Cin7 CoreReviews of dearsystems.com

No more integration with approvalmax

We have been with Dear Inventory now Cin7 Core since February 2023. The system is actually a good system, it has most of the functions you'd want an advanced stock management system/ERP to have. The problem is a lot of them don't QUITE work OR there is a workaround but it's convoluted. For that reason you rely on support a lot. And that's the BIG problem. The support "ecosystem" is riddled with issues: - Half the time they hardly read your query properly so you have to re-iterate and repeat yourself several times to get them to understand what you mean. - If you want a quick answer, Facebook chat is the best you can get, and is therefore far from ideal. And then again, read first problem above. - If you email, depending on your time zone, you'll have 1 answer tomorrow, but invariably they don't understand so a back and forth ensues, at the rate of 1 answer a day if you're lucky. It can take weeks to get to resolution... if there's solution. - Best you can do is book a video call with them but there are hardly any slot available quickly, most of the time it's a few working days away. - The support culture is all wrong, they're spending more time sending you to the articles you've already read instead of trying to understand the problem you're trying to solve and telling you IF you can solve it and HOW. - If they agree to raise your issues with the tech support, it takes several working days for them to get around it and whether they fixed it or not, they don't get back to you. Or they're saying it's your fault and you've done it wrong without explaining anything. - If you want a feature or a tweak, it works on a weird semi-democratic system based on an old fashioned, badly designed forum where if others like your request you're more likely to see it being taken on. But there are dozens if not hundred of requests a day so no one ever has time to read through everyone's request... so it's down to pot luck. So basically, it's good, it's far from perfect but it's ok value for money compared to other systems. But mostly, you're on your own to figure out the nooks and crannies of optimisation. They are so many simple tweaks that could make this a really good system, suitable for many industries but they're crippled with a bad tech culture.

There are many things DEAR does exceptionally well, and there are many more that clearly weren't thought out, and were hacked together buy junior developers who don't understand the first thing about Inventory or ERP. The worst part is having to argue with support staff to escalate to the senior Dev's or Product Managers in the hope they can see how problematic something is. Once you finally get there, they are exceptional and usually fix it quite promptly. But getting past all the gate keepers is tedious and makes for a poor quality experience, and always leaves a sour taste. Especially when Its happened over 10 times, each time resulting in them fixing their mistake. All in All, I've tested many systems and DEAR still comes out the best for my needs and the price, but it could be so much more if they started listening to the experienced customers who actually know and understand (and have developed) Inventory and ERP Systems, and fixed the failures in their system before they start building new features. And for the love of software, put some more dev time and effort into POS. Your POS System doesn't need much to shine, but a few small things and it would be exceptional.