What should we use for a POS and Ticket Tracker for Computer Shop / Retail Store?

[PCX]

I know that similar questions have been asked before and I am surprised that there are very little to no adequate solution available, but I am hoping to get some shop owners that also have a store to chime in on this topic.

Currently we are using mHelpdesk, but there are a few issues with the software and we are quickly growing out of many of the features that are included.

PCRT, as already mentioned several times before, looks to be the most complete system, but the UI is horrible and it does not export into Quick Books.

Basically, I need some type of All-in-One system to manage both a retail store and a repair shop. We need a reliable ticket tracker that does not mysteriously delete information as well as a full POS system for retail --and retail is becoming increasingly more important as we are looking to actually buy a building or a retail space for a full size store in the near future.

For those who are using PCRT, how are you handling your accounting side? Are you guys invoicing everything twice? Once into PCRT and again in QB? Or does PCRT total out everything at the end of the day so that you can just put the totals into QB? I am by no means a book keeper (which is why I have one), I just know that I need a system that is as streamlined as possible.

 

[cyabro]

The only system that comes to mind is TS-Man.
http://blanchesoft.com/

We used to use the repair side of it but never got the POS going as we dumped it for ShopManager due to terrible customer service from them.

 

[SprinterTech-WI]

The only system that comes to mind is TS-Man.
http://blanchesoft.com/

We used to use the repair side of it but never got the POS going as we dumped it for ShopManager due to terrible customer service from them.

I don't recommend TS-Man... awful integration, and a clunky problematic UI/


PCX -- as we've talked before... same predicament here, and I need it to support multi location an add things like tracking of loaner phones and hopefully tracking of warranties to find out problematic devices.... a real pita if you ask me!

 

[emsbronco]

MHelpdesk and other products that are talked about most in our industry do not seem to handle the retail side of things well. They are good for pure on-site or mostly on-site services, but don't seem to work well for a more traditional retail environment.

If your budget can handle it, look at POSitive Retail Manager, http://gopositive.com/ . I've been using the earlier version for the past 4 years and it handles Sales, Inventory, Kitting, Service Orders, Orders with deposits, Backordered items, Recurring Invoices, Appointments, Used Items, trade-ins, etc.
My POS system has a laser printer for service orders, a receipt printer for most regular transactions, a label printer for printing shelf tags and bar coding some items.

If you decide to go with PRM, or any other full fledged POS system, I recommend that you find their resellers and see if any have deals. I was able to purchase PFW (the earlier version of PRM) at a decent discount from what was listed on the main website.

Now, I do not know how well the appointment scheduling works in the new version, but that is a weakness in the version I have that I have had to work around. I would love to see integration with Outlook. Remote updates is also another weakness, where web based products like mhelpdesk have an edge up.

 

[compnet]

Copy and paste between pcrt and quickbooks here.

 

[Maniaman]

I'm in the same boat, looking for an integrated system. Right now we are using a home brew ticket system and I've experimented with both Dynamics POS and Quickbooks POS. Can't really say I like either of them, though I like the interface of Dynamics better. Problem we run into is having to keep everything in sync between the two, customers, work orders, etc. I really want to ditch the cobbled together mess, but everything seems to either do 1 or the other, but not both, and it seems that very few of them have a nice API you could use to fix that problem.

 

[Jamie]

I use pc repair tracker as a repair tracker. I have wasp quick store as my pos software, the two are separate and no plans to integrate them.

 

[mkeathley]

PCRT can give you a report each day with totals. Just put that into quickbooks, quick and simple. You don;t need all your customer sin quickbooks they are all in PCRT. I do all my invoices in PCRT it keeps up witht hem, what is paid, whats not and etc.

PCRT also support inventory mangement for the retail side as well as of course barcodes/price tages. It also supports multiple locations.

For warranty tracking I make a work order each time a computer comes in for repair. I also put the customers name in each time I make a sale. So for example I sale a new computer with a 1yr warranty. The sale can be foudn by the customers name. Each time they bring it it for service that can also be found by their name. Their name will also show me each time the system has been in for repair, with support for multiple systems of course.

It sounds to me like PCRT does everything you need. Try out a demo and their forums. The author is quite helpful.

 

[carrcomp]

I use mhelpdesk and I recently started using quickbooks.

Mhelpdesk is awesome at all the schedualing and invoicing etc for non inventory items, but quickbooks is great for tracking inventory.

Plus, quickbooks integrates with mhelpdesk so you can download all of your stuff right off and avoid double entries.

Edit : They also handle credit card processing if you wanted a merchant services account

 

[PCX]

PCRT can give you a report each day with totals. Just put that into quickbooks, quick and simple. You don;t need all your customer sin quickbooks they are all in PCRT. I do all my invoices in PCRT it keeps up witht hem, what is paid, whats not and etc.

PCRT also support inventory mangement for the retail side as well as of course barcodes/price tages. It also supports multiple locations.

For warranty tracking I make a work order each time a computer comes in for repair. I also put the customers name in each time I make a sale. So for example I sale a new computer with a 1yr warranty. The sale can be foudn by the customers name. Each time they bring it it for service that can also be found by their name. Their name will also show me each time the system has been in for repair, with support for multiple systems of course.

It sounds to me like PCRT does everything you need. Try out a demo and their forums. The author is quite helpful.

Yeah, I may have to break down and use it . . . it really needs a face lift bad though. I guess I can deal with entering the totals each day or at the end of each week, I just wanted something more streamlined that played well with QB.

 

[carrcomp]

Yeah, I may have to break down and use it . . . it really needs a face lift bad though. I guess I can deal with entering the totals each day or at the end of each week, I just wanted something more streamlined that played well with QB.

Just out of curiosity (because I'm opening my office within the next few months)

What are you missing using mhelpdesk/QuickBooks combination?

I'm looking at using the Quickbooks POS for everything in office and mhelpdesk for service calls.

 

[FoolishTech]

If your budget can handle it, look at POSitive Retail Manager, http://gopositive.com/ . I've been using the earlier version for the past 4 years and it handles Sales, Inventory, Kitting, Service Orders, Orders with deposits, Backordered items, Recurring Invoices, Appointments, Used Items, trade-ins, etc.

Having used POSitive for several years, I can honestly say it's not a bad system, but my (then) employer dumped it for Tigerpaw for a number of reasons.

 

[emsbronco]

Having used POSitive for several years, I can honestly say it's not a bad system, but my (then) employer dumped it for Tigerpaw for a number of reasons.

Interesting. When I last looked at TigerPaw, they didn't seem to offer any kind of POS capability. Retail sales is a good portion of my business, so having a solid POS component is important. I've been looking at upgrading to the latest version of POSitive, now I think it may be a good time to review all the options again.

 

[PCX]

Just out of curiosity (because I'm opening my office within the next few months)

What are you missing using mhelpdesk/QuickBooks combination?

I'm looking at using the Quickbooks POS for everything in office and mhelpdesk for service calls.

Honestly, I am not using QB POS, just QB for accounting. Regardless, I want everything managed in one system, not two. My understanding of QB POS is that it is not customizable enough (at least from what I have read) for a computer shop / store and I have not heard anyone actually say that they like using it.

 

[carrcomp]

Honestly, I am not using QB POS, just QB for accounting. Regardless, I want everything managed in one system, not two. My understanding of QB POS is that it is not customizable enough (at least from what I have read) for a computer shop / store and I have not heard anyone actually say that they like using it.

I haven't really messed with the Quickbooks POS as far as customizing....

I might download the 30 day trial on a test computer and see what I can come up with.

Unless you're very specific ... in which case I'd recommend the demo.

The integration with your quickbooks accounting makes things nice and smoothe...

I'm following a few threads right now to find out a few things about how people are using QB POS in their stores and one person is running an experiment on repair trackers. Might be worth a look.

(Edit nevermind. This thread was started a while ago with no answer.)

 

[jargen]

I went for a odd approach with this problem. I got my own made, cost me a far buck but it was worth it. Tailored exactly to our needs and handles finances aswell. And if there is ever a feature missing all i need to do is send a email and its added within a day or two.

 

[PCX]

I went for a odd approach with this problem. I got my own made, cost me a far buck but it was worth it. Tailored exactly to our needs and handles finances aswell. And if there is ever a feature missing all i need to do is send a email and its added within a day or two.

