How to choose billing software for your shop
Most people evaluate software by watching demonstrations until they all blur together. There is a better method, and it takes about an hour to set up. This page describes it, including the questions that are uncomfortable to ask and worth asking anyway.
Use this on us too. We would rather you did.Judge every product against your shop, not against its own feature list
A demonstration is designed to show software at its best. It is run by someone who knows every shortcut, using data chosen to make the product look good, following a path that avoids whatever the product does badly. None of that is dishonest. It is just not informative.
So before you watch a single demonstration, write down the five or six things your shop actually does every day. Not features — transactions. "A customer buys four items, two of them on offer, pays half in cash and takes the rest on credit." "A supplier delivers short and we have to record what actually arrived." "A regular party gets his own rate."
Then make every product you are considering do exactly those, in front of you, on the spot. The differences between products become obvious within about ten minutes, and they are almost never the differences the feature lists talk about.
Six questions that separate one product from another
Everything else is more or less the same across the market. These six are where products genuinely differ, and where the answers are worth writing down.
Can it do the thing my shop does that is unusual?
Every business has one. A rate that depends on the party. Expiry dates that have to be watched. A tag printed in a particular format. Salesmen who settle at the end of the day. Ask about yours first, not last, because the answer decides everything else. If the answer is "we can build that", ask what it costs and how long it takes.
What happens when it goes wrong at four in the afternoon?
The counter is busy, the printer is not printing, and you need a person. Ask who answers, on what number, during which hours, and what happens outside them. Ask how many people are on that phone. A product with better features and nobody to call is the more expensive choice.
Whose data is it, and can I get it out?
Ask specifically: if you stop paying, or decide to move, what do you leave with? A usable export of items, parties, stock and transactions, or a screen you can look at? This is easy to ask now and impossible to fix later.
What does it really cost over three years?
Licence, implementation, training, the annual charge, the cost of adding a counter or a branch, and the cost of the changes you already know you will want. Ask for all of it in writing. A low first-year number with an unclear second year is the oldest trick in this market.
Who else like me is running it, and can I call them?
Not a logo wall. A shop of roughly your size, in roughly your line, that you can telephone. Any supplier with real customers can arrange this. The five-minute call you have with that owner will tell you more than every demonstration combined.
How much of my business does it expect me to change?
Some products fit around a shop; some require the shop to fit around them. Neither is wrong, but the second is a much bigger project than it looks, because it is your staff who absorb it. Find out which one you are buying while you can still choose.
Make them do these in front of you
Use your own scenarios wherever you can. Where you do not have one, these six are the ones that most often expose the difference between a product that will work in your shop and one that will not.
- Bill a real basket from your own shop, at your rates, with your discounts, and time it.
- Enter a purchase from an actual supplier bill, including a short delivery.
- Take a part payment on credit, then show the customer ledger and the ageing.
- Make an item go below its reorder level and show what the system does about it.
- Print a bill and a label on the hardware you already own, not on theirs.
- Pull the GST reports for a month and show them to your accountant before you commit.
Ask us the uncomfortable questions too
We would rather lose a sale at the demonstration stage than a customer six months in. If your shop needs something Stock2Track does not do as it stands, we will tell you whether it can be built, roughly what that takes, and if it cannot be done well, we will say so. Most of what we build for a living is exactly this kind of change.
How custom development worksQuestions about the choice itself
How many products should I look at?
Three is usually right. One is not a comparison, and past four or five the demonstrations start running together and you begin choosing on how much you liked the salesperson. Write down your scenarios first, see three products do them, and decide.
Should I take a free trial?
Trials are useful only if you use them on your own scenarios with your own data. A trial you poke at for twenty minutes teaches you nothing, and running four at once usually leaves people more confused than when they started. One trial, your real transactions, a week.
Is the cheapest option a mistake?
Not by itself. The mistake is comparing a first-year price against a three-year cost. Ask every supplier for the full three-year figure including support, changes and extra counters, and compare those numbers instead.
What if I choose wrong?
It is recoverable, but it is expensive in time rather than money: you re-enter the item master and retrain everyone. That is exactly why the data-export question above is worth asking before you sign anything, not after.