I wanted to change the software running Mobile Edge more times than I can count, and in 29 years I never did it once.
What I was running was solid, and the price was fair. But as technology progressed, there were things I needed that it wouldn’t do. I needed to find and pay for a lot of other software to accomplish what I wanted, and nothing talked to anything else. Other options came along that I thought might be better. I would look at a new point of sale software and walk away every time. It was always the same three reasons:
- It would take too much time.
- It would take me forever to learn.
- It would cost too much money.
Let’s start with time, because that was the wall for me. Starting over meant typing in all of my inventory, my employee data, and years of history, and I couldn’t make myself seriously consider it. The endless data entry was the barrier, not the features. I knew it would stop other owners the same way it stopped me, so the first thing we committed to in 1sixty8 Manifold was building importers. The first one is live and is for TSS, which has served this industry for nearly 40 years and is what I ran at my shop. It brings your data across in about 15 to 30 minutes. Customers, work orders, invoices, employee data, inventory and much more. All of your TSS data is sitting in 1sixty8 Manifold the moment you open it up.
Then the learning curve. When you switch software you have to learn everything all over again, and the questions show up at the worst possible time. We built Ask Manifold for this exact reason. You ask it in plain English and it answers in plain English: step by step, no technical language, with links to knowledge base articles if you want to go further. It was designed to answer 95% of your questions in seconds. In the rare instance that Ask Manifold does not answer your question, our online support is second to none.
Money was the third one, and it is the one I had backwards for years. The point of sale I was using was affordable. It still is, if a point of sale is genuinely all you need. I wanted a lot more than that. So I bought reputation management software, a customer communication tool, vehicle check-in and quality control, in-store communication, and a project management platform. When you add up the costs associated with all of the other software, I was somewhere between $600 and $800 a month. And none of it talked to anything else, so I was constantly copying data by hand from one platform to another. You know the version of this you have lived: the same customer typed in four times before the car is even on the schedule, and one of those times a digit goes in wrong and you find out six months later when you need to call them. I made lots of mistakes, and it cost me a lot of time and lost revenue. When you factor all of that together, my hesitation to switch was costing me thousands of dollars every month.
In another post, I laid out the path one customer took through every system I owned, so I won’t walk through it again. The short version is that the price of standing still never shows up on an invoice, which is exactly why it is so easy to keep the status quo.
Nearly three decades in this trade taught me a lot about running a store efficiently. I baked that into 1sixty8 Manifold, and I made a point of solving the three issues that kept me from making a change:
- The migration.
- The questions.
- The monthly cost.
If you have been meaning to switch for a few years and keep finding reasons not to, send me a note and tell me which of the three is yours. I read and respond to every one myself.
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