Eventually, this is what we will do, for now we have to find a better solution. I will try mhelpdesk in junction with QB POS and let you guys know what I think. My only concern with this combination is that as of lately we have been having a lot of issues with mhelpdesk deleting information. We will literally be working on a ticket for several days or a week. Updating it, adding invoices, payments, etc. and then all of the sudden it will be gone. No ticket, no invoice, no payments. We see this happen a lot too with payments and random bits of information. Just about every day, something goes missing. A description in the ticket, a log, payments, even information inserted in a customers profile. It is very frustrating. At first I chopped it up to us forgetting to save, but we now double save and still see the same issue. I am not sure if it has something to do with us using mhelpdesk on several computers at once, but if this continues we will have to move on to another repair tracker.

 

[mhelpdesk]

Dean, you've never brought this to our attention so I'm surprised you are bringing it up on Technibble. You've submitted several requests, but the request was for an auto-save feature. You had stated the problem was forgetting to save the ticket. You even asked us to warn you when you attempt to leave page without first saving the page. If you leave the page or forget to hit the save button, the expected behavior is the page won't be saved.

This is completely different from our system mysteriously deleting your data. This is the first time I'm hearing that your tickets are being deleted. In fact, this is the first time I'm hearing of such issue at all. If you have a problem like this please submit a ticket directly to us.

Also, we've seen an issue with ticket data being overwritten. But this is because the users were sharing accounts, which is a violation of our licensing agreement. Basically, two users are sharing 1 login while logged into 2 different computers. For example, User 1 and User 2 both have a ticket open. User 1 updates the ticket but User 2 never refreshes to make sure he has User 1's latest update. When User 2 saves the ticket, User 1's changes will be overwritten, thus making it seem as if User 1's changes disappeared.

Again, if you have a problem and you are not sharing accounts please contact us directly to resolve it. We've never had an issue with data mysteriously disappearing.

Eventually, this is what we will do, for now we have to find a better solution. I will try mhelpdesk in junction with QB POS and let you guys know what I think. My only concern with this combination is that as of lately we have been having a lot of issues with mhelpdesk deleting information. We will literally be working on a ticket for several days or a week. Updating it, adding invoices, payments, etc. and then all of the sudden it will be gone. No ticket, no invoice, no payments. We see this happen a lot too with payments and random bits of information. Just about every day, something goes missing. A description in the ticket, a log, payments, even information inserted in a customers profile. It is very frustrating. At first I chopped it up to us forgetting to save, but we now double save and still see the same issue. I am not sure if it has something to do with us using mhelpdesk on several computers at once, but if this continues we will have to move on to another repair tracker.

 

[mhelpdesk]

PCX, is there more than one tech using the same login?

 

[PCX]

Dean, you've never brought this to our attention so I'm surprised you are bringing it up on Technibble. You've submitted several requests, but the request was for an auto-save feature. You had stated the problem was forgetting to save the ticket. You even asked us to warn you when you attempt to leave page without first saving the page. If you leave the page or forget to hit the save button, the expected behavior is the page won't be saved.

This is completely different from our system mysteriously deleting your data. This is the first time I'm hearing that your tickets are being deleted. In fact, this is the first time I'm hearing of such issue at all. If you have a problem like this please submit a ticket directly to us.

Also, we've seen an issue with ticket data being overwritten. But this is because the users were sharing accounts, which is a violation of our licensing agreement. Basically, two users are sharing 1 login while logged into 2 different computers. For example, User 1 and User 2 both have a ticket open. User 1 updates the ticket but User 2 never refreshes to make sure he has User 1's latest update. When User 2 saves the ticket, User 1's changes will be overwritten, thus making it seem as if User 1's changes disappeared.

Again, if you have a problem and you are not sharing accounts please contact us directly to resolve it. We've never had an issue with data mysteriously disappearing.

It is an issue that has been reported and I was told that I was an issue on my end. I requested the auto-save to hopefully alleviate the issue, not because I thought I was forgetting to save, although I figured that might have been the issue in the beginning. As for users, we have several computers running mhelpdesk for different stations. We have one up front to check in and check out customers (no separate user required for that), one by the diagnostic bench and another by the main work area. We do not have separate technicians working on separate projects nor do we have a need for that at this moment. Like I said, the only thing I can think of is that there is an issue with using MH on different computers at once, BUT none of these computers are accessing the same information at the same time. For instance, the one in the store area is only accessing new customers checked in and customers checking out. The one in the diagnostic area is only accessing those running diagnostics and the one in the main area is only accessing those that are in the middle of repairs. So the chances of any of these computers being on the same ticket at the same time is unlikely, especially with as many tickets as we have open at any given time.