Brightpearl perspective from one of its first ever users
October 05, 2016

Brightpearl perspective from one of its first ever users

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Brightpearl

Support has taken a very long time to resolve (minor) bugs the last two times I reported them. Ten years ago things were actioned with much more sense of urgency - of course, it was a much smaller team then.
Brightpearl is used by the whole business; it manages nearly everything that we do from purchasing and stock control, through to sales and margin reports, to accounting and credit control.

Initially we implemented Brightpearl after becoming dissatisfied with very clunky sales reporting in our previous system. I knew from using Pearl (as it was then) in a previous company that Brightpearl had a much more user-friendly pre-set reporting and also allowed full data export so it is simple to extract any other data you might need.
  • Excellent, comprehensive pre-set sales, margin and accounting reports with intelligent filters to allow user-customisation. The vast majority of what we need to know is in the default reports.
  • Information kept at the users' fingertips without visible boundaries of "modules". If you are writing a sale for a customer everything you need to know about sales history or payment record is there, without loading a different module.
  • Imports and exports with CSV files means updating product prices or generating an unusual custom sales report is a relatively simple task in a spreadsheet.
  • Sometimes the pace of updates can feel a little rushed.
  • New developments seem largely focussed on retail making the multi-channel system seem a little less multi-channel.
  • Much better (and faster) sales reporting has helped to drive double figure growth year on year
  • Margin reports and stock control have signifcantly improved our stock turn realtive to using our previsou system.
Brightpearl is streets ahead in almost every way. It felt at least three times faster, kept all relevant information at our fingertips instead of hiding some of it away in different modules, and had much more user-friendly reporting. Reporting in Sage was so difficult in comparison that we did practically no reporting. This one change has had a massive impact on our profitability because we have a much more accurate idea of what is happening all the time.
Brightpearl is perfect for retailers and wholesalers/distributors, especially if they use modern third-party shopping carts like Shopify. Support for integrating a bespoke website through API might be more limited.

It has some serious shortcomings for businesses that also manufacture product in-house. Brightpearl is open about this but it is a shame since many wholesale businesses manufacture parts to some extent.