DEAR Inventory

PROS & CONS

What are the best aspects of this product?

Everything is linked so even if one employee decides to leave, we still have all the data we need to continue functioning. It's easy to track and order the products we need for our store.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

I feel some steps shouldn't be required. There are some repetitive processes. Some functions also don't link, so this becomes additional work for us.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

All orders are processed using DEAR Inventory. We then link it to Xero for accounting. This makes the process somewhat manageable for us. We find DEAR Inventory very useful.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes

What do you like best?

I love that everything is linked. We recently had a huge shift in employment, and the person who ran most of operations and purchasing left. Thanks to dear literally tracking The supplier, the product, the sku in our system, the sku in the suppliers system, re-order levels and bill of materials on products, it is extremely easy to track and re-order products.

There are some steps that I feel are excessive or unnecessary, but that could be as much my companie's fault for making those the processes as it is dears for allowing them. Steps that I find redundant are things like having to move the used materials through dear, even though a PO with the items bill of materials was already entered. Also, some functions do not link up and so create a bit of an extra work-around.

While we are unable to track physical inventory in here to cross over to xero, this is an excellent place to try to track as accurately as possible the levels and movement of components and raw materials. We process all orders through here, and have it linked to xero for accounting. Somewhat usable.

What do you like best?

We have never looked back since we moved from an internal system - limited by long dev circles.

I would love that they do even more integration with other products.

Managing to control - orders and stock

PROS & CONS

What are the best aspects of this product?

It integrates well with our CMS and works great with our connected channel sales manager. We can also easily add products by category.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

Different sales data is sometimes shown on the dashboard, which can be confusing. The rfid connection is also quite weak.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

We can now manage and organize our inventory. Tracking purchases is also very easy, the same as its shipping. Adding items also work well.

Are you a current user of this product?

No

What do you like best?

Implementation in our CMS was easy and works perfectly with the connected channel sales manager. Adding products by category group is easy and works also with the external handheld.

The dashboard sometimes shows different sales data - drafts will be added sometimes to the total amount, clearly that draft sums shoudn't be added to the total summary. Only barcode scans are allowed - rfid connection is weak.

Control of our inventory - from the sales and incoming products. Purchases can be tracked easily and also the shipping process can be controlled. Adding products to our inventory and warehouse with the handheld works perfectly in interaction with our channel manager and the software.

What do you like best?

My favorite aspect of dear is that you can create a product from the ground up. You can first create the Sku, name it, say where it comes from, and then create a bill of materials attached straight to said product that is then easy to duplicate for other sizes or similar products. It makes creating a product extremely easy. Not only that, but I like that we are able to store our hard materials and ordering for those as well, so that ideally if we were using it 100% correctly it would pull from that material every time we processed a purchase order from production.

Some of the communication between functions isn''t 100% or isn't clear. I've found myself spending a lot of time trying to adjust quantities of fabric being used. It's also not clear where the price is drawing from, so I often find myself running little tests in order to get the pricing per unit accurate. Also, we can't find a rhyme or reason to some of these pricing averages that dear computes. Another dislike is how easily messy dear can get if you let it get out of control. to the point where clean-up would be a headache. Once a company is a certain age and has had various users over the years, it can get pretty crazy. Having all the products so dependent on each other can get out of hand easily, and I often find myself in a maze of components and products. Not really so much dear's fault as our own, I know, but something worth pointing out.

Don't take on dear unless your companie's processes and procedures are 100% down to a pat. It will get messy if you try to take on dear and don't have your back end figured out.

I plan out my designs through dear and base my ordering of components on what dear tells me we have. We don't use it for hard inventory tracking (we have a separate platform for that, that no longer integrates with dear, but it is a great place to keep both final products as well as components and supply inventory.

What do you like best?

My favorite aspect of dear is that you can create a product from the ground up. You can first create the Sku, name it, say where it comes from, and then create a bill of materials attached straight to said product that is then easy to duplicate for other sizes or similar products. It makes creating a product extremely easy. Not only that, but I like that we are able to store our hard materials and ordering for those as well, so that ideally if we were using it 100% correctly it would pull from that material every time we processed a purchase order from production.

Some of the communication between functions isn''t 100% or isn't clear. I've found myself spending a lot of time trying to adjust quantities of fabric being used. It's also not clear where the price is drawing from, so I often find myself running little tests in order to get the pricing per unit accurate. Also, we can't find a rhyme or reason to some of these pricing averages that dear computes. Another dislike is how easily messy dear can get if you let it get out of control. to the point where clean-up would be a headache. Once a company is a certain age and has had various users over the years, it can get pretty crazy. Having all the products so dependent on each other can get out of hand easily, and I often find myself in a maze of components and products. Not really so much dear's fault as our own, I know, but something worth pointing out.

Don't take on dear unless your companie's processes and procedures are 100% down to a pat. It will get messy if you try to take on dear and don't have your back end figured out.

