AIM

Has made us MUCH more efficient

Vantagens:

For a small retail store this is excellent! Helps manage inventory, as well as daily and weekly check out.

Desvantagens:

There was quite a learning curve for us. We had no POS before AIM.

TriTech AIM Review

Comentários: Overall, I am very happy with this AIM. It has made our business run smoother and has opened up some avenues to us that were previously not feasible.

Vantagens:

We sell firearms, and the built in A&D Book is a critical component to our business. Once setup, this feature makes tracking of firearms incredibly simple .

Desvantagens:

The management of sale prices for our products needs to be revamped and is currently both difficult and convoluted to use. In my opinion, this is easily the area of the software that could most benefit from improvement.

AIM once the sale is made we don't care.

Comentários: I have been trying for several years now to get this company to finish installing the software with all paid for data transfers. AIM tech support Has been supposedly working on entering my inventory for about four years now.
Every time I call I get the we supplied the software so that I owe for it even though it is totally unusable without my inventory and bound FFL book installed. And just because I paid for extra for data transfer to make the program usable does not mean that that AIM has to actually do it (simple Excel format)
Tech support is useless as none of them have done their job yet. I am going to have to take the time away from my business to take these crooks to court.

Vantagens:

Looks like if it worked it would be nice.

Desvantagens:

The way it just sits there with no data for the last several years waiting for AIM software to finish their job. The fact that I was charged for software and data transfer and received software without data transfer so it is useless. I have been waiting so long it was called AIMsi when I bought it.

An overall great product

Comentários: We moved from a custom AS400 program written for our company to AIM almost 10 years ago. We've been very pleased with AIM & never looked back. No program is perfect & they all have their little quirks, but we've been very pleased with AIM & have no interest in shopping for another platform.

Vantagens:

There is a lot to unpack in this program, but once you've learned the system it's an all-in-one package & is fast, easy & efficient to use. Integration between our website, payment processing, shipping, etc. make our life easier. The program is constantly updated with enhancements & quality of life updates making the software faster & better to use. Tech support is very responsive to our needs & requests, development has made many changes to the software at our request to better fit our needs.

Desvantagens:

The Vortx web platform that integrates with AIM comes with a lot of limitations & the custom report tool is difficult to use. The SQL platform version 12 uses is powerful, but the hardware & software startup cost (SQL especially) can be high. There is not a good solution for working with products that are sold in both a physical AND digital format.

Emily's Review of AIM

Comentários: I have worked with many people at Tri-Tech we have been using there POS for about 4 years. I have had to call the customer help line many times in those 4 years. And no matter how frustrated I am they do an excellent job helping me solve the issues I run into.

Vantagens:

I enjoy the easy of being able to create things and customize the POS easily. The system does all I need plus more that I probably don't know about. Seems like I learn new things about it all the time. My most recent call was with [SENSITIVE CONTENT]. He was very knowledgeable and the questions he didn't know the answers to he was very speedy at finding them. I enjoyed my early morning conversation with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] while he helped me work on multiple issues I was having. We got them all fixed in under an hour (I was expecting it to be a multiple hour kind of call). I look forward to working with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] again.

Desvantagens:

The worst part about this POS was the set up. Although I believe that is mostly the fact that we were transferring information from a system that was very VERY old and outdated system. But the service team was there for me whenever I had questions; and boy I had a lot of them. Those first few months most of the service people knew me by first name.

Great feature set and support. Very poorly implemented.

Comentários: The product has features that no other has, especially for the musical instrument rental business. However, it is showing its age. The worst thing is that it wasn't written well even to standards that we had 30 years ago. (I started in the IT business in 1986.) I would recommend it, with a great many warnings, to a musical instrument rental or similar company, but absolutely not to anyone else.

Vantagens:

The feature set for the rent-to-own business is good. So far as we have been able to discover, there is no other product at any price that supports our business. (If there was, I would be on it like a duck on a June bug.) The support staff is excellent!

Desvantagens:

