QlikView vs. Rain Retail Software

Sales data validations have helped manage our justifications in the past, especially with regard to new product development and new business introduction. It has also been helpful in identifying trends with business impact and direction specific to quarter and monthly sales from ERP data as well as decisions to purchase equipment of staffing based on run rates and product demand.

One thing that can get out of hand is data output - if you aren't careful in your query, you may be overloaded with data dumps and drown in the amount of info you have to filter through. This is a user caution, not a comment on the software itself.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• QlikView has a simple, relational data model that's REALLY fast. Filtering and changing data is dead simple results are almost immediately available.
• The free version of Qlikview is almost completely featured, so you roll a pro-level product out to an entire department for really cheap.
• QlikView is really flexible--if you can imagine it, you can build it.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• We found that QlikView can be a bit slow in supporting some forms of encryption. It is web-based and we needed to upgrade all of our server to not support the older SSL and TLS 1 protocols, only support TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. However, QlikView could not run with TLS 1.2 and TLS 1.3. We had to wait over six months to get a version that would handle the newer TLS versions.
• There are so many options with QlikView that you can get lost when developing a visualization. There are still items I have not yet figured out, such as labeling a graph with the name of a selected detail item.
• QlikView works by pulling the data it is going to use for visualization into its database. I am a security reviewer and I need to make certain that PII and PHI is not pulled by QlikView for a visualization, otherwise this could become a reportable indecent.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

Ease of use, ability to load from pretty much any data source. today I created an application that loaded time sheets from excel that are not in a table format. With Qlik's "enable transformation steps" I was able to automate loads of multiple spreadsheets and multiple tabs easily. Could not do that with any other tool.

Incentivized

We are very pleased with the service

Incentivized

QlikView is very easy to implement. The installation is very straight forward. QlikView has several different data connectors that can connect to different data sources very smoothly. The user interface to build the reports is very easy to understand. This helps to have a smaller learning curve. Something very helpful is that QlikView is a browser application for the end users. So, you don't need to install any applications on the user's computer.

Incentivized

We have not had any downtime issues with the product nor uncovered any significant bugs

It is not a SAAS product.

My experience with the Qlik support team has been somewhat limited, but every interaction I have had with them has been very professional and I received a response quickly. Typically if there is a technical issue, our IT team will follow up. My inquiries are specific to product functionality, and Qlik has been very helpful in clarifying any questions I might have.

Incentivized

My team attended, but I cannot myself rate, but I think it was good as they've successfully launched a training program at our company themselves for users. It was 3-4 day training.

Training was as expected. The demo environments tend to be more fully featured that our own environment, but the training was clear and well delivered.

"Implementation" can mean a few things... so I'm not sure that this is the answer you want.... but here it goes: To me, implementation means: "Is the user interface intuitive and can I produce meaningful reports with ease?" On that score, I'd say YES. The amount of training required was minimal and the results were powerful. The desktop implementation is a simple, "blank" interface just waiting for your creativity. The pre-populated templates give you a reasonable start to any project -- and a good set of objects to "play around with" if you're just getting started. Finally, note that the "implementation" I used was baked into QuickBooks 2016 Enterprise -- called "Advanced Reporting"..... That integration makes it ultra useful and simple.

Incentivized

The only other vendor product that I have worked with that provides a similar experience to Qlikview is Tableau. I would recommend Tableau if your use case is to build a fixed dashboard. You can share reports for free without needing to buy additional licenses. I would recommend Qlikview if your users are looking for a more interactive experience. They can create new objects to represent the data which can't be accomplished as easily in Tableau

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• You can use the free desktop version to do a lot of reporting and analysis work more quickly so the ROI is huge
• QlikView is great at finding outliers such as data entry errors
• QlikView is great at helping you quickly discover new insights about your business that can prompt you to take action that can immediately affect your cash flow.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized