Alexandria POS vs. DEAR Systems, by Cin7

For any school district I would highly recommend it.

Incentivized

The production module systems that is offered by DEAR Systems is very good but a criticism is that it is tailored to non-variable production e.g., assembling a bike. If the output is variable e.g., dehydrating then the system is a bit challenging to use and can lead to inaccurate stock levels.

Incentivized

• Cloud hosting. Only has gone down once and was back up in a matter of hours. Updates are applied automatically.
• Easy to use from the librarian side. Little help or training is needed.
• Support is very helpful and approachable when issues arrive.

Incentivized

• Xero Online Accounting Integration - 100% reliable
• Drop Shipment combined with Own Warehouse Shipment Processing is a dream
• Support - Really efficient dealing with technical issues and more generic issues equally well
• Financial control of delivery notes and purchase invoices provides excellent data integrity
• Easily add new cost variables such as shipping costs, managed easily

Incentivized

• Cost is pretty high.
• Some settings are difficult to locate, had to call tech support to find them.

Incentivized

• Support
• Bugs
• Website Functionality
• Down-time
• Glitchiness

It does what it says on the tin.

Incentivized

Terrible support, absolutely useless for anything more major than a simple navigational problem. They always provide meaningless responses that don't really address the issue such as, "our engineering department is working on the issue" or "we're working on some optimisation". These responses would be fine if anything actually resulted from them, but the same errors and problems have existed for 4 years so I don't believe they really amount to anything. In addition, they're quite pushy for me to "close your ticket" so it can be marked as resolved, but my issue hasn't been resolved. I don't exactly want to leave my ticket open for several months, but they send me consistent reminders to close the ticket which is obnoxious especially since their resolution was "our engineering department will work on it".

DEAR Systems is much better software compared to Xero. The inventory tracking within Xero doesn't record batch dates and isn't really capable of production modules. Additionally, Xero doesn't have pricing tiers within invoicing, which is a very helpful feature offered by DEAR Systems. If a business has any level of complexity than DEAR Systems is a significantly more capable software.

Incentivized

• Cloud hosting has enabled an offsite backup of our library inventory.

Incentivized

• Improved reporting for production
• Reduced invoicing admin
• Better cogs reporting

Incentivized