Anybody using Info@Hand

[dkmoore]

Is anybody using Info@Hand? If so, what are your likes and dislikes? I am interested to hear opinions on the software.

[Yaletown]

Best part is that it addresses small business management in general, not just CRM. It does a good job at CRM, but also has solid quotes, invoices, product catalog, POs, Bills, Payments in and out, etc..., and has a comprehensive sync with QuickBooks.

Worst part is lack of Module Builder, and an older, creaky Studio. Their release 7.0 is supposed to fix that in a month or two - we'll see.

[Yaletown]

Judging by their preview site, their studio is certainly much better now in the 7.0 release.

[abtechgroup]

I started using using info@hand (infoathand) version 6.7 live as our company sales order system in September 2011. It does handle and automate a large percentage of our tasks, but it also has a few serious shortcomings. We use it in a parts distribution and sales setting.

The number one shortfall for us of the infoathand system is that sales or product units are not available (such as “feet”, “roll”, “spool”, etc.). The work around is that we have to edit the part description when creating the sales order to include the unit of measure.

The second major shortfall for us is that the product search when creating a sales order does not display the “type” (products can be classified by Category and Type where Type is a subset of Category) dropdown list in an alpha sorted format: its just random. With some of the type lists we have over a hundred versions of category, so always having to search visually is a waste of time and prone to errors.

Another shortfall of infoathand is that if you apply a discount to an order, the subtotal is not displayed, just any tax and shipping along with the grand total. The subtotal would be useful.

Infoathand changes the status of a sales order to closed if you ship an item, but if you re-open the sales order to edit something, like add a tracking number in the notes area, then it resets the status to “open”. You have to remember to reset the status to what you need.

The packing slip shows the packing slip number, but doesn’t show the sales order number. Since its the sales order which is sent to the customer for confirmation, the customer sees the sales order number – the packing slip should also show the sales order number.

If you do partial shipments and issue multiple packing slips as items from the original invoice, the quantity disappears from the subsequent packing slips – you have to write it in by hand.

There is no dedicated field(s) for storing credit card sale information: we just stuff it into the “notes” area for the account. With purchasing cards being updated so often, it should be with the sales order.

The freeform search tool does not work well.

The pre-defined reports seem to be all forcasting and invoiced based: it would be nice to have daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly reports by sales order value and also by part.

The sales orders, invoices, etc., do not have enough customization ability for adding company information such as multiple office locations, tax license numbers and remit to information, etc.

The response by info@hand to some of these suggestions has been less than enthusiastic.

Having listed the shortfalls – infoathand is saving us time compared to how we were processing orders. We are currently looking at an alternative system that compares favourably in pricing called salesorder.com. So far our trial of salesorder.com addresses all our concerns, and I suspect we will be switching over once salesorder.com includes the multiple warehouse feature which they promote as to be released shortly.

AMB

[Yaletown]

Wow - I just saw the latest demo site for info@hand System 7 - I was most impressed with the speed (compared to Sugar which has been getting steadily slower for the last few releases), the new capabilities of every list view (like custom layout tabs, reports tab in each module, layout editor in each module), and the dynamic target lists that make campaigns much easier to manage. After being quiet on development for a fair while, looks like this new info@hand with its 1CRM Engine is pretty advanced.