your username over there.

If you haven't checked out the IS forum yet it is definately worth reading through. It's refreshing to have this open to the public before buying the product. Another great forum is for Stone Edge Order Manager which has glowing reviews by their user base.

jf0721

02-20-2008, 07:24 PM

I have made several postings about Mainstreet Commerce over the past several weeks and I still stand by them. There seems to be no significant improvement in the company's customer support practices.

I would recommend a strict agreement in writing to secure an acceptable service level for customer support for anyone who is considering Mainstreet Commerce.

johnTEN

03-03-2008, 11:45 AM

mutahman,

I tried to PM you but was unable to. I am also a Netsuite user looking at Interprise. You said "We have now found what seems to be a great person to extract all the data (including transactional data) from Netsuite at a very reasonable price, and have a local Interprise integrator who seems eager to get this rolled out."

Could you let me know how to contact this person as getting data out is a big pain. I was thinking about doing the Interprise install myself, but would be happy to talk to an integrator if they can make a good case for their services. And thanks for all you posts, they have been very helpful.

mutahman

04-02-2008, 07:29 PM

Guys

This week we are starting our implementation to Interprise Suite, and our integrator has a tool that will extract all the data (including transactional data) from Netsuite to I.S.

If you want to know his contact details please send me a PM

Thanks

Dom

johnTEN

04-02-2008, 07:51 PM

For some reason I am not able to send you a PM, but I would love that contact. I am john (at) madebysurvivors.com

jeff-em

04-05-2008, 09:04 AM

mutahman/Dom: The forum software is not allowing me to send PM. Do you have an email address to write to ?

Tye

06-13-2008, 02:59 AM

We also compared ICode with NetSuite and ended up going with NetSuite. It's only been about two years and we have a significant amount of data stored in NetSuite. I've seen other postings on this thread about having so much data on-line in a hosted environment. We tried the .CSV data export from NetSuite however so much of the data "details" were missing we would be in big trouble if we actually lost our connection to NetSuite.

I ran across this company that provides a NetSuite to QuickBooks data conversion service and signed up for a one year "QuickBooks Backup File" service. Once a month they connect to our NetSuite database and download all the data and convert it into a standard QuickBooks file. At the end of the year we have all of our Customers, Vendors, Accounts, Inventory, Employees and all historical transactions "backed up" into QuickBooks. It's worked out great. Their contact link is http:\\www.SiliconDigitalSystems.com/DataConversion.

Also here's a link to another article about their NetSuite to QuickBooks services: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=48677&messageID=908160&start=-1

NetSuite to QuickBooks Data Conversion
We've been using NetSuite for about 3 years now with about 24,000 Inventory Items and Assembly's,
64,000 Customer Accounts and almost 450,000 Transaction records (Customer Invoices, Receive
Payments, Vendor Bill Payments, Checks, Journal Entries, Cash Receipts etc.)
Currently we're using the SDSI NetSuite to QuickBooks Backup Services to backup all our NetSuite
data to a QuickBooks file once a month. Can you contact the company and explore the option to have a
NetSuite to QuickBooks "Audit" Service added as well? The company's website is
http://www.SiliconDigitalSystems.com/DataConversion.
When our team has attended the NetSuite conferences many of the SDSI users request a similar Audit
tool so that we can find transactions that have been entered in NetSuite that match a certain criteria in
QuickBooks. The SDSI monthly data conversion is very accurate however we have so much data that
it's difficult to locate data using the NetSuite Search features. An Audit Service added to the SDSI
NetSuite to QuickBooks data conversion service would give us the ultimate functionality between
NetSuite and our QuickBooks backups.

Hope this helps!

Tye

06-13-2008, 03:36 AM

I've received so many call's about the arcticle on ZDNet for the NetSuite to QuickBooks Backup Service from SDSI so here's the link info:
http://www.SiliconDigitalSystems.com/DataConversion.

Also here's a link to the original article: http://talkback.zdnet.com/5208-10532-0.html?forumID=1&threadID=48677&messageID=908160&start=-1

This service backups all our NetSuite data including all historical transactions into a QuickBooks company file on a monthly basis. The NetSuite to QuickBooks data conversion is included in the service. Because of the many postings about problems with the NetSuite .CSV data export this option has worked well for us.

Tye

whitek

08-05-2008, 09:23 AM

WOW, this is an educational thread. I've been in over my head researching accounting/ERP/ecommerce solutions for over a month now--and it is an exhausting process.

Mutahman, thank you for your helpful reviews. I hope I can be as helpful to others as you have been on this thread.

We are a small (under $3M) wholesale manufacturing and distributing company, currently operating on the dinosaur that is Quickbooks. It flat out stinks for inventory, and we need something more web-based now (multiple locations).

While that all-in-one suite seems like a dream come true, it just doesn't look like it's out there yet. I'm OK with piecing it all together, but ultimately, we need:
- GL, AR, AP, basic accounting (could leave on QB if we absolutely have to, ugh)
- Ecommerce for multiple sites
- CRM, but this doesn't have to be robust. We have a small sales staff.
- Commissions tracking and reporting
- Inventory/Warehouse Mgmt
- Shipping integration
- Customer Portal login
- Serialize/bin/bar coding system

Originally, we thought NetSuite was the best fix-all ever, but it sounds like there are still price-gouging issues, data-retrieval issues, and the fact that it's not open to google analytics is almost appalling!

