If you're small business owner and dreaming of being big . . . and you're using best of breed small office software solutions to run your business, you're probably a lot like us before discovering Evolution. We were depending on QuickBooks for accounting, Outlook Express for email, ACT! for contact management, and of course we had a website (four of them in fact), plus Excel to tie up some loose ends.
Unfortunately these individual "solutions" not only didn't play well together but were running us ragged with multiple instances of data entry (and the associated opportunities for errors). Maybe this sounds familiar . . . you add a product to your business offerings. First you enter the product into QuickBooks. Then you create web pages to add it your website. Multiple products means a lot of work and naturally this all takes time - a lot of time. Later, when an order comes in via your website, you have to somehow tell QuickBooks. And despite promises that it would import automatically to QuickBooks, our website developer somehow never got it to work (and lets not even go into how QuickBooks would let us do things which were just flat wrong from an accounting standpoint). But this is nothing compared to dealing with customers while using our contact manager (scribbling an order down on paper) and subsequently manually entering the order into our QuickBooks (and sometimes we would make a transcription error which caused us to revisit the order - and waste time). And buying the Intuit Point of Sale didn't help because we deal with phone orders as well as web orders . . . thus getting the orders from our website or from over the phone and into the accounting package that quickly became an issue! Frankly, it soon got to the point where keeping everybody on the same page had become a nightmare for us.
Naturally, as small business owners we wear lots of hats so we didn't have unlimited people or hours to throw at these problems. The fact is these disparate "software solutions" really turned into much more work for us than we imagined as we bought them one by one. Simply put, sure they were helping us . . . but they were hurting us at the same time! And, of course, they each have a different interface so when we hire a new person we have to train them on several pieces of software and this gets expensive!
So we started looking for a solution - and found plenty of them - but their costs ranged from $20,000 to as much as $150,000, imagine that! And then a friend told me about Evolution and in one fell swoop I found a reasonably priced solution, which integrated all these disparate pieces of software. Suddenly I could enter a product into my accounting package and automatically have it published to my website. It was better really because in one place I enter a photo, a description, a bar code, a weight, a cost, a price, a reorder point, a bin location in my warehouse, etc. and all the pieces automatically work. Wow, what a time saving revelation this became!
And it gets better because orders entered into the website or over the phone into the Evolution POS are immediately in the accounting package . . . instantly because they are one and the same program! For example, instead of spending time only to discover we had made a simple error and transposed a number in a credit card order taken over the phone we found ourselves with time on our hands - well, not really, but you get the idea. As for the web sites, new pages for new products are created automatically complete with detail photo and thumbnail photo all at once and I didn't have to get with the website designer to do the updates and this is not only saving me time and getting my products listed on the site sooner but it's saving me money too!
Wow, what a luxury time away from the business has become! For me it meant buying a small airplane and taking flying lessons . . . something I always wanted to do but somehow never managed to find the time to do. Now I work to live instead of seemingly living to work.
I cannot overemphasize how much Evolution has meant to my business. Invoices and pick lists are bar-coded and print immediately. Now our order pickers immediately know what bin the parts are in (because once we told Evolution it includes that info on the pick list) and this means quicker picks. And our order packers do their job more accurately because of the bar codes, and now even the shipping scale is integrated, plus there's instant integration with essential shipping services like UPS and USPS. Heck, even our shipping labels are printed automatically! And it doesn't matter if the order comes in via phone, in person or via the web. It's the big time around here because when the phone rings Evolution pops up with the customer info on the screen. Our order takers can say, "Hello Bob, thanks for calling. What can we do for you today?" Man oh man this blows them away - it's like we are some major league company, and they're impressed with us right out of the gate! These are features only found once you hit the big time . . . but every business can afford them. This Evolution software should have been named "Revolution". Trust me folks, this software is the real deal; it represents a sea change in how you will do business.
John Beech - GM
Genesis Hobby Distributors