I would have fired an experienced programmer or seriously chewed out a beginner 30 years ago if they designed a user interface that was so poorly implemented. You never know from screen to screen what you have to do to do a "find." Sometimes you have to hit Tab for the program to work, sometimes you have to hit Enter. The mere fact that in a good many places the programmers apparently elected to use the tab key or enter key events rather than the OnExit event is inexcusable. (Click the OK or Save button without first tabbing out of a field and there is a great chance that the changes to the field you were last in were not saved.) Things as simple as standard naming conventions for naming reports are just an example that someone either didn't understand design or didn't care. (The reports aren't in report name order because some inept person decided to put "Print" or "List" in front of the report name, thereby making the lists sort out without rhyme or reason. Having a table of variables to STORE system options is fine. It's even okay for a first release. However, how a system that has been on the market this long without having a user interface on said table indicates a huge lack of caring. The user interface flaws cannot be excused by the fact that the programs are old. The design flaws would not have been acceptable in a DOS or even a CP/M program. The back end modules are simply sad. The fact that they decided to write the back end all over again in the new system that they plan to release someday indicates a huge lack of judgment. Why the devil would one reinvent the wheel, especially after doing such a poor job the first time around, when one could interface to any of several well-written, mature, user-friendly and well-supported G/L, A/P, A/R, etc. systems and focus on the specialized modules that make me use AIMsi to start with? (QuickBooks immediately comes to mind.) Doing so would save well into six figures of development cost, give one a solid base on which to build, and even give one a huge marketing opportunity by being an enhancement to a widely-used system rather than being a home-rolled thing. It would also give me some hope that the new release would be available in my lifetime. They are simply burning man-years of programming effort and stretching lead times unreasonably. As bad as the G/L module is, their "Purchase Order" module simply boggles the mind. They make a sad effort to somehow combine P/O and Customer Order Processing while making both the COP features and the interface to A/P damned near unusable. One need only looks at the database design to see that whoever wrote the COP programs had never actually worked on one before. No Order Header and Order Line Item tables? Really? They sort of sludge everything together in something that they dreamed up from scratch. Even the terminology used for field names and labels is non-standard. "Picked" has a very well understood meaning in the COP industry. They have a whole new definition. I could go on forever...

AIM software makes my job easier!

Comentários: My interactions have almost exclusively been with the tech support team. I am a musician and I don't think like an accountant; they are always helpful and efficient. The support is peerless - I don't think we have ever stumped them!

Vantagens:

We have been using AIM for more than 10 years. It allows us to manage daily sales, keep current track of our inventory, and to update, receive, and transfer inventory as needed. The A/P invoice feature makes accounting a much easier process. The software is reliable, and the reports it can generate are tremendously helpful.

Desvantagens:

We are a musical instrument store that is run by musicians, and it took us all a bit of time to learn to "think like the software" in more complicated processes. The availability of tech support being there to bail us out made that transition easier.

It's a shame - good ideas, bad execution.

Comentários: There are a lot of good ideas in this software, but things like a staff that's not on the same page, and a long-awaited refresh of their base tech keep AIMsi a frustrating software package. We stay because our lesson program is to big to be handled by any other solutions we looked at, but I would advise others to hold off until their promised rebuild is released.

Vantagens:

Lesson management is good. Inventory management and sales are serviceable.

Desvantagens:

Built on outdated technology, which means the system will get slower and more bloated as your business grows. Simple ancillaries (like date lookup) require Googling to find outdated Microsoft files when you replace computers, and support won't have those files available. E-commerce is excruciatingly complex to execute; why must it be this complicated when options like Squarespace and Shopify exist? They don't require the user to learn XML to take full advantage of their features. The PO system is convoluted, the workflow makes no sense. Inventory management could stand to lose some processes to speed things up and make it more understandable. Reporting doesn't make much sense, either. But the most frustrating part for us has been the staff. Calling support is rarely a good experience; it often sounded like someone was paging through a manual to find a solution. Recently, I found out why: support is tiered, and we are on the lowest tier. I've been using this software for 5 years, and no one at TriTech offered us an upgrade. Online help files don't offer much more in the way of assistance. Navigation is clunky, and entries are often incomplete or outdated. We've also experienced the classic "sales promises features that developers say can't be done" routine. The most recent involved running their product on a Windows tablet - sales said it could be done, but later, support said it was only possible using Remote Desktop Protocol (a thing I wish I knew before I purchased the Windows tablet & an additional license). More than once, I've been scolded by sales for "not understanding how [their] software works." They require you to buy gift cards & hardware through them, at a substantial markup. I'm getting frustrated just thinking about this stuff...

AIM Software

Comentários: Overall experience has been amazing. Tech support is there to help us out when there are questions. The training videos are full of good advice and very helpful hints to make the software work better for us.

Vantagens:

For an all around software, for several different industries, this software is well thought out. We have used this software for many years, and have gone through several of the upgrades. When there has been an issue, tech support is right there to help resolve problems or to escalate to developers to create what we need. The training tutorials are a huge help. The software is very customizable for our needs.

Desvantagens:

We have not really run across any negatives. Tri Tech is always improving the software. The one downside is not having tech support there on weekends if we have an issue. We have only run into one or two times we have really needed them on a weekend in all the years we have used the software.

One of the worst business decisions I have made.