Other things we've investigated:
Netbooks.com - looks very promising, however, we received and email saying that they were not currently accepting new customers due to the overwhelming response. A good problem to have, I suppose. They must be doing something right.

Pavintheway.com - a small company, but good alternative to NetSuite. Will now go investigate more.

Liferro.com - also not accepting new customers at this time.

Still have to go investigate some of the others mentioned here. I'll let everyone know if I learn anything promising or insightful.

We currently have a non-ecommerce site built on ModXCMS, which I'm excited about in and of itself. It interfaces with FoxyCart, so that only one login is required for content management and catalog management. Both are opensource, which is also encouraging. FoxyCart doesn't look like it currently interfaces with Quickbooks, however, so I'm not hopeful about integration with other programs just yet.

That not be very helpful just yet, but if anyone has any insight, I'm happy to continue to share what I learn along the way as well. Thanks to everyone who has shared here!

InfoSourcing

08-05-2008, 10:51 AM

Hello All,

We have been dealing with ERP solutions for last 5 yrs and we have worked with major vendors in implementing their solution for small and medium business and yes its headache to evaluate these software's because of its depth and breadth.

I have made a detailed comparison list of all the major ERP vendors out there and I hope this might help you guys as a snapshot of vendors.
ERP Comparison for Small and Medium Business (http://www.info-sourcing.com/comparison_enterprise_softwares.htm)

The right approach is to map your requirements to the products out there during evaluation process and that has really helped customers see the value. There is no software out there which is perfect and no solution which is "one size fits all".

Whitek - According to your requirements the best suited ERP products for you is Interprise Suite and Everest Software.

In Nutshell,
a) Interprise is new in the market but has great advantage compared to others in terms of architecture and price.
b) Everest is matured software with lots of feature cld be slightly costly but customers making 2 to 5M can afford.
c) NetSuite it great software with lots of features but it may go over your budget

Pls feel free to share your thoughts.

thinkcomp

08-21-2008, 12:44 AM

Hi whitek,

I'd be interested in speaking with you. I just finished adding barcode, multiple warehouse inventory and some shipping support to Exponent, the all-in-one suite I've been hacking together for the past several years. I've been using it to ship books through the normal book distribution channel since I recently set up a publishing division, but maybe it would be helpful to someone else as well?

Aaron

wedwsd

09-04-2008, 02:24 AM

Nice Posting

mutahman

01-13-2009, 04:30 PM

Last week in this forum (via a different thread) I learned that ASPdotnet and Interprise Suite are no longer working together. I have been trying to find more detail on this but neither site has any information (yet the ASPdotnet website now has NO mention of Interprise Suite on the site) and literally 5 minutes ago just called ASPdotnet to learn what is going on, and was told that Dan Van Kuren (their head honcho) was not in town and no one there had any info on this.

Now that this "cart issue" has come to light, I will share with this long and informative thread, our experiences with Interprise Suite + ASPdotnet.

If you read through this thread you can see that we are a Netsuite shop and were looking for a replacement to Netsuite simply because we continue to add the number of international websites we run, and Netsuite (as a cart) does not give us the most flexibility we would like to have AND cost is certainly an issue (because we run each international website through a different international company, which requires us to buy separate instances of NS and this is quite costly).

so we have been on the search for a number of years, and looked SO many different ERP/e-commerce combos. Early in 2008 we chose Interprise Suites with the ASPdotnet shopping cart. Even though I felt at the time they were not ready for prime time, I knew we had 3 more years on NS and we could get Interprise/ASPdotnet set up to run one of our international sites, and as they progressed the software, we could add more sites.

We chose to first set up out Canada website on IS/ASPdotnet and it didn't work properly (did not calculate taxes properly and there were issues with the CC gateway). After 8 months of working on the set up and issues, working with IS customer support, ASPdotnet's customer support and the gateway's customer support. we realized that we were getting nowhere, and the site that was scheduled to launch in July, then August, then Sept., then Oct.---was not ready to launch.

So I contacted the IS and ASPdotnet guys and after a month of e-mails where they (a) said they would not provide a refund (b) said there were no issues that they knew of (c) said would work to fix the problems (funny because they first said there were no problems) at no cost to me.

So a month and a half later, I have heard nothing back from them....I sent them a mail 2 days ago (copying ASPdotnet guys and IS guys) and have yet to hear back from them. In my mail I simply asked (a) for an update on the "fixes" and (b) for an update to the word on the street, whereby I'm hearing there is no more partnership between IS and ASPdotnet.

So, obviously, I'm not at all happy with the fact that the software doesn't work (which I expected), but I am extremely dissatisfied with the fact that after 8 months we could not get a basic website to properly process orders and most dissatisfied that the companies have chosen to (seemingly) stop their working partnership without ANY notice to existing customers.

Gary Harrison you may want to chime in here before it gets ugly.

RobbieB

01-13-2009, 05:43 PM

Well hopefully they work somethings out but maybe it's for the better. I think it was a good idea to find a partner who already had a solid shopping cart but options are good too. It would be nice if able commerce or perhaps some open source cart paid some attention to IS but I can certainly understand why they'd hesitate to devote resources to what is still a "start up".

noblenull

01-23-2009, 11:22 PM

Last week in this forum (via a different thread) I learned that ASPdotnet and Interprise Suite are no longer working together.