I plan out my designs through dear and base my ordering of components on what dear tells me we have. We don't use it for hard inventory tracking (we have a separate platform for that, that no longer integrates with dear), but it is a great place to keep both final products as well as components and supply inventory.

What do you like best?

DEAR seems to be able to do it all - It integrates with a number of platforms for shipping, eCommerce, accounting... And has different sections to allow businesses to customize it (though with limits to their own needs. I use DEAR with Quickbooks and Shopify together. Having Shopify push all of our sales from our physical and online store is great, and DEAR captures these real time. There seem to be so many features in DEAR that I'm not using right now, though I could see the benefit for other business. They allow for inventory tracking, dynamic movement, sale tracking and fulfillment, purchase order placement and tracking, and even allows you to track assembly of products. They've recently lifted their 20,000 SKU limit on accounts.

The interface is fairly easy to use, especially for simple transactions (like product movement, sale fulfillment for in-stock items.... One major benefit of DEAR is the ability to limit the access that each user has to each section of DEAR - sensitive information doesn't need to be shared with everyone and items that can cause problems with the database can be set to view-only status.

Dear support is also quite good. Sometimes it takes some back-and-forth with the member of the support team to get them to understand the problem, but if there is a solution it's usually explained well.

While DEAR does try to offer a lot of features, the ones that they have can be very limiting. As mentioned, we use Shopify to push sales to DEAR, however, DEAR uses its own labelling/numbering system so it can be very hard to track the specific sale. Additionally, as a safe-guard, DEAR does not let you undo a lot of actions. For example, a location that has been used to store a product will forever be in the system, even if it hasn't been used for years. While this prevents inconsistencies with the 'history' of a product/item, it can create a lot of confusion for users when logging locations or searching for products. Along this line as well, any product that was used in one way shape or form in the system cannot be deleted. So even if it was created or used by accident you're stuck with it there. DEAR is continually adding new features and refining the ones they have, but it can take a long time (even for popular requests to get changes to the system.

Figure out what exact inventory processes you need in your business. Do you need to assemble products? Do you change your products from when they arrive to when they are sold? Do you need to keep track of expiry dates? Do you need purchase, storage and sale information on one platform? Do you need multiple people with regular access to the system? DEAR allows you to do all of these things in some capacity, but do thorough research first!

In most eCommerce platforms there's no sophisticated way to track inventory all the way from purchasing to storing to selling and shipping. DEAR helps manage a lot of that. Despite its shortcomings in some areas, it's allowed us to keep track of our frequently changing inventory.

What do you like best?

Stock system split with multiple locations. Automatic stock Integration with shopify is extremely handy. Full tractability with stock means you know exactly where everything has gone. Link to Stripe & Paypal means customers can pay for their invoices without needing to phone the company. Payments can be taken via an online portal.

Advanced purchases, sales means you can have multiple fulfilments (if you need to part ship).

The program can be very clunky to use sometimes. With certain features not thought out well enough to be fully usable. Support does also not really seem to be interested in listening to/ fixing broken features. The production module is next to useless. You can only create a new production per product variant. Meaning for one order you could have 100's of production orders on. Trying to keep track of these is a nightmare. We opted to use the purchasing module as a makeshift alternative.

The most annoying aspect is that at times you have to undo orders if you need to make a change. Resulting in you having to re authorise any potential pick/ pack lists, invoice, shipping etc. It can take an hour to change something as simple as a price.

Utilise the free trial as much as possible. Don't commit unless you have thoroughly tested all features.

Integration with shopify is very useful. When you sell something on shopify it automatically takes stock out of your master stock list. Essential if you sell in multiple platforms, and require stock to be very accurate.

We have multiple warehouses. Tracking the inventory all in one place means we don't need two systems.

PROS & CONS

What are the best aspects of this product?

Integrates with Woocommerce and Shipstation - sort of. There are times when this breaks.

What aspects are problematic or could work better?

The integration works sometimes and sometimes it doesn't. The customer service is more likely to blame you for a problem you bring to them instead of looking at the code. For example, you can upload your products from Woocommerce. It should build the SKU's in Dear. However, it doesn't always work. You contact them and they tell you to do it again and you do it again for 3 x 4 times. At the end, they recommend that you upload the product from Dear to Woocommerce which destroys the content you have on the page for SEO unless the system pulled it down first, and it barely ever does that, or you have the foresight to leave it open you can copy and paste it back in after Dear is done ravaging your business and taking away your traffic.

What features/services would you like to see in future versions of this product?

Better integration. Better customer service that doesn't blame the customer for issues when the code doesn't work.

What specific problems in your company were solved by this product?

They have answered many questions but this, in general, is bad. The product does not work like intended and does not look at the code to fix the problem. They assume you are the issue first.

Are you a current user of this product?

Yes