Plate IQ vs. Square 9 Softworks

It is well targeted at restaurants and similar service organizations with complex COGS. It dovetails well with complementary systems like FinTech payments. It wasn't designed by accountants, so there is a bit of roughness. Reporting is very limited: would like to see some SQL / build your own report functionality. Lookups are reasonably robust (filter for amount, time, vendor, etc). It is occasionally unstable but recovers gracefully. From our use case, it would be preferable to have the user approving the invoice ALSO have the ability to attach documents. This is left to the payment approver, who in our case is the "check signer".

I don't recall a period of time when we couldn't access our data in the Square 9 cloud. The software works really well. I can't remember the last time I had to submit a support ticket. While we were working on the project, the technicians were great at utilizing software like ScreenConnect and Calendly to complete tasks.

Incentivized

• OCR
• Workflow
• Support

Incentivized

• It's easy to design a form - many featured features allow you to create what you need.
• The workflows allow you to set conditions to take it in different directions based on the request - such as skipping approval levels.
• You do not have to be a programmer to design a form and workflow (although similar skills are needed).
• It's not hard to check on the status of a user request (form submission).

Incentivized

• Provide better analytics in terms of cost increases per item.
• Provide the ability to create recipes and forward price increases to those recipes for accurate food cost projections.
• Free Bill Pay

• The functionality is great but it can be a bit overwhelming. There's so much you can do that it's hard to remember how to do it - even if they've reviewed it with you and left themselves available for follow up. I don't want to necessarily have to take a class to learn how to use the product in full.

Incentivized

We absolutely can't imagine not continuing software maintenance as there are always new additions that improve the system not to mention the excellent tech support when issues are encountered. Response times for troubleshooting are very quick and usually, my issue is resolved in less than an hour after connecting with support.

Incentivized

Not sure if 10 is favorable or not, but this is supposed to be an unfavorable rating. I find that the solution lacks intuitiveness that should be inherent. I liken it to a large stack of papers and you have to be creative in finding what you want.

Incentivized

Square-9 can get this product out to you in almost the same hour your order it. We got ours very fast.

With the PDF projected viewer, the document retrieval-to-display can drag for a second more than some systems, and the capture workflow if you overload a server array can also drag, but those are the only two issues we've ever seen with this product, and they are not serious issues at all.

They have a dedicated support person for each customer who actually knows the product.

Turnaround is usually within an hour or faster.

Support is always extremely helpful and responsive. Whenever we have a question, it is simple contacting them and also setting-up an appointment, if necessary. Scheduling the appointment is easy and they are willing to talk on the phone, which is not always true with software companies. Their report support tools are also really east to use.

Incentivized

It would have been higher, but the training is a bit muted for the lesser qualified office equipment vendors who signed up as partners to sell and support it. The more experienced ECM vendors and customer end-users will find the training very good, but a bit slow.

I think the implementation could have gone a little smoother than it did. Now that I know how to use the software, I could do it myself. I feel that as an organization, we could have been a little better prepared. If the consultant was more aware of what we were looking for, they could have assisted in setting up some workflows for us as per the contract. But because we were not prepared, the initial implementation process was a little painful. That said, adding a document management system to ANY business kinda means everyone has to re-think the way they do their work which can be difficult for some staff.

Incentivized

We used DocuWare first; great experience; however, it was not made specifically for restaurant clients like Plate IQ is. Plate IQ does a much better job of recognizing common items, and they've continued to add a function that is important for restaurant owners. Restaurant 365, we felt, was trying to be a complete package of accounting/AP/AR/inventory. After looking at each piece, we didn't feel that each of them was as strong as the other.

Incentivized

A similar product I have used was Time Matters. For a Law Firm, I think Time Matters is more useful as it keeps track of everything for a client, including billing. However, since I now work for a legal department of a corporation, SmartSearch is definitley more useful. It is not possible to seperate the documents we have internally in neat client files. We have various miscellaneous documents for many different services and customers or vendors. SmartSearch allows us to organize in broad categories that make sense to internal employees using it and to make sure security is set on specific documents. Time Matters would not have been sufficient for our managers to have access to, since it uploads all documents to the file - some of which are confidential.

The scale-ability is quite good actually, but you need competent sales/support folks providing it to you, so the scale is set right for the demands of your system use. Some resellers are not good at doing this, some are fantastic. If you are scaled correctly at first implementation, you'll be very happy with this system.

• In my opinion, it has had zero impact on ROI now that we are paying for an additional year.
• Another negative is that we've spent a lot of time discussing this issue with Plate IQ, to no avail. They feel it's appropriate to charge a company for an entire year of service even though said company emailed to cancel prior to the end of the first year of service.
• We also wasted a lot of time onboarding this company only to find out that the software left a lot to be desired.

• Elimination of all filing activities, labor $$$ of at least $20,000 per year.
• Elimination of file cabinets, retention management, boxing and storage, purging and shredding... again, thousands of dollars of savings
• Estimate that we paid for the software in the 1st year and would never go backward to our old processes

Incentivized