Spruce is an end-to-end business management software that allows lumber, home, and building supply businesses to manage purchasing, inventory, ecommerce, documentation, delivery, accounting, and sales analytics all within a single system for increased efficiency and profitability.
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Rain Retail Software
Score 8.2 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Rain Retail, headquartered in Springville, offers their omnichannel retail management and Point of Sale software that allows you to track rentals, manage inventory, use text message marketing, and use social media to market your business.
I think my single most surprising and satisfying experience with ECI and its RockSolid Maxx and then Spruce products was the ease of implementation and rollout -- both on the hardware and software side. ECI seems to have mastered the idea of using an integrated team along with robust tutorials to make that process easy.
If you are doing all the different streams of business music stores or similar small businesses would have Rain Point of Sale is a great solution. If your store is more similar to a gift shop or cafe it may be too much for your needs.
Integration. One customer list. One product item list. One inventory count. POS and website store that function in real time with each other.
Responsiveness. New features and tweaks to the user interface are actually constantly being developed based on our feedback and requests.
Multiple location support. We have two stores and many of the other platforms we shopped didn't have good solutions for that. Rain lets us have a combined product database with different reorder preferences. Also, a new update to the system made transferring serial numbered products even easier.
Spruce offers a method for doing repetitive and reoccurring billing but it is not as intuitive and easy to use as it might be.
In my 30+ years of experience as CFO/CTO I've always found printing to be problematic. Though it is a problem with roots in hardware and thus somewhat beyond being fully addressable by software I'd like to see Spruce's solutions become a little more transparent. This said, my experience is that Spruce does a much better job of it than the Rocksolid Maxx product.
Though this may be a niche problem for a business with large construction and service components, the ability to track labor with greater detail would be nice.
Reorder amount preset options could more sophisticated. I'd like to see the option to automatically "round up" the preset reorder qty up to 10 or 12 or 6, etc. This was possible previously but they added other options that changed the automated reorder suggestion to the difference between your current count the ideal count you have set for each product. This is good for some items, but not for others. Guitar strings come in a box of 12, but sheet music can be any number. And then some items we purchase in a box and then sell individually. Rain does allow for that in the purchase order automated reorder quantity. Mostly, I change each reorder quantity as I am copying and pasting the product codes into the vendor's website. Not huge deal breaker. And I believe they will eventually add more options like I want to see.
You do need the internet to do business. So in case of a localized broadband outage you can use your mobile device as a hot spot.
Spruce is possibly just above average. Not super impressed with usability and especially not impressed with tech support who is rarely able to answer questions on the first call.
We migrated from a less integrated situation of running ShopKeep for a POS system and the AIMsi as a billing solution. This created a lot of extra steps for a large percentage of tasks. AIMsi is just to hard to work with and it is very difficult to use it efficiently across multiple locations since tri-tech wants to license how many computers you can use it on and so on. ShopKeep works well but we wanted ti move on to something a tiny bit more sophisticated for tracking repairs and replacing some of the billing functions of AIMsi, and we wanted to have a web store finally. ShopKeep doesn't go past being an easy to train on POS system with inventory tracking.
With $13 million in gross and 40 employees I'm able to run a full back office with a staff of two. In today's tight labor market that is invaluable.
Being able to implement Spruce with almost no upgrading or replacement of existing computer hardware represented a huge cost savings to us. I'm not even sure what dollar amount I could attach to that.
Dealing with both a wholesale and retail customers requires that we provide different levels and kinds of reporting and documentation. Spruce has made it easy to respond to the different demands that those customers place upon us.
We did not have any type of web-store before starting up with Rain Point of Sale so adding that online presence has helped us bring first-time customers into the store
We have had one or two bad deals happen because of the site - so watch out for scammers using temporary office space with a fake business as the ship to address. Not Rain's fault, just part of doing business online.
