ECI Spruce

It’s ten times better than Retail Pro. Its search is also quicker. Retail Pro took a while to get an answer in search. Another thing I like about Spruce is if you have an e-catalogue like TruValue, I can type in a SKU and it can pull up if its not in our system. It searches TruValue’s website and just pulls info in saving me a lot of time.

This one was right up our alley where it was an all-in-one. I need the accounting side. Some software had it, others didn’t. This system just fit what we needed. It looked very user friendly.

RockSolid MAX is the baby brother to Spruce and that is what my buddies used but they’re using QuickBooks for accounting and that’s what I didn’t want. I didn’t want two different softwares where I do accounting here and do journal entry there, etc. etc.

So this is all-in-one where it’s got that accounts receivable, accounts payable, it’s got inventory management, it’s got your point of sale. It’s got the whole package in one deal and of course the price then triples but then nevertheless you can avoid errors because now you enter inventory and automatically convert it to a bill versus you enter inventory and then take a piece of paper to another room. Then they enter the bill and now you have this human error that starts playing a factor again.

Spruce is very catered towards lumber yards. That is what it was designed and developed around. I run a part store so whether I’m selling a starter or a 2x4, at the end of the day I’m just selling a product. It still worked for me regardless of what I was selling.

So far so good for support.

Overall the system is ok but has several areas it falls short and negatively effects our business. Any new projects, the system identifies as a liability instead of an asset. This becomes an issue when we apply for funding and the bank sees all of these outstanding projects. The software is also soft in their mobile and service capabilities. As we are a multi faceted business, we need all areas to be equally as strong.

NOT HAPPY

Spruce has many faults. Constently freezing up. Cannot even close the window or start another application because it is strictly cloud based. Not very user friendly. So control alt delete won’t shut down the app because of the cloud base design.

Spruce was designed specifically for LBM dealers by people who really know our industry and what we need.

(We) wanted an industry-specific, lumber-based software program and when we started looking at what was out there, it became clear very quickly that Spruce was the logical choice.

Before switching to Spruce, the company had been using a generic business accounting program for about 10 years and, for co-owner David Goss, it was time for a change. “David decided he wanted an industry-specific, lumber-based software program and when we started looking at what was out there, it became clear very quickly that Spruce was the logical choice.

One of the great things about Spruce it that it’s software for lumberyard and building material dealers that’s designed by lumberyard and building material dealers. Instead of being off-the-shelf, general business management software, it’s specifically designed for our industry and that makes a big difference.

Spruce was designed specifically for LBM dealers by people who really know our industry and what we need," he says. "I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone at Spruce who had less than 15 years’ industry experience and that really set them apart from the other software providers we looked at!

Spruce was developed by lumber dealers from the point of view of the salesperson on the counter, in my opinion, rather than primarily for the back office. It has made it so much easier for us to make a sale, price it correctly, receive it correctly and get the invoices and statements in the hands of our customers quickly, accurately and efficiently.

The Spruce system links the customer’s order to the vendor purchase order to the customer’s invoice and to the invoice from the vendor. All those steps are linked and it’s easy to drill down and look at any document in the process if you need to.

With our old system, we would send out statements once a month, either with no invoices or with invoices that had to be manually pulled from a file and matched because they had a signature on them. With Spruce, we capture the signature at the point of sale, the invoices are automatically collated with the statements and they’re either mailed, e-mailed or both with all the supporting documents. Spruce has taken a process that used to require a full day under our old system and reduced it down to just two hours!

It seemed like customer service at Epicor was not at the level it was when we first bought into them, and the cost of their service contracts were really out of hand for what we were getting.

Since we made the switch, Spruce has been a very responsive to our requirements and has quickly adapted to our type of business, Their regional consultant, Nicole Adams, has been great to work with and Spruce as a company has been very open to our concerns and willing to address them.

For a company of our size–100-plus employees across 15 different locations-- getting everybody up and running on new software in one day could have been a scary, huge job but it went very well. We’ve definitely been getting our money’s worth since then and Spruce is giving us the modernization that I wanted for the company. It’s just a very good product that’s backed up by some very good people.

