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Brightpearl not there yet
October 11, 2016

Brightpearl not there yet

Colin Price | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Brightpearl

Very weak support and slow response when setting up BrightpearlBP New Zealand. Just trying to get a demo sandbox account set up was a struggle. [We were] passed back and forward from the UK to the USA and basically made to feel unwanted. Help with actual implementation was unavailable in an acceptable timeframe and we resorted to trying ourselves and using a third party which was not ideal, expensive and time-consuming. I suggest regional experts if you intend to market Brightpearl outside the UK. Phone support for implementation is not too much to expect given that the solution is not a low-cost solution and has significant shortfalls which always seem to need a 'workaround' (this seems to be one of the favourite words in the support responses and should give a clue that there are major usability shortfalls).
  • Very low for implementation
  • Effective enough for simple questions
  • Too often issues are passed to developers for resolution

Brightpearl is used for SOP and accounting with hooks into a SPREE web shop. We sell bundles of products to customers in the building control space. We have complex orders that require us to produce quotes and pro forma invoices for customers. Materials are mostly imported in other currencies and sold in the base currency.


We have 3 instances of Brightpearl (UK, New Zealand and Australia). We began using Brightpearl in the UK approximately 3 years ago and in New Zealand 4/2016 and Australia 7/2016. It has been a very painful experience implementing Brightpearl across the group and it has become clear that Brightpearl is not an internationalized product despite what was promised at the point we were choosing which system to use as an alternative to Sage.

  • SOP process is pretty easy
  • Adding and updating products is pretty easy
  • Producing quotations and converting those to POs is easy
  • Accounting - Foreign currency transaction handling for suppliers is ridiculous. I end up back in Excel and then make changes to journals. For an automated system this is frankly very very poor.
  • Accounting - no ability for live bank feeds or payroll make Brightpearl a very manual accounting system. Recommend that you reference Xero for best in class and aim for that as the benchmark rather than QuickBooks which is also poor generation if purchasing requirements does not consider the SoH and allocated and on order correctly. It also does not consider the low stock report when generating purchase quantity requests.
  • We are bombarded with requests to review Brightpearl support. I regularly respond but have no feedback, so, can't see the point.
  • Overall do not feel like a valued customer by the 'success team'.
  • Negative - so much time wasted and additional cost of installation experts and additional external accounting overhead. I compare this to Xero.
  • We want Brightpearl to drive our business and be the heart of it. So far we have been unable to achieve this.
Xero is a highly accomplished accounting platform that makes it easy for every level of the business from standard business processes like invoices and bills to bank rec, expenses, payroll. Its time saving for a business is excellent. Xero however does not do good inventory management. Unleashed was just not a good integration partner for Xero. The stock management was poor and data integrity was not acceptable. Integration with Xero is flaky at best. Sage was our original system and we needed to change as the basic stock accounting function was not working for us.
I guess that Brightpearl is aimed at the high volume webshop etailers rather than more physical order based businesses, based in the UK. It's probably good here where there are few imports and all sales are made in the same territory and currency. I expect the integration with major shop platforms is good.