Comentários: We gained POS software with serialized inventory track-ability from this software, something that we were lacking with QuickBooks.

Vantagens:

It can handle a lot of inventory and a lot of different skus. The POS module is decent as far as keeping track of a lot of customers and barcodes. If you do opt for this software, stick with the very basic POS module only.

Desvantagens:

There are sooooo many things.... First off, the platform itself is extremely outdated. The only people who like this software are companies who have been using it for more than 10 years and haven't tried anything newer. Our IT guy HATES it, and TriTech wants you to spend thousands of dollars on an old-school server set-up because it can't be set up with any sort of cloud system. One thing to keep in mind is the relatively cheap up front cost is just the beginning, as the hardware costs are going to get you BIG TIME when you have to keep going backwards in time and adding hardware, IT, and specialized accounting costs on top of everything else (did I mention our accounting costs quintupled when we started using AIMsi?!). You can hardly ever correct a mistake, and we found this out right away when even TriTech support messed up trying to help us correct a simple mistake early on. Making corrections is tedious if not impossible, and yet the program is so counter-intuitive it's very easy to make mistakes even if you've been working with it for awhile. The accounting module is a joke, and this is where I feel like it was truly a bad business decision. We went live officially in 2016 after practicing for about 6 months, and after 11 months of trying to get off of QuickBooks completely and get on only one reporting software we finally gave up on AIMsi as we started losing sight of numbers and business goals. Bottom line, there are way better options out there than AIMsi.

After ten years, I work with the system reluctantly.

Vantagens:

You can open the system multiple times on the same computer. In the middle of entering a sale, cust wants to try on a helmet or gloves, or just gets distracted; you can switch to another copy of the system until the customer is ready to continue. When using the computer to work on customer information or inventory, you can switch to another copy to verify or copy something. For instance, combining two customers into one, can copy email and then compare or enter.

Desvantagens:

The system is absolutely opaque, not intuitive, and byzantine. To deal with a product, it is impossible to find S/A Maintenance unless you know how to find it. Way too many arbitrary clicks and decisions to find anything in the system. Especially annoying is the inability to go back one level, if you make a mistake in these decisions; you have to go back to the beginning, and you might not even remember which decision was the wrong one. The lack of a training program to teach new employees how to use the system is something I have been thinking about for ten years. The rental module does not lend itself to quick service, renting 100 bikes on a busy day. If you suspend a sale, you can't open it and suspend it again; therefore you can neither edit, nor even reprint it. You can't analyze sales data from a sector of the customer data base. For instance, you can't separate the customers from A to M and compare them to the customers from N to Z. This would be useful to analyze the effectiveness of advertising. We could contact all the customers from A to M, but not N to Z, and then compare the results. There's more, but that will do for now.

ABC RC & Hobbies Review

Vantagens:

I purchased it because the active e Capability and find it is a bit awkward and confusing to use The software basically works well but a long learning curve because it is trying to work for every body

Desvantagens:

Long learning curve and support is expensive

Baums Music

Comentários: I have been an AIM user since 2003 and overall I have been extremely pleased. I have been working with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] and he has been extremely helpful in my last issues.

Vantagens:

From POS to backroom accounting and inventory management the software integrates seamlessly. Also support is crucial and they have that covered well.

Desvantagens:

Seems to need a lot of updates to fix issues.

Cardinal Percussion Mark Tirabassi

Comentários: AIM over has been good not great. [SENSITIVE CONTENT]
has been the reason I feel we can make it work.

Vantagens:

I like that it seems customized for the music industry.

Desvantagens:

Lang in correcting system issues. Not being able to request a specific Support Tech and the Support Tech not being able to call me. I really think [SENSITIVE CONTENT] is amazing. Super helpful and knows the product. You have a gem and I would highly suggest that AIM take the steps to secure him long term.

aimsi review

Comentários: It was hard to learn at first and I find my new employees have a bit more trouble with it than I like. Support is good but I have frustrations when CC processor and yourself throw the blame back on each other when resolving such problems. I think the separate module are a bit pricey unless you can catch a sale. And unfortunately I wish there was better online instruction to able to learn a new module. customer support is limits how much they show you in that area. I feel as though I utilize only about 50% of what aimsi can do just because there is no instruction of resource available online. And what's the point of the scheduling tab in reports when it doesn't give data even though the choices of reports are the same in the lesson tab and they work there. Customer service told me the tab doesn't work yet.

Vantagens:

customer contact capture and credit card processing .

Desvantagens:

modules priced individually and that updates aren't discounted for current customers.

Review of AIM

Comentários: They have been a very reliable partner is running our business.

Vantagens:

The easy of use when in front of a customer. Helps speed up the process allowing customers save time.

