Anyone here using Retail Ice/Retail Star POS System? by CamCommerce

[markajem]

Presently I am assisting my godson with his POS system for his store (which he installed prior to my involvement). We have two major road blocks with this software.

#1
The system will only hold costs to $0.00 and not to $0.000 which throws our costs off when we receive inventory from purchase orders.

#2
The system does not allow for kits so when we place an order with the vendor we need to order the items individually from the kit and the purchase order reflects this. Then the vendor is quite confused as to what we are ordering because our PO does not look correct and when we receive the invoice/packing slip from the vendor it does not have the same items numbers listed and does not have the matching costs because of our limiations on kits and costs.

Purcahse Order to vendor
[tt]
Item# Descp Pcs
1423 Widget 10
3245 Thingie 20
[/tt]

Invoice and Packing Slip from vendor
[tt]
Item# Descp Pcs
3542 Gadget 1
[/tt]

1 piece item #3542 contains 10 pieces of item #1423 and 20 pieces of #3245. Because our system does not handle kits we have to list the items separately. This causes a problem because the vendor does not list the items separately in their system and can not cross reference the items to their kit. We have to make note on every single PO of what we really want so they know what to ship.

If we create a special non-inventory item #3542 for the kit so we can list it on the PO then when we receive the purchase order we have to make manual adjustments to the inventory to the proper items which of course is danagerous (human error) and also 95% of the time the costs are not correct because when you break out the items individually from the kit cost they breakdown to $0.000 and the system only handles cost to $0.00

I was thinking about upgrading possibly to CAM32 which supposidly handles both Kits and cost to $0.000.

What I wanted to know is does anyone use this software presently or the CAM32 we are considering upgrading too.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Mark Mark
Email: markanas333@hotmail.com

 

[KeyTechSupport]

eStoreKeeper is a web-based POS. Visit

http://www.keytechnologysolution.com

and demo the software on our products page.

 

[mkatzer]

We use Retail Star. POS UI is gfood, but the database is a vintage 1990 technology that crashes under load. This is the case with 5.x and 6.5 product. It does not scale across multiple processors. Is is a single transaction DB design.

With that said, it really depends on what you want to do with it. If you are content with the CAM business model then it is ok. If you want to do anythign outside of the loop, then it will be extremely hard to do. Cam is completly inflexibiler ont his. Reminds me of the old IBM mainframe days wher you were dictated when to upgrade and how to do it.

Retail Star UI is fair to good, some stupid things in the product POS/Office that suck up data entry time (suspect that the programmer never really did any formal UI testing).

All of the above can be work arounds, but one thing. Make sure you place the database server (centura is really an overgrown access db) on a dedicated box. It crashes usually every two weeks with us. Bad sql scritps in the apps, and the gupta (centura soft) DB does not have any real error recovery except for : "Continue" and "Halt" (what a concept -- send a DB halt message to a retail clerk)

Don't assume that you have stability like sql2000. They are not in the same league, even though the gupta license cost more (and does much much less). Make the asumption that you need to reboot the server. we usually have to reboot the gutpa db at themin of every 3 weeks, we just do it weekly to avoid problems.

matt

 

[markajem]

Matt, thanks for the reply. My godson sold his store and I no longer use the system.

Agreed the software was trash, database construction is worse than Peachtree and that's crap. I am used to major business application software like Macola and MS Great Plains. I also do a lot oCrystal Report writing so I have a lot of expeirence with databases.

Thanks again.

Mark


Mark
Email: markanas333@hotmail.com

 

[mkatzer]

hi mark..

I was trying to be polite which is really hard to do. It is really funny when you try to talk to people, that if the db engine is crap, then it really does not matter what you do on the UI, the whole app will still be crap.

I suspect Microsoft RMS (old qs2000) will eat CAM's lunch in a year or so. It is a shame, because CAM could have prevented it, owned the market and grown their product line. CAM had an advantage in the UI and the customer help desk. They could have easily picked up all of the third party db activity and applications; and lead the pack.

After talking with CAM, it is clear that they never had a strategic plan. The centura soft solution was more top down driven, by a management team that did not have the clue to what was happening in the market place. It seem to me the CAM database selection was driven by an accountant based on how many $$ they could get out of the retail user. CAM assume that the market was like the early 90's.

