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.
Youcanbook.me is great for small businesses or for self-employed professionals who need an easy-to-use and cost-effective solution for handling large numbers of clients. It's great for eliminating inconvenient miscommunication and tedious back-to-back emails in order to set a proper date and/or meeting details. However, if you need a more sophisticated system that fits into your company's IT procedures and carries sensitive data, an in house solution would fit best.
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.
One really helpful feature of YouCanBook.Me for our organization is that everyone can see appointment times in their own time zone. We frequently schedule interviews with applicants nationwide, as well as communicating with team members located in 32 different countries, so this has really simplified scheduling.
We rely heavily on Google Calendar for staff scheduling, so it is great that YouCanBook.Me can sync your availability straight from your calendar as well as automatically adding meetings to your calendar when they are booked.
We use YouCanBook.Me to schedule follow-up calls with people we meet at conferences and other recruiting events. It's really simple to have someone sign up for a call, and this has been a really effective tool for us to stay in communication with prospects.
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.
I don't like the generic email invite to a Zoom meeting it sends out. Once I get the date sent to me in my email, I have to cancel the meeting and re-set the meeting with my own personalized Zoom Invite. Sometimes that is confusing for the prospect. However, now that I write this...I see an article on the web site about creating a unique Zoom meeting invite. I will have to check that out.
I set my work days as 9:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. but on the calendar it shows a time available at 6 p.m. My last appointment should be listed as 5 p.m., as my appointments are in 30-minute increments and I leave at 5:30 p.m. So that is confusing and resulted in a few appointments booked when I am not actually working.
I book demos for a coworker, and if he is busy in another meeting, I have to block it off in my calendar as "Jack is Busy" so that prospects won't pick a time that is not available for Jack. I wish there was a way I could link his Outlook calendar to my YouCanBook.Me. Perhaps there is, but I am unaware of it.
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.
The user interface may be slightly outdated, but it is very intuitive and easy to navigate. Once you have learned one module within the system it is very easy to apply that knowledge to any other module. It makes using the system much easier, and it makes training another person on the system quick and efficient.
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.
YouCanBook.Me allows fuller messaging in addition to appointments. Calendly is more minimalist than YouCanBook.Me. I prefer having more control over the look and feel, and functionality than it offers.
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.
It's helped our Professional Services Team immensely. Although we don't have numbers as far as an ROI, we use it daily across our whole team of 8 project managers.
We also use youcanbook.me to schedule in interviews with our 20+ researchers who are moderating sessions. Our admin team also uses youcanbook.me to allow our employees to schedule our weekly massages.
