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We bought into it last year, paid the upfront costs, got the "training", prepared all our data for export to their system, had everything ready to go live on their system, and (mercifully) never went live. There were a lot of reasons, but a few of the them are:

  • They didn't disclose all the costs up front; we had to pay for many things they didn't disclose.
  • As we got further into it, their system turned out to be very outdated, with no intention of updating any time soon. Early-mid 90's technology.
  • No ability to customize the input forms or datasheets to work the way we work.
  • Answers they gave us to questions we asked about their system before we signed up, turned out to be incorrect once we actually got into it.
  • We found it was going to create more work for us overall, not less.

It might work for a small shop such as a vinyl and print shop, or maybe even for a shop that does mostly large production runs of only a few products. But we're a full-service custom fabricator, we do most of our own installations as well as service work. We fabricate almost everything and our list of raw materials is very large. We custom estimate nearly every job. But we're not a large company either, so we don't have employees dedicated to managing and tracking inventory and other functions that a larger company may have. It turned out that the KeyedIn Sign product was a very poor fit for us and the experience we had with the company overall was not a good one. I wish I could say otherwise because we put hundreds of hours into preparing for it and a lot of money paying for it, but it was better to cut our losses before things got even worse.

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We're not using a "system". We use Business Works for accounting and a Microsoft Access database created in-house for project management. It works, but thought we could streamline things with an ERP solution. However, even as clunky as our current "non-system" is, it works better than what we would need to do to make the KeyedIn stuff work.

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If I am correct; Sage is more of an accounting program, were CASper was design for the sign industry. It handles the accounting plus estimating, customer information, contact note, vendors, and inventory.

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We're using Sage also, the Business Works product. I don't know about other Sage products, but there is a module in Business Works that you could use for estimating if you're desperate, but we use spreadsheets for estimating, plus our in-house Access database for PM and Business Works only for accounting.

It's a disjointed system but it's still better than KeyedIn.

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Sage has Estimating, we do all our estimating with it, I always used spreadshees before, the main reason I like using sage is it keeps all material pricing for our standard materials so I dont have to keep looking up material prices

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  • 3 weeks later...

This is a relevant topic for us right now. We have been looking for a new global system and have been considering Cyrious http://www.cyrious.com/ however there isn't much of an accounting platform that works with QB or other programs. There also seems to be considerable redundancy in purchase order generation and close out docs. Currently we have the E2 system and it is an access base program that isn't too customizable for the right reports. We also use Excel for estimating and PM scheduling. I have worked with Casper at another company and wasn't too thrilled with it's overall capability. Many of the 'Sign Shop' systems I see look great for a vinyl shop or digital print house, but bring me concern when you get into the one-offs that we do in house. Most custom fab shops I speak with run a customized management program.

I am curious to know what the rest of the world is doing these days?

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