Interprise never passed my "smell test". It is unfortunate that they seem to have great ideas, but poor execution.

mutahman

01-25-2009, 02:05 PM

Noblenull

Interprise did not pass my test of being market ready either, but based on what was working and the fact that the platform was .net and open source, and the fact that ASPdotnetstorefront was an established and reliable software, we figured we could get a couple of our smaller sites up and running on the platform, work with it for a year while we improved the system and Interprise came out with updates.

When we tried to go live and there were issues, it seemed the issues were based on roadbumps between the cart and the system. They should be fixable, but now that ASPdotnetstorefront and Interprise are no longer "actively" working together (IE ASPdotnetstorefront no longer sells the I.S. version, and after speaking with Dan at ASP he confirmed they will no longer work on an I.S. version and the partnership is done) we are left here on an island, with no update/info from Interprise (despite me chasing them for 2 weeks now).

What I am extremely pissed about is the fact that Interprise has made NO mention of this to it's customers, they still promote on their site that they have "a cart" but don't clarify if it's the ASPdotnet cart OR if they acquired the code from ASPdotnet OR if it's new code. what probably aggrivates me most is Gary Harrison and the Interprise people at the top always struck me as leaning towards the shady side (talking more then delivering) and I expected that to change somewhat after Taylor Corp. bought them in 2008. BUT, this current issue with the cart and the way they are handling in (or not handling it) is a indication that as a management team, the people who are currently running Interprise are clowns. Have the balls to tell us that there is an issue, that the partnership is done but you are working toward a solution. Don't hide in the weeds, because not only does hiding in the weeds turn-off your customers, it gets them talking negatively on boards like this...where many others read and are influenced by the posts.

Now, let me tell you about my feelings on ASPdotnetstorefront. Dan did the right thing. I spoke with him on the phone, he explained the situation with me and agreed to refund me for the 3 carts we purchased. Because of this I am very willing to do business with them again, and WISH there was a back-end ERP system that tied into their ML cart. The way he handled this makes me want to do business with him again. The way Interprise is handling this, I want to see them dead.

Through all of this, I'm very happy I have Netsuite. They signed us up for another 3 years, honored their contract with us (there was a clause in our original contract that they could only increase their price by X%) and even though I wish their cart had more flexibility and access to the code, they still (IMO) provide an excellent product for a company that is running a business not just a web business, but a B2B and e-commerce business.

I hope that Netsuite finds a way to make their product more cost effective for the small business with multiple websites AND makes their cart more flexible/robust because after all this time I still believe they have the best solution in the market.

Barney Stone

01-25-2009, 05:43 PM

Because of this I am very willing to do business with them again, and WISH there was a back-end ERP system that tied into their ML cart.There is a back-end system that ties into AspDotNetStorefront. I know it does not have all of the all-in-one-system features that you are ideally looking for (such as a built-in accounting system), but it is real, has been around for about nine years now, is used by about 2,000 merchants, and is a heck of a lot less expensive than NetSuite. It is also written in a popular (although older) language, and shipped with mostly open sourcecode. I won't name the program, so hopefully this post won't get deleted. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I will add that it is my company's product. There is a section for it in AspDotNetStorefront's user forum, so you should be able to find it there.

InfoSourcing

01-29-2009, 02:48 PM

Regarding Aspdotnet storefront, yes they did have a hiccup with licensing and support issues with Interprise Suite, but I guess that's all taken care of now and IS has its own ecommerce module called ISE, which makes it even easier for them to integrate more features ...

Do read this blog about Inteprise http://InterpriseSuite.blogspot.com for more updates on IS and its new version ..

Any more questions do feel free to ask we are here to help ...

Note: This thread started with differences between Everest and NetSuite and it turned into Interprise Suite, which shows that IS (Inteprise Suite) is becoming a prominent player in ERP sector and with its new version 2009 it will still grow stronger for small and medium business.

We don't pitch just one product we look at your business requirements and pitch the right solution which fits your business and budget..

Gary Harrison

02-02-2009, 03:59 PM

Wow, I had not been on the forum for a little while. Yes, Interprise has taken over the exclusive rights to the AspDotNetStorefront for Interprise Suite product which we have renamed to Interprise eCommerce. Having two companies provide the integrated solution was very problematic for our customers as they had to purchase two separate support and maintenance plans and were confused where Interprise Solutions left off and AspDotNetStorefront began. Even worse, customers often were bounced from company to company for answers to problems and customer related issues often fell through the cracks. We jointly felt that a single company needed to be responsible to simplify things for our customers and to be able to take the product to the next level and we appreciate AspDotNetStorefront's cooperation in making that happen. Because corporate policy require us not to discuss issues that are in negotiations, and to ensure that the IP of AspDotNetStorefront was properly protected, the final agreement took longer than expected. This unfortunately caused some alarm for our users.

As infosource mentioned we are very close to releasing the 2009 version which will incorporate hundreds of improvements based on the feedback of our users. Also we have a second team of developers that are already working on the 2010 version but that’s all I’m going to say about that for now. Because this is important in todays economic climate, December was our second best month ever and we were ahead of projections in 2008. Our U.K. office reported that Janauary 2009 was one of their best months ever as well.

Thanks!!

mutahman

02-21-2009, 11:52 PM

Gary every time you open your mouth it is to pitch your product. You cannot come clean when you **** things up, and instead you continue to get on a soap-box and fan the flames.

the product isn't market ready. One of the main things I've come across (despite having asked John Grande and one of your VARS prior to our purchase) is that your cart/backend do not properly account for Canadian provincial and country taxes. I bought this software in Feb 2008, brought up the issues to IS support and one of the VAR partners no less then 5 times and they could not help. I finally lost my patience with the nonsense around the end of September 08. Then end October ASP.net and IS finally "got together to help me out". Now 4 months later I'm still sitting here with my thumb up my ***. At least in January Dan from ASPdotnet stood up and did the right thing, saying "yeah it didn't work right, there are lots of problems and that is why we're not working together" and he refunded me in full.

You guys, instead, keep pitching me ******** about how this is going to be fixed....and you have the audacity to get on these boards and further promote your product.

Never on any public forum have I been this vocal against a company, and I'm just getting started. You guys are shameless. Lying to customers like me (especially me) is now going to take a big bite out of your ***. Never underestimate what one guy can do against an army.

mutahman

03-01-2009, 03:02 AM

you want to see how bad Interprise is with regards to answering customers on their own forum....check out this link

http://www.connectedbusiness.com/FORUMS/UserForums/tabid/136/afgroup/5/Default.aspx

it's amazing that these guys have all the time in the world to come onto this and other forums to pitch the product, BUT they don't get onto their own forum to answer the many questions customers are asking (IE when is the 2009 version of the software being released? can you guys clarify/update everyone on the ASPdotnet cart situation?)

MediumSizedBus

03-04-2009, 11:13 PM

Wow, there's been a lot of interesting developments in this thread since we last came here 2 years ago. We process 100 orders a day, ship directly to customers and also to distributors, and ship via UPS, Fed-Ex, and USPS.

Two years ago we decided to switch to Mail Order Manager after years of using Stone Edge. Well, after two years of constant problems with the software, we're ready to try some better software. (Right now we're spending an hour a week on the MOM tech support line dealing with bug after bug. We can't waste time like this.)

Does anyone have any suggestions? Our main "unique" requirement is the ability to handle our "of the month" style club memberships. Everything else is standard: web orders through some platform (we use Miva Merchant right now, but are open to changing), ability to track customers orders, etc.

We'd like to be able to process postage, Fed-Ex, and UPS shipping automatically, too. Right now with MOM you have to print out the order and then print out postage through Endicia, which is a unneeded and time wasting step.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Joe Medium

Prowire

03-04-2009, 11:56 PM

MediumSizedBus

03-05-2009, 11:26 AM

we use Order Manager and cant live without it . we love their built UPS system . if i were you i would have another look at Order Manger they have come a long way in the past 2 years . What ever you do dont waste your hard earned money on IS i would almost gaurantee that your business would suffer, trust me we learned the hard way :mad:. Some of these companies are quick to take your money and promise you the world but in the end your business suffers be cause these companies cant deliver what they promised.

Yeah, we've read ALL about IS and won't be going there.

It's really sad what's happened with us and Mail Order Manager. Every week, I'm wasting at least an hour on the phone with support and it's always the same thing: some file or another magically got corrupted and needs replaced. I almost wouldn't care if it didn't take a 30 to 40 minute wait to get through to someone. Plus, in the afternoon, they seem to have a whole different staff that takes FOREVER to figure out what's wrong.

Worst of all, we've paid for several custom changes to the software for Mail Order Manager, but every time they send out the SMALLEST update, all of those changes are gone and we call them and they want us to pay AGAIN to make the changes again. That's total BS.

Back when we were first looking, someone had made a site called DydaCONJob or something like that. I wish we had listened to him.

We really liked Stone Edge Order Manager, but we switched because we just didn't like how it ran off our Microsoft Access. So you're completely dependent on Microsoft NOT messing around with Access and causing problems, you know? That said, Stone Edge (I think) did everything we needed. Except maybe our "of the month" club? If they could handle the clubs, we might just switch back! :)

Joe Medium

mutahman

03-05-2009, 12:21 PM

After 3 years of this thread (and being part of thread since very early on) it's ironic to see how so many of us have experienced major problems with so many vendors, ultimately wasting money, time and who knows how much opportunity cost.

It's a testament to why going with seasoned and tested software, even when expensive, is actually worth the money.

While I'm still not happy with the limitations to the shopping cart, and I had to go through a major song and dance with them to honor the pricing, Netsuite has been a godsend because it works!!

MediumSizedBus

03-05-2009, 12:50 PM

After 3 years of this thread (and being part of thread since very early on) it's ironic to see how so many of us have experienced major problems with so many vendors, ultimately wasting money, time and who knows how much opportunity cost.

Yep, but I'm glad this thread has been going so long to keep "collecting data" to help out other business owners!

While I'm still not happy with the limitations to the shopping cart, and I had to go through a major song and dance with them to honor the pricing, Netsuite has been a godsend because it works!!

They're on my list to investigate for this time around. Would you mind discussing those limitations to the cart you mentioned? How does everything else work for you? How much did it cost to get up and running with them, if you don't mind me asking?

(And if you've already posted about this, I must have missed it, so feel free to point me back to your post so you don't have to waste your time writing it again!)

Thanks!

Joe Medium

mutahman

03-05-2009, 01:24 PM

you don't have the code for the cart (as you would with an open source cart) and because they host it, you can make only very limited customization to the cart. Also some basic requirements for e-commerce sites (like product reviews) are currently not available "out of the box" and instead you have to work with one of their partners to get a review app built on.

