Aralco Inventory Management vs. BarCloud Stock

Aralco Inventory Management is well suited for a retail operation with one or two locations that is expanding to 5+. At that point, there is small enough start-up costs and significant benefits available for this software to assist a company with the inventory and POS challenges associated with rapid growth. Aralco Inventory Management is also particularly helpful for retail companies that have complicated sales orders or a sales fulfillment time that is longer than a day or a week.

Incentivized

I do not see how this is suited for anyone needing to track inventory coming in and going out. FIFO is completely unusable because the system can handle price changes from suppliers. The price change is applied to all past sales orders and items even if they are no longer in stock. In the Con examples I gave [below] you can see how many problems we have had with this system.

Incentivized

• Retail focus
• Single source for all inventory control requirements
• Power-to-cost ratio
• Training package

Incentivized

• Barcloud is really easy to use from multiple locations with multiple login potential.
• Allows outlying locations to see what we have in stock without seeing in person.

Incentivized

• Lengthy set-up process that requires strong management
• High base hardware requirements (can't be used with just a phone, for instance)
• Inventory forecasting is not linked to any external or macro forces

Incentivized

• The sales orders get "lost" in the system. This makes it so we are unable to issue them to take the items out of stock.
• The FIFO option does not work and has never worked in the year we have used the program.
• When price changes occur the system changes all the past sales orders to reflect the price change. this makes balancing the $ of inventory a nightmare.
• Items that have issued before become unavailable to issue because of system hiccups.
• The inventory count never matches the physical count because of system hiccups with issuing items.
• System unusable for tracking actual inventory counts.
• If the item has to be moved to a different inventory location (shelf change) the system crashes and deletes the entire history of the product.
• Customer Service for BarCloud is left to be desired. They take weeks to get back to you about a problem and even then their answer is always we are not sure why the system it is doing that.
• The price is unimaginably high for the product service and problems that the system has.
• All of our Sales orders from 2016 to now have been undone. This caused us to show in BarCloud that our stock contains everything we ordered for the entire year and we have sold $0.

Incentivized

• Short training time reduced costs and increased sales which increased ROI
• Less downtime which reduced costs and increased ROI
• Good customer support which boosts employee morale which leads to efficiencies and higher sales which increased ROI

Incentivized

• We have had 0 return on investment and we are currently switching to a different inventory system. BarCloud has caused us to lose money from all the hours we have had to spend fixing the inventory count and having to do physical counts every week to know what we actually have on hand.
• Caused more headaches than help.
• Positive point: We learned that the more expensive system that is web based does not mean they are a better program or will have better customer service.

Incentivized