The conversion was planned out well and the Spruce people were very accessible and took care of any issues that arose. The big thing for us was that we heard nothing from any of our customers when we converted. When you make a major change to the business like bringing in new software and your customers don’t even realize it happened, that’s what I call a success. That’s particularly true when you’re doing it across 14 very different locations, plus our headquarters office!

With Spruce, we can see what’s going on in real-time. If you buy something at one of my locations, I’ve got the information on my computer right then and there. Our headquarters team can look at daily sales and daily margins and see real-time data. With Epicor, you had to go through a day-end routine to get that information, and that was not a good thing. With Spruce, we can look at transactions and see immediately if there is a problem with a sale price. We can make any changes when they’re needed instead of having to wait for the next day-end report to find out.

With the old system, we were always a day behind and then we would have to contact the customer and let them know what was going on. We don’t have that problem now.

Epicor was impressive but it did far more than we needed it to do,” Hermann recalls. “We weren’t going to be able to utilize everything that it did and all those extra features came with a hefty price tag.

Spruce could do everything Epicor did, but at a level far better suited to a medium-sized business like ours. Spruce gave us everything we needed at about a third of what we would have had to pay for Epicor!

The conversion to Spruce went really well. I prepared customized checklists for each of our employees depending on which parts of the program they would be using, so they could work through the training they needed before we went live.

Most of our people took the switch to Spruce very much in stride. We practiced on the software a lot before we actually went live and Spruce provided an implementation specialist on site for two days. So we had someone readily accessible to help us get any kinks with our software or hardware figured out right away. It all went really well.

Spruce has streamlined key areas of our operations and given us real-time information on the company that we really didn’t have with Dimensions.

With Spruce, I have so many more reports that I didn’t have before. Keeping track of inventory is far easier and the program does a great job of managing our custom millwork shop. This enables us to capture our cost of labor and cost of goods sold in the shop in a way that we weren’t able to do before switching to Spruce.

With the dashboards, I can look at each customer and see at a glance what they are or not buying. I can look at sales and margin trends in core product categories and see where the business overall is performing well and where there are opportunities for improvement.

When I started JM Building Supply in 2010, we were using a proprietary system from a local software house in Florida that had done work with some of the contractor yards in town. That program was very basic. It generated vast amounts of paper, none of the various modules integrated in any way, and any time you wanted to make changes to the program, it was a real struggle.

If there’s a question with an order or an invoice, Spruce allows us to pull up any part of the transaction. Everything is integrated–from the customer’s order to our PO with the vendor, through to receipt of the product, delivery, invoicing, and statements. It’s all right at our fingertips whenever we need it!

Our first system was fine when we didn’t have a lot of volume, but the larger we got, the less effective it became. Finally, it got to the point where we were either going to bring in better technology or start adding more employees.

If I were a bigger hardware operator, I might have considered it, but our hardware is just necessity based. We are primarily a stick yard.

We were expecting it to be further along in its development. We weren’t able to trust the validity of some of the processes. We didn’t realize we were in a beta state with the Prosperity software. There were things that should have been solved within a reasonable timeframe but were not.

I was frustrated within the first 90 days. I didn’t want to make an irrational decision. I’ll hear you out, but I’m not going to just jump ship.

ECI was such a big help to us when we needed a catalyst to turn things around after the devastating flood and its aftermath!

Spruce is allowing us to identify new opportunities in our business to improve inventory management, boost overall gross margin and control our expenses more effectively.

Of all the programs we looked at, Spruce had the best user interface but the people side of the equation was just as important. The staff at Spruce seemed more interested than any of the others in making sure we had an easy transition and that made a real difference.

Spruce has generated significant cost and time savings across the board. It’s easy to use software that comes with a clean interface and just as important as any technology feature, the Spruce staff really care about their customers and the support they provide is truly amazing!

I also liked the fact that Spruce is a Windows® based system and that makes it very easy to learn. With Spruce, we can train a new employee to be ready to handle point of sale at the counter in just 30 minutes and for a business like ours, that means everything.

Locating an item in our database is so easy with Spruce and that’s really important for a new person working the cash register.

Spruce is Windows® based so if you’re at all familiar with any of the Microsoft Office® programs, it’s a no-brainer to learn. With Spruce, we can get new hires up to speed and fully functioning so much faster than before–that’s been a huge plus!