My situation with Netsuite (when it comes to pricing) is very different then what most encounter because we were their first customer in Asia, so we got a sweet deal. They are pricey, which is the concern I have with regards to my next renewal in 2011.

As for working, I've never had an issue with the site being down. I love their backend because the CRM, accounting, inventory are all there....and their dashboards are great for tracking the business.

If it was more affordable (from the list prices) it would be a no brainer.

It was because of my concerns with the price (down the road) that I started to look at other solutions. I have refused to buy a cart and build a back-end behind it (IE go with Magento and build an ERP that is built onto that cart) but I'm afraid of (a) the cost (b) dealing with all the bull*$% that comes with building and maintaining a custom application

Hope this helps.

Switchables

04-30-2009, 10:28 AM

SAY NO TO EVEREST!

By far the worst company! If you're budget meets their quote. Believe me when I say you will save money if you up your budget to get a better software company.

They may say they have CRM, but they don't. They don't have VARs anymore which makes it a ROYAL PITA to deal with Everest directly. My account rep told me she'd contact me in a week and it took 1.5 months for me to have to call her. The overpriced support plan you pay for only gets you software updates which RARELY happen even though there is a flood of suggestions from their customers - they don't care. Suggestions have been around now for 18 months and there isn't even a response from an Everest representative. Oh, but you can an even more BLOATED fee to get free incidents to fix bugs with their software (oh yeah, and there's a bunch). Their new e-commerce feature doesn't even work, so you have to stick with the old version. STAY AWAY FROM THEM!!! WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD!

MediumSizedBus

04-30-2009, 11:36 AM

The overpriced support plan you pay for only gets you software updates which RARELY happen even though there is a flood of suggestions from their customers - they don't care. Suggestions have been around now for 18 months and there isn't even a response from an Everest representative. Oh, but you can an even more BLOATED fee to get free incidents to fix bugs with their software (oh yeah, and there's a bunch). Their new e-commerce feature doesn't even work, so you have to stick with the old version. STAY AWAY FROM THEM!!! WORST COMPANY IN THE WORLD!

Hey, that sounds a lot like Mail Order Manager, only they send out WEEKLY updates that BREAK things that worked just fine, so you have to spend 1.5 hours on hold waiting for a tech support person who doesn't know what they're doing. HAPPENS EVERY WEEK.

Plus, every time they do an update, it overwrites the custom programming they made us pay for because the system didn't do something we were promised by the sales rep that it could do!! So we call back EVERY week and the person on the phone says, "Oh, that's custom programming you want. It'll cost $800 an hour!" And we're like, "Hell no, we're not paying for it again and again, every time you do a so called update!" And it takes hours to get it all figured out and fixed.

It's a real PITA and we think they do it to make their support plan seem necessary. If they'd stop BREAKING stuff that worked just fine, we wouldn't need to pay $1300 a year for "support."

Joe

JudithDolling

05-07-2009, 05:29 AM

This thread is informative. Thanks to you guys! These information can be used in home based business. Keep the useful information flowing. Thanks again!

Prowire

06-11-2009, 04:34 PM

Hello All

Well it has been a few months since IS offered to implement my software package after they took my money and left me hanging for over a year.

Today I was forced to pull the plug, this company is a joke. All these guys do is talk talk and more talk . After waiting for more than 3 months not a single thing has been done.

NEVER PAY THIS COMPANY UNTIL YOUR SOFTWARE IS RUNNING FULLY

Once they have your money your are screwed. I am out about 10K including hosting.

If they tell you that the import process is painless don’t believe it. You will have to import every image separately; you can’t import any SEO info.

If IS was a respectable company they would refund me all the money that they have taken from me.

Lucky for me I have using my Stone Edge OM the whole time and never hiccupped once.
The 1500.00 is paid for OM is my best investment yet.********* support is provided in America and most importantly by Americans that can be easily understood

Joe D

Scubed

08-10-2009, 07:43 AM

Versata buys Everest Software (the ENTIRE company) announced fri aug 7th.
Do the customers know yet?
Good thing? Bad thing?

InfoSourcing

08-18-2009, 10:01 AM

That's right as of last week, Everest was bought out in short sale by Versata Software's sister company Trilogy systems. The work force was reduced to 25% and rest were kicked out including CEO, CTO and VP sales ...

They don't have VAR's since 2008 and they went 100% direct and they closed down their development office in India and outsourced it to independent contractors so all this signs indicated they would sell ...

Is it good sign? Well Versata wld change the support plan for sure for its existing customer base, no new sales and product development which wld be bad for existing customers.

As solution providers we are continuing to support our Everest customers and help them migrate to 5.0 ver so they shld be able to use the software for another year or two and will monitor the situation going fwd...

We have been working with Interprise Suite as resellers for last 2 to 3 yrs and there was huge learning curve when its an ERP software and no s/w is without bugs/issues, but we are working to show a true ROI for our clients.

We don't want to be involved with NetSuite since there is not much value for small and medium business, its expensive, its SaaS model, its pretty good for start up companies who wants to reduce the infrastructure cost.

GreenMachine

08-19-2009, 11:12 PM

everest is basically in quarantine due to the acquisition
InterpriseSuite does not work and either does the company
NetSuites is hosted so thats out
dynamics is expensive
sage?

what has worked out for people.

Rogerco1

10-12-2009, 12:10 AM

IM SCHOCKED!! at how long this thread has been going. Ok my 2cents over the past 6 years.

