Spruce

• It is a little bit of a learning curve to learn Spruce
• There are so many different ways to do the same thing
• I recommend taking notes and referring back to the notes till it is 2nd nature

• Data conversion could have been a smoother process

There were some intricacies that required focused learning and took up a little but of valuable time

• Customer support was quite poor
• It took over 6 months to get access to data that we were told we should have immediately
• We were able to increase the number of licenses as we grew with employees (for a higher monthly cost
• ), but when we informed them that we were migrating to a new platform, we were told we could not decrease the number of licenses other than once a year at the auto contract renewal date
• which is not expressly written within the contract

• I believe the accounts receivable process could me improved
• I would love the ability to "undo"

• The POS is very slow and follows no sales logical
• Clearly the developers do not understand the end users
• Too many clicks to process a sale
• The POS often disconnects from our credit card terminals putting us out of business for hours at a time
• This happens once weekly, and Spruce Support is not very helpful in ensuring that this does not continue to happen
• From the accounting end, we are finding errors in the math with no solutions provided
• The statements are very difficult to understand, for all our customers and after having spoken to other Spruce Users they have the same issues
• Yet when we asked for a better solution, no progress was made
• The customer support is slow and we're often left with "it's just this way" or with no viable solution
• We're very unhappy with the software

• Customer Service is horrible
• You call in and basically get a call center of people who can look up the same things you can look up through their on-line help
• Otherwise they have to send you to a support specialist who typically has to call you back
• It takes quite a while (days not hours) for them to actually call you back and typically I have to call and raise a fuss to get a hold of anyone
• The GL is primitive
• There is no easy way to get reports and any information back out of the system
• The only way I've found to do this is you have a learn Crystal reports, purchase the product or pay more money to have them write you a report
• This is a very rigid program
• If you have anything special or any "different" way of completing tasks, you will have to conform to the program
• It's very difficult to get the program to conform to you
• Also if you have invoice terms rather than statement terms, you will not get a proper statement to send to customers monthly
• They consider each invoice the "statement"
• And if you have discounts on those invoices you cannot change that amount if your customer does not take that discount

• While probably not an issue at every business, our staff is a little older, less sophisticated and not very computer literate
• It would be nice to have people that specialize in each segment of our business to come spend more time doing individual training to get them up to speed on their specific roll in the new system
• It can be overwhelming for the implementation specialist to train everyone and also for those like myself to train everyone in rolls that I am not so familiar in such as Manufacturing

• Not cross-platform (must use Windows), no access to the database itself (and since the canned prebuilt reports are severely lacking, this is a problem), 48-hour support callback times can sometimes stretch to a month or better, multi-tasking is nearly impossible (long story, but run one report, then try to run another one and there's no way to look at them both side-by-side -- you must export), etc
• The list goes on

• Limited ability for a user to get software changes done in the system
• The lumber world requires software engineers to understand how the programs should work
• As a lumber and building material sales company, it is difficult to interface with the software folks