Spruce has brought a much more efficient document management system to the business. It could take hours to track down the paperwork. Now, it’s literally available in seconds with just a few keystrokes.

It has to be easy to learn, easy to place an order and come with the ability to evolve and add features and functionality as our business needs and customer expectations change over time.

If you’re in the building supply business, Spruce is a program that makes it easy to take care of ordering, receiving, and getting customers through the checkout smoothly.

We really needed a program that was more current and more user-friendly and that offered more options than what we had with Profitmaster. The decision to move to Spruce had a lot to do with the software’s ease of use and the fact that it is a Windows®based system.

If you’re in the building supply business, Spruce makes it easy to take care of ordering, receiving, and getting customers through the checkout smoothly. And because it’s Windowsbased, our new hires can be up and running with Spruce on their own after just a few hours.

We now run our returns report on a regular basis so that we can catch any emerging patterns that might indicate a potential problem.

Without Spruce and the responsiveness and professionalism of the Spruce team, we would never have been able to address our fraud problem so quickly or effectively. Wendy Hitchcock and the rest of the Spruce organization recognized the importance of this situation for us. They made it a top priority so that we could quickly pin down the full dollar value of our losses and get an accurate report to our insurance company and the police.

Don’t ever assume anything about the security of your business. Our problem came from a trusted employee who had been with us for five years and who was operating literally right under our noses. Thanks to Spruce, we were able to identify exactly what was going on and take corrective action. Make sure you have the tools you need to help identify potential fraud situations and make using them part of your regular routine. If you don’t, you’re putting the longterm health of your company at serious risk.

We had a chance to see Spruce at a Do it Best Market we attended and quickly realized we could do things with it that Prosperity couldn’t even dream of doing.

There was no inventory module, general ledger was a total disaster, and I ended up doing my first year taxes off of Excel spreadsheets.

It’s a scary thing when find yourself running a business with a system you figure is going to do what you need, only to realize once you get into it that none of that is going to happen! We were continually finding things that either weren’t there or weren’t working properly and we were always being told it would be in the next release-- except that it never was!

I also liked the fact that it was a Windows-based program, which I was a lot more familiar with and that new hires would find so much easier to learn. Plus, they showed me a way I could use Spruce to take my two branches, which were still running totally separately, and combine them under one single system.

We had a Spruce representative on site with us for the implementation and it all went smoothly for both locations. After he was gone, the Spruce help desk was very responsive. We would call with questions and get answers very quickly.

The inventories that you had to obtain, the pricing schemas, all the units of measure issues–everything was all there already within the system and it was just a matter of me figuring out how to use it to get the answers I needed.

A solid, state-of-the art technology base is absolutely critical for a business like ours and that’s what we’ve got now, thanks to Spruce.

There’s no doubt in my mind about Spruce’s ability to support our future growth. It’s important to us today and it’s only going to become even more important for us going forward.

I was a RockSolid Classic customer and thought that I was purchasing the newest generation of RockSolid. It lacks much of the functionality of Classic and is actually based on SPRUCE.

With Spruce, you can flow everything through from start to finish–from the beginning of a transaction when you’re quoting the customer, through to placing the order, issuing the PO to the vendor, receiving the product, inputting the details into the system, selling it to the customer, paying the vendor and all the way through to posting the receivable.

With Spruce, I can click on any invoice and see the entire paper and activity trail before and after–the purchase orders and vendor invoices for the products on that invoice, who did the quote, who received the inventory and so on–it’s all easily accessible any time I want to see it.

The people at Spruce know the industry and really understand what we need as a business to be successful. Spruce has already made us more productive and more profitable and its ability to keep doing that is only going to get better as we go forward.

Spruce came with so many features that were specific to our industry. It seemed like it would not only offer us the opportunity to take a big step forward as an organization, but also, we felt it would give us more bang for our buck than any of the other programs we looked at.

Spruce was very clearly software that was designed for building and lumber people by building and lumber people. Spruce came with so many features that were specific to our industry. It seemed like it would not only offer us the opportunity to take a big step forward as an organization, but also, we felt it would give us more bang for our buck than any of the other programs we looked at.