1- MOM not worth it at all stay away.
2- Mainstreat Commerce = Ripoff $1,000 a month, no demo time
3- IS = I looked into this 3 years ago and ive always said the concept is great but no way is this ready for the real world.

SO what im currently using is ********* Order Manager = excellent once you get usaed to it and figure it all out, Support is excellent, their forums are filled with other users and employees and very active, help is a click away literally. VERY Worth every dime.

Site is hosted on a yahoo store platform, which i hate, small fortune to build professionally though YStoreTools.com is my number one source and choice for anything to do with my yahoo store after being ripped off by 3 other developers.

now my only problem is finding a Database developer who can build me a database to integrate all my suppliers and custom calculations etc..

Ive been in development with aspdotnetstorefront shopping cart for 9 months. Let me just say stay the heck away from this shopping cart too, this company is in the business of price fixing their cart, as well as deleting your posts from within their forums if they cant fix a known bug with their cart, they are extremely unhelpful and the truth is they do nothing to help you, their forums are answered mostly by their reps when they feel like it and if they feel like it. If i had any money i would take this company to court. Their documentation is confusing at best and very unclear. Unless you know everything there is to know about XML and ASP.net, plus other programing skills most of dont have stay away from aspdotnetstorefront shopping cart youll save yourself 1500 bucks, stress and a huge freaking headache.

Seeing how long this thread has been going and how many of the same people are still tracking this, I kind of feel like asking what about if a bunch of us get together and develop our version of a real shopping cart and order management system, supply chain management, shipping system, etc.. everything we need under one roof. This would be a huge undertaking. Im not even sure if would be possible.

We would need a development team and few dedicated individuals who are willing to fund, test and build this from our first hand real world use knowledge.

I have been scouring the internet day and night for years looking for a solid system, and to the best of my knowledge it doesnt exist without an absolutely ridiculous investment.

Can it be done? can it be scalable? can it be profitable or can we just build it for our own use?

Rogerco1

10-13-2009, 11:07 PM

Looks like the forum thread starred out the name of the order manager i currently use. its abbreviation commonly used is SEOM.. google it. "SEOM order manager" if this gets cut out, i would believe this is done on purpose or this forum is moderated by someone who hate this company for one reason or another. which is absurd because this is the entire point of this forum people sharing jeeeesh guys keep some part of the fee world free for g-d sakes. really cmon...

haljordan5

11-02-2009, 11:23 AM

Hi, Does anyone know of a CRM web application that also handles project management and billing, and is under $100? Thanks

cuberman

11-04-2009, 07:48 PM

First of all, great information on this post. Currently, i am too shopping for all-in-one solution but willing to separate the financial side of the process. We are a office supplies wholesaler/distributor with about 15 users.

Currently, we are offering our products via B2B (wholesale), B2C (retails, multiple websites, multiple eBay account, and Amazon) and planning to add Yahoo shopping and more ecommerce site in the future. The tasks to manage inventories and orders from multiple channel is just too much for our QuickBooks Enterprise version.

Therefore, we are looking for ERP/CRM/OCM. Must have requirements: Able to handle multi-channel (Retail, B2B, Ecommerce, EBay, Amazon); Web-based so that i implement them anywhere i want; support multi-brandings or companies.

These are the few companies that we are looking at:

CORESENSE ON-DEMAND RETAIL MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE
www.coresense.com
Just went through a 2 hours demo with them. Great software that probably will solve 70% of my operations. However, they do not have any financial integration except for the sales processes. I've been told that they are working on the P.O integration with QB so that i can write check/payment on QB. Pretty impressed on the demo.
Pricing: 25K to 30K implementation with training included (90 - 120 days of implementation)
Monthly: $2000/month + 0.25 per order transactions. This is for unlimited users and include one website. For additional website or channel, there is be an extra of $99/channel

RiteCart Multichannel
http://www.palindromesoftware.com/
Had a 2 hours demo with them as well. Software is able to handle multiple channel ordering but less polish than Coresense. I guess that's probably why the cost is substantially lesser.

Devix For E-Tailers, By E-tailers
http://www.devix.com/
Awaiting for Demo

ESCALATE RETAIL MULTI-CHANNEL COMMERCE
www.escalateretail.com
Requested Demo

STONE EDGE ORDER MANAGER
www.*********.com
Requested Demo

Mainstreet Commerce - BusinessFlow
http://mainstreetcommerce.com/solutions/businessflow.aspx

Would post a follow up after the demo with the rest on the list. As for now, i am happy to get some feedback from Coresense users. I tried to google it but found nothing. Keep up the good work guys.

Ohh by the way, i'm too looking for some ERP Systems and financial system to replace QB and solve my multi-channel purchasing. Here is some that i found:

OpenBravo
http://www.openbravo.com/

WebERP
http://www.weberp.org/

Compiere
http://www.compiere.com/

Does anyone has any other recommendation?

Rogerco1

11-11-2009, 12:02 AM

I can say something about coresense, their platform does look great, and yes you can scour the internet about them and all youll find are PR articles they wrote about themselves or published and thats it. As far as a good company to do business with ? i wouldnt deal with them if they paid me. After going thru a demo with them i get told that my company doesnt fit with them. hmmm lets see my first year in business i grossed 1.4mm second yr 2.3mm (when i first spoke to them), 3rd year (after corsense experience) 3.8mm (too bad for them) so far this year to date gross 4.1mm.

