AIM

Avantages

I really like how you can easily generate reports, that's important for my business and I believe this software can do the best job of it.

Inconvénients

I don't like that's a little clunky to use, but that should go without saying because this is super complex software we're dealing with here.

Avantages

Quickly execute sales, tracking serialized inventory and sales is detailed and quick.

Inconvénients

There are a million features! It was overwhelming in the beginning to decide which ones were going to be essential for our business.

Avantages

Easy.......... The fact it can communicate by sending auto calls and text to my customers and helping me to stay in touch along the way. We are a repair shop and this has not only saved us tons of time but this feature has made us lots of money$$$. The POS and customization of the screen and tech support. Tech support is absolutely, hands down, some of the best I've ever experienced. They answer the phone and stay with you until you understand. Very nice people who never make you feel stupid. Also love the fact you can so easily access your data. Other software we've had has limited the backend data to you where as AIM absolutely encourages you to use it. I will say.... a new employee can be taught in under 5 minutes how to check out a customer through the POS.

Inconvénients

Inventory management, pricing and the repair shop module all need some help. All usable and functional. They are just some areas that aren't as polished as other software. Also, if you are a company with over a million different SKU's, beware. The software really is slow. I know! FYI, you'll need own EXCEL and have a basic understanding in order to to manage your inventory as AIM just simply does not have the capability to do so.

Avantages

We have been using the contract module side of AIM for our instrument rental contracts to keep track of monthly payments since the beginning of our business in 2004. We pulled away for a brief stint to try another company and it was a disaster. The instrument rental contracts are the bread and butter of our business. If it fails, we fail. If the customer doesn't feel like they can trust us with their personal info because the system fails, we fail. It's a reflection on us. We came back to AIM in 2019 and went all in with the full point of sale system and we've never looked back. We highly recommend AIM.

Inconvénients

We do wish that there weren't so many steps to follow. Seems like there is a huge learning curve to this program. Once you live it and breath it like it do it's one thing. But my employees tend to make mistakes often because they miss a step.
And for example: having to get out of one frame and into another one for the same customer with a different question about their account is sometimes frustrating.
Also. I really wish that an email went out immediately to my rental contract customers on autopay when their card is declined. The ability is there, as they receive an email immediately when the payment goes through, but not when it declines. This would help our collection dept out tremendously if this option was implemented.

Avantages

The more we use the software the more we learn and love the product. We use this software everyday runnig reports, for our POS, inventory, and much more. We love the button feature to make everyday use easy.

Inconvénients

I find that it is hard to find a credit card company that is compliant with AIM.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir AIM 

Pourquoi passer à AIM

Avantages

Customizing the menu system makes it easy to help new users get familiar.

Inconvénients

The bugs that we do have often leave issues that take time to find or resolve after the initial issue is corrected.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pourquoi choisir AIM 

Logiciel antérieur 

Avantages

I don't have to have multiple systems running to achieve everything we need to do...AIM does it all

Inconvénients

learning curve....set up and learning the system takes time

Avantages

Ease of Use, Cost, Customer Service, Merchant Services relationship.

Inconvénients

Canned Reports are often minimal, but I summarize them in complex Xcel worksheets

Avantages

Retail POS, Service, Rental programs all in one program.

Inconvénients

When you ring up retail items, a rental, & a service ticket at the same time for a customer it creates 3 different transactions for the same payment, thus listing 3 different payments on your deposit report for 1 transaction.

Avantages

The tracking data on products was quite helpful. Serial numbers were regarded as individual numbers with unique purchase order receiving data that could be cross referenced with customer service records and trade-in information. Backorder protocol for Purchase Orders is the one thing I do miss about this software.

Inconvénients

Local server based. This made it very difficult to process transactions remotely (tradeshows, etc) or work remotely.

Avantages

I am able to do in one program what I used to have to do in 3 programs!!

Inconvénients

Weekly updates - some of the weekly updates "break" other areas that were working and you may not realize it until there is an out of balance situation.

Avantages

The features to our store that is most impactful is the Rental Module. Our music store thrives from rentals and the use of having the contracts and payments all set up through AIM is so easy and finely setup to use.

Inconvénients

If anything for me it would be the smallest things such as getting the barcodes to be bigger. In essence the ease of being able to fix the barcodes that are being printed on the labels themselves

Avantages

It is the app that we use for every aspect of our business. From POS to inventory control we have it all in one place. The straight forward menus and feature with in each module is user friendly.

Inconvénients

I do feel that the system is a little over complicated with so many pop up windows. Also, tranactions seem to have too many steps for simple procedures.

Avantages

The team at AIM gave me all the support I could ask for with setting up the software. I can barely turn a computer on and they were able to set it up for me so that I could start using it immediately. Customer support is flawless. The price was well below competing software and still had all the features I could ever use plus some.

Inconvénients

We have experienced some lagging issues, but the team at AIM is working with us to resolve this at no cost.

Avantages

Solid database. Features specifically designed for our industry like lesson billing, rent to own tracking

Inconvénients

Crashes daily because it isn't fully compatible with newer versions of windows. Not easy to use at multiple locations. Requires arcane network setup like environment variables because you have to pay for a total number of "terminals." Very clumsy user interface because you have to start from the master look up process for every piece of data you need to enter. Autopays are only semi automatic because they only run when you tell them to and once again you have to start from the master look up screen multiple times to: generate an auto pay list with manually input dates, transmit the autopays, post the autopays, cancel the denied auto pays, print out a denied list. Lesson billing is usable yet clumsy, lesson scheduling is a joke.

Avantages

There are many POS on the market today but not very many geared to our industry. It is flexible and customizable. It is so easy to use.

Inconvénients

There are very few things I like least because when we do , features can be implemented. I guess at this point I like least is we have no way to print a claim check when customers drop off their vacuum. That said I created a feature request that they are working on as I type this review.

Avantages

Saves time on the Sale, interactive A&D book linked to sale.

Inconvénients

Manual updates to the system. That’s about it

Avantages

The consignment module works well for tracking and paying consignors (if the consignment items are received correctly).

Inconvénients

The software is extremely complicated to use for users. It takes a lot of time to learn and skill to use/understand this software. There are too many modules and features that are no use to us.

Avantages

The software is great with all the different features that it has and offers. I particulary like the reports function that allows me to generate my inventory, sold items, and sales tax reports.

Inconvénients

The system was very easy to setup and intigrate with. There's a lot of functions that the software offers. You certainly need to take a lot of time during the setup to learn about the functions.

Avantages

The interface is very easy to understand and use, and customer support is great. It is a feature-rich program, I only wish we had a newer version.

Inconvénients

When printing statements, it prints old accounts with no address. Apparently there is no way to filter the ones with no address out so I have to manually remove them. Occasionally one slips past and they are returned to us by the Post Office.

Avantages

Really helps with the back room duties (accounting, inventory, planning, etc.). Great point of sale program. Bar coding is a must.

Inconvénients

Getting quality support can be a challenge. Program has so many features that better documentation for using the features would help

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

Looks like if it worked it would be nice.

Inconvénients

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.

Avantages

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!

Inconvénients

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...