They will prob complain about big bad microsoft when they start loosing market share. The real issues is CAM, because of their own incompetence, that put them in the position that they will find themselves in a year from now -- reduced sales, decreased new customer trends etc. A miracle could save them, but do not see it happening.

oh well.. time to move on

matt

 

[markajem]

Matt - I know exactly what you are talking about. Peachtree is faced with the same problems. I don't know if you have used Peachtree or are familiar with it's far below average functionallity. I guess though working with Peachtree for several hundred dollars is not far to compare to productws such as MS Great Plains and Macola which range in the 10's of thosands. But, even priced in the hundreds their database is far from up to date.

From the very first day that I helped my dogson work with Retail Star I saw it's difficiencies; big time. But then again they offer it for free - well a $30 handling and shipping charge - right!! At one time my godson wanted to upgrade to CAM32 but I told him not to bother with it. Too many of my questions could not be answered by their sales department as to what it really can do for us in the way of costing decimal places and kit explosions. These wre to two main factors as to why we wanted to upgrade and I never got straight answers from them - "It should" not "It will". So told him not to spend his money here. With the volume he had we could do it all by hand, sorry, he could do it all by hand. I just told him what had to be done. Also creating Crystal reports with Retail Star was no walk in the park either. They had no documentation for their data definitions. Had to hunt and peck for the data.

And quite honestly working with MS Great Plains I find many problems with that software for the price. This company I work for must have spent about $150,000.00 for the software and custom software they had integrated with it and it really does not impress me. There are many problems with the wsoftware. It may be part of the customixing that caused it though. It integrates with a warehouse shipping system which did not even speak the same language at first. It is one of 3 systems like it in the world and MS has spent a fortune in development of it hopeing it will catch on. I don't know if it will. But it has about 550 datafiles that I have to work with when creating crystal reports. They have their datafiles documented but only showing the files and field definitions, they do not explain what each file does and how it interacts with another. You have to kind of guess at that and have working knowleedge of that type of business to be able to work with it. I have had experience with a business like that in the past so it was not too difficult for me to catch on. But that is a lot of files to work with.

Mark




Mark
Email: markanas333@hotmail.com

 

[markajem]

Matt - I know exactly what you are talking about. Peachtree is faced with the same problems. I don't know if you have used Peachtree or are familiar with it's far below average functionallity. I guess though working with Peachtree for several hundred dollars is not far to compare to productws such as MS Great Plains and Macola which range in the 10's of thosands. But, even priced in the hundreds their database is far from up to date.

From the very first day that I helped my dogson work with Retail Star I saw it's difficiencies; big time. But then again they offer it for free - well a $30 handling and shipping charge - right!! At one time my godson wanted to upgrade to CAM32 but I told him not to bother with it. Too many of my questions could not be answered by their sales department as to what it really can do for us in the way of costing decimal places and kit explosions. These wre to two main factors as to why we wanted to upgrade and I never got straight answers from them - "It should" not "It will". So told him not to spend his money here. With the volume he had we could do it all by hand, sorry, he could do it all by hand. I just told him what had to be done. Also creating Crystal reports with Retail Star was no walk in the park either. They had no documentation for their data definitions. Had to hunt and peck for the data.

And quite honestly working with MS Great Plains I find many problems with that software for the price. This company I work for must have spent about $150,000.00 for the software and custom software they had integrated with it and it really does not impress me. There are many problems with the wsoftware. It may be part of the customixing that caused it though. It integrates with a warehouse shipping system which did not even speak the same language at first. It is one of 3 systems like it in the world and MS has spent a fortune in development of it hopeing it will catch on. I don't know if it will. But it has about 550 datafiles that I have to work with when creating crystal reports. They have their datafiles documented but only showing the files and field definitions, they do not explain what each file does and how it interacts with another. You have to kind of guess at that and have working knowleedge of that type of business to be able to work with it. I have had experience with a business like that in the past so it was not too difficult for me to catch on. But that is a lot of files to work with.

Also I have been to the CamCommerce BB a few times and see the questions that are posted there along with mine. YOu can see that Retail Ice has many problems far beyond what some people would believe.

Mark




Mark
Email: markanas333@hotmail.com