This forum automatically stars*** out the 4th company on your list above Stone, e d g e. the reason why they do that i have no clue this is a good company and their software is open source so you can pretty much do whatever you want as long as you have the know how. They also have an extremely active forum with many users out to help each other on top of their excellent support for their platform.

It will handle multiple selling channels an websites fro a variety of shopping carts granted each cart costs a one time fee. For a company of your size i would definitely recommend going with their SQL version. Though i do not know the details of your business its very hard to say if this would be good for you or not, but they are an honest company to do business with and thats what matters to me more than the coresense hoopla.

Devix is another very big player and expensive too. never went through a demo with them as fro what i hear their prices are into the thousands as well.

Mainstreet - did not want to provide a me with a demo to log in and view, all he, and i say he because i think its a one man show, only offered to do a remote desktop session for 30 minutes and if im testing out a platform that im going to spend 1k a month for you better spend more time on the phone detailing your hopped up platform and show me what you can do or give me a demo to log into and see for myself thats why i hate these big companies. They are not willing to do that. They want you to sing your life away without showing you what they can really do and then when you run into problems they say oh opps ok we'll work on it and you have to pay us $200 an hour to fix the problem with their own platform.

So to sum up whomever you go with make sure you get it in WRITING that if "anything" goes wrong with their system they will fix it without charge.

Rogerco1

11-11-2009, 12:20 AM

Oh and in case you want the canned email response i got from coresense after 2 weeks of providing them all my data specs and database this is the disgusting slap in the face response i get. Even though when this person threw her numbers at me which were equal to your above i accepted and was willing to pay them for their platform. VERY glad i did not move forward. At the end of my 2nd year in business after this experience i donated $12k to 3 different organizations. My comments about these big companies would not be kind at all. If i was to spend the money i would go with SAP, SAGE, Microsoft Dynamics these are the guys you should be looking at. If i learned anything, none of these programs are easy and none exist that say they are easy that actually work the way they say they do.

My recommendation? The simple/hard way but definitely effective, each site would be managed individually into its own system. Then tally them up into quickbooks on their own and then tally that up end of the quarter which is what i do. Costs a heck of a lot less causes slightly more work, but once you get the workflow you can create some automated process with a program called "Automate" by Network automation, this program is a lifesaver and i mean it, best 1k i ever spent besides my Herman Miller chair.

EMAIL FROM CORSENSE
Thank you for your interest in CORESense. Our mission is to create a competitive advantage for mid-sized retailers by providing them with everything they need for achieving retail business success.

As such, we feel it is best to let you know that our experience has shown that companies like yours are not a good fit for CORESense. Most likely you can be best served with a standalone POS and/or ecommerce solution. Quite often after talking with companies who are just starting up in business or ecommerce, they will come back to us later on to help them take their business to the next level. We hope that is the case with you.

If you would like a few suggestions for affordable systems, please feel free to contact us. If you would still like to be included in our educational program (newsletter and webinars), please let us know.

Thanks again for your interest.
Best regards,

Collabora

11-11-2009, 11:22 PM

What is your budget?

Bdenny

11-14-2009, 08:03 PM

Hey mutahman,

I actually ended up choosing 'NetSuite Small Business' shortly after posting this question, $90/month per user (not their full blown 'Netsuite Enterprise' system for $399/month per user, or somewhere in abouts that).

I met with them at their local office to discuss the product in detail and to tell them what we were looking for, our rep even pulled one of the web techs down a few times when we started to get a bit technical with what we were looking for in regards to the website functionality.

To date, I've been very happy with the features and flexibility of the system.

Major warning: the learning curve is steep.

To be fair, I did opt out of any training they were offering, and any setup work they quoted, to save an additional $5-6k. I felt that since I was starting from the ground up, and had no data to import, I could get by (I was also relying on my 3 years of business degrees to help me out - lets just say they were rusty!)

They did have a few 'getting started' type web seminars that I logged into and participated in, and I know they have other presentations in their "NetU" offerings that I have yet to try. Plus there is an online forum which you can subscribe to and seek help with others. I haven't hit any roadblocks that bad yet, and with the 'Small Business' application you get 3 free tech support emails per month... ...not much, but it's something, and I have yet to use those too!

The entire 'Help' sections were very well thought out, and quite extensive. Nice little things like if you're on a page in the application and select 'Help' it brings you directly to THAT page's help page, and tells you just about everything you'd need to know about the page your looking at. Also, all the input fields are 'help clickable'(eg. if you're staring at a box field that wants some type of information punched into it, but your brain simply cannot process what it's asking for, click on the field description to get a more detailed answers as to what it's expecting from you - neat! saved my butt more than a few times)

re multicurrency: The system is setup for it. I am currently using CAN, US, Euro and British Pound.(at launch time, it will only have CAN)

Pros & Cons:
Pros - too many to list quite frankly! highlights are everything you and I asked for and then some I've never even thought would be possible (eg set your minimum stock level, and when inventory quantities drop below that, warnings are sent, and a PO is automatically generated...). Dashboard is really nice, you can customize it to give you just about any sort of an up-to-minute info/report you'd like, so when you log in you have an instant overview of profit/loss, inventory sold, web stats, whatever! There's tons, I could go on and on, but I don't want to sound like a sales man, check it out yourself... ...I know iCode and Netsuite can give you access to a live demo of the application, should you want to mess around.

