ECI Software Solutions offers e-automate, an ERP for office technology companies to automate business workflows and increase contract profitability.
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WorkWave PestPac
Score 8.0 out of 10
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IFS company WorkWave offers PestPac, a pest control business management solution, available to support smaller and enterprise level (PestPac Select) solutions, boasting an integratable payment solution (WorkWave Payments), and integrated marketing (WorkWave Marketing).
If you need a system to place and track sales quotes, sales orders, purchase orders, and service calls then E-Automate is perfect. However, if you want to be able to easily bulk upload customers and contracts or if you want to be able to quickly and easily track contract profitability, customer costs, etc, then you'll likely want/need a secondary or different system to do so.
For any route heavy organization, PestPac is a great choice due to the route optimization. It is great for businesses that are moving more online and into the digital space. For smaller organizations, you can make PestPac work but the complexity and training would be a barrier to entry. PestPac does more modular pricing so the cost can be affordable if you aren't needing many of the add-on features, but things can add up quick if looking to incorporate basic service functions when it comes to customer service.
Sending Invoices out to customers via email or printing.
Keep track of ordering and inventory.
Sales Tax reporting.
Monitoring customer payment activity/setting up and removing credit holds.
Calculating payments to process each cycle.
Excellent aging reports.
I like the fact that when I am looking at one item, such as an invoice, I have the capability to switch to the customer menu rather than having to exit out of invoices and then enter into customers.
I love the flexibility of the search menus - being able to sort on several factors at once.
Make sales invoices not require serial numbers, or be more flexible with it.
Make contract invoices have some sort of flexibility in terms of editing. Our end users complain that QuickBooks made it very easy to edit invoices, and in e-automate, for them, it is practically impossible. (I do personally understand why it has to be as it is myself, I'm just forwarding their observation.)
Make the API actually useful. I spent days looking at the functions and the functions available are not really useful.
Its really the only option for the industry that does enough of what we need for it to function . I'm not sure if there were better options out there if we would have to renew our subscription. With the addition of AI, hopefully something will be able to become more useful.
Due to the customizability of the software, the usability is not the easiest to pick up and especially train on. We find that office staff take the longest to train due to the steeper learning curve. It is not a plug and play and every company uses PestPac a little differently so sometimes it can be difficult to get support because what works for one organization may not work for another due to how they set up and use PestPac internally
Reports are the struggle the most with the information being extracted in a way that you need to copy and paste it into a new document so some of the information is not covered
Sometimes when you need answers quickly, a voice on the phone is far better than having to wait for email support or a callback. I have found this to have delays and feel ECI e-automate should invest more in its support infrastructure.
E-automate is much better at understanding the needs of the office equipment industry and provide the necessary tools. SAP Business One has limited features specific to the office equipment industry and includes things that are not useful. E-automate is also priced much better and provides the best value for your investment.
Ultimately we went with PestPac due to the reporting but also at the time other softwares had limits to API integration and that was something that was important to us with our business model. The route optimization tool in PestPac was also far better than anything else we had seen out there
The e-automate will stop working if we stop paying each year. We chose not to go to the cloud and buy the software. QuickBooks and other software are a one-time fee.
E-automate has very few outside vendors for add-on modules.
WorkWave PestPac has certainly improved our time management by getting us off of paper scheduling. It allows us to map and easily move appointments which makes our techs more efficient
Having all documentation stored digitally and be locked to the correct account helps us stay compliant