Desvantagens:

Once in awhile I have some issues creating reports. Usually it is just my lack of computer skills causing the problems.

Over all, VERY happy. Best all in one POS for Firearms Retailers

Comentários: All in one POS for firearms retailer with the best pricing that WIL NOT break your bank!!

Vantagens:

Lots to offer for the firearms retailer at eh best possible price compared to there competitors. We have been very happy with the system as a whole and although there is a lot to learn, support is just a call away. Having Bound Book linked right to your inventory is very helpful and there is even a delayed delivery choice in the POS for state like us in IL that require a waiting period for firearms purchases.

Desvantagens:

There is a lot to learn and many items/field we don't use, but can not simply delete. We have to work around them. For being such a gun based POS system, there are things that could use improving to keep retailers compliant. But every time we make a suggestion to support, it is taken in kind and it the modification can be made, they do it!

A Small Music Store's Best Friend

Comentários: I used this software as a salesman at a local music store. It worked great to keep track of inventory (sales/ordering/receiving), salesman commissioning, time cards, and it made band rental season easy to manage.

Vantagens:

It's very easy to use for all point of sale needs including transacting sales, sales history, band rentals, gear rentals, powerful customer account features, ordering and receiving. We used it to track salesman commissions and it worked great for that as well.

Desvantagens:

No real cons from a salesman/user perspective. It functioned to meet all of the needs of a small, local music store.

Great software

Comentários: good

Vantagens:

Easy to use. Good support. I like this software.

Desvantagens:

Great as is. Frequent updates are a pain

Music Biz

Comentários: overall very good product

Vantagens:

functionality and ease of use plus great customer service!

Desvantagens:

Too many updates. If it is necessary to implement updates every week or so... Can you set the system to do automatic updates?

Great Functionality at a Great Price

Comentários: Customers for 11+ years. We would not buy another POS product. We have premium support and receive excellent assistance

Vantagens:

It has the capacity to handle all day to day activities. When used as it is designed, the software works flawlessly. The tech support is great.

Desvantagens:

When corrections are needed, some are not easily done without assistance. There are integrated correction options for common errors, making those much less troublesome. Note that terms and button functions are not universal across all modules.

Owner

Comentários: Running my retail store with AIM has been a blessing.

Vantagens:

My sales associate Josh Okey. He was the driving force in implementation

Desvantagens:

e commerce. If you do not know ecommerce buyer beware.

Veritable Jack of All Trades Point of Sale application

Comentários: With many small businesses operating more than one type of business in their store, the demand for more versatile point of sale programs increases and becomes difficult to find. Think about looking at software to purchase and realizing each software application only does a portion of what you need. Say you sell retail products, but you also want to help local artists and sell their merchandise on consignment, plus you take trade-ins, offer repair services, and you wish to maintain a customer database to let them know about future sales; How many points of sale programs are out there capable of handling all that and much more? AIMsi. I'm still looking for the iPad program or another PC-based program capable of handling it all and be completely integrated. What kind of businesses are we talking about? Retail stores, liquor stores, hobby stores, gun stores and shooting ranges, appliance stores, car washes, music stores, bike shops, golf courses, bars and restaurants, grocery and convenience stores, and the list keeps growing.

Vantagens:

User Friendly Continually being developed and upgraded A true all in the box solution (point of sale, built in accounting program, built-in gift card program, contact management, B2B and C2B capable, and everything else a business needs to run the front, middle, and back office).

AIMsi for computer/gun store

Comentários: We have just purchased this product within the last month and are still in the implementation phase. So far so good. It seems to be fairly easy to use once we went through some of the training videos. We have used up one of our two hours of free support getting guidance about things particular to our business and that has been very helpful. We are a small shop and spent a good amount of time shopping around for the best fit for the best price. This does what some of the way out of our league expensive programs do as far as multi-channel e-commerce, working with an online gunbook, accounting for trade-ins, consignments, assemblies, etc. I also like that it can integrate with Quickbooks and we can stay with our current merchant services provider. The cons are that depending on what modules you need, it can start to feel like you are getting nickel and dimed a bit but overall the price is still very reasonable. We were able to get what we needed within out budget. I can't give any in depth reviews beyond this yet since we are still in the learning phase but so far I think this was a great purchase.

pc poll software

Comentários: great customer support, however if I had concerns it would be cost effectiveness, for small business operation, I do not need support that often, but had to pay monies every month to be connected, one time fees should be available at reasonable price points

Vantagens:

support team has vast knowledge of software

Desvantagens:

the cost to use this service, would prefer a smaller fee to use this support on a one time as needed order, software is not user friendly