Cons - my biggest gripe is that the system was clearly built for people moving from QuickBooks, who are familiar with how that system was developed and works, rather than a 'lets build this in a logical way'. It's not hugely bad, but while learning the system you can't help but laugh at how it was laid out at times (okay, it may simply be that way to me being a System Administrator for MS products through the years - Win95/98/NT/2000/XP, NT/2000/2003 Server, Exchange 5.5/2000/2003, IIS, SQL, etc, etc - so you kind of get used to how things get laid out, it's not just MS, I work with Adobe and Macromedia product on a daily basis as well, and it's all about the same UI...). I didn't realize this until I signed up to a web seminar, where they demonstrate how easy the system is to use, because a lot of the functions are the same in QuickBooks and Netsuite. Great marketing to get people away from QuickBooks (#1 business app!), not the greatest for non-QuickBooks folk. Which is fine really, like any app, it only does so much, and when you've figured that out, you'll be fine like I am now. Or just take some training.

[as I’m rereading this, I should note that Netsuite has a variety of ‘Roles’ which are all customizable. When I log in, I log in as the 'Administrator' so I see all and can do all which may also be why it’s a little, err, ‘complex’(?). Should you change your ‘role’ to, say, an ‘accountant’, you’d only see accounting items and not shipping, website, POs, etc, etc – so my biggest con, may not be a con at all…sorry!]

iCode vs Netsuite
Originally I was quoted $1600 for an iCode licence. In the time I waited to buy (trip to Europe, meeting with tuners), they switched CEOs and direction. When I called them back to sign up, I was requoted $21,000. My reaction to Mr.iCode rep "ha ha ha ha ha - 'click'" (I admit, not very professional, but I'm a SMALL BUSINESS with LITTLE START UP $$$ - why would I want to sink 1/3 of my start-up funds into a software package?? morons I tell you! yes, you Mr.iCode CEO!)

In that time Netsuite had also released their new online product (no more "Oracle's Netsuite" requiring a $$$ Oracle backend, hardware, etc) which I am so glad right now that I chose! How can you go wrong with a 100% hosted app (that allows you to back-up!), accessible from any web browser, with everything built-in, +ecommerce website and hosting for $90/month?!

One thing I'd recommend to someone looking at Netsuite, or any licensing software package, is really sit down and think about how many licences you need. Does every employee require one, or can some 'share' (hey, if it's 'per licence' and only one person uses it at a time, it's still legal, no? :)) May save you a few bucks.

My eCommerce website should be live next Friday (finalizing legal, design, etc). Feel free to check it out. It’s honestly nothing special, key word here is “clean”. It's been a long time in production, but that all been because of my end, credit card processing companies(!!!), banks, website design, and not Netsuite. I think they had my company access setup in about 4 days.

Hope some of this helps future readers.

Bryan

I own Everest ver. 4.03 with the ecommerce solution, CRM and more. It was terribly expensive and while you think you are getting in cheap, maybe less than $20k for the entire package, look the hell out for the yearly maintenance fees, installation fees, training fees and more. By the time we were finished, or should I say, Everest was finished with us, we had more than $50k in the finished solution. From there, a tech named Brent came out from Salt Lake City, did a half ass job of installing. He didn't get my shipping option working before he left (Starship) which was purchased from Everest, not Starship, and was told it was not their responsibility to make it work. WHAT THE HELL!!!! Then he didn't set up my chart off accounts properly as per standard Accounting Practices would dictate so my Income statement was inaccurate and I ended up paying a local CPA to fix it all. This ran me about another $3k to have fixed.

Over the course of 4 years now, I have been passed to 3 different sales reps, all of which can only work with you if you are spending more money it seemed. They would not get any of Everest's screw ups fixed for us without more money...yea, I had to pay them again to fix what was screwed up from them in the first place.

Just ask them about the ecommerce module Indexing function...yea, what indexing function?!! After adding 80,000 part numbers to our system, it jammed it up to a snails pace and they told me to have my local computer person make the software index. Right!! Whatever the hell this means, but is a function of tweaking their proprietary code, and my local computer man had no idea how to get this done, so I had to pay, yes pay Everest to do it and it made very little difference.

They made false promises, and screwed me at every turn for more money. I told my sales lady (Anita) to look into the crystal ball with me for a moment. Your company is all about sales, and service after the sale is way down their list of priorities and certainly making customers happy and honoring their promises is somewhere on the bottom. Anita, you will not survive in a difficult economy with this attitude. I predict Everest will be sold, traded, swallowed or shut down within a year or so if your upper management does not wake up.

This was about a year ago, I have refused to pay any maintenance fees, and I contacted Anita for a proposal to finish some unfinished programming and she told me Everest had been bought out. Humm, go figure. Funnier thing is that the attitude of the company is worse now than ever. She doesn't even return my emails because I will not pay maintenance fees until they fix issues with their software. They feel no responsibility, so we are at stale mate.

I have been considering NetSuite but my tail is still smoldering from the whole Everest experience so if I were you, I would do all your books by hand with a stack of notepads and pencils before investing a penny or one minute with the used, car salesmen at this company.

One more factor, look at the Google presents of Everest when doing a search term they should be utilizing, "Accounting Software" or "POS Software." They are nowhere to be seen. Nowhere!! I would assume sales are down, down, down for them and they are on the ropes or they would be advertising like crazy as all the other major players are. Beware!!