DEAR Reviews

Pros

As a cloud integration consultant working with SMEs in Adelaide and interstate to solve inventory management issues by implementing the right software, DEAR has proven again and again to be the leading choice for these businesses and is now our recommended choice as an implementation specialist.

DEAR has the functionality to provide a central solution to any SME looking to sell online or instore across a number of channels, and manage all the inventory in one place.The integration with Xero is top notch and the most robust I've seen of almost any app that connects to Xero.

The integrations to eCommerce channels are consistent in their setup and options and allow a great deal of flexibility. Complementing these integrations are shipping service integrations that allow for a full suite of inter-connected apps with DEAR as the hub.

Cons

If I had a gripe, it would be around some minor inconsistencies within the UI across various parts of the software, as well as some minor inconsistencies with various reports that are available.

Pros

inventory management and the ability to track inventory which is provided by very less ERP and are way more expensive than Dears system.

Cons

I liked everything about dears. There is nothing that i can think of that would be regarded as least liked.

Pros

The bin feature is why we chose Dear. It's been the most helpful.

Cons

It's meant for manufacturers, not really suitable for other companies.

Pros

The invoicing and sales management is easy to use and it has a good user interface. Customer support responds to emails within 24 hours. Some support specialists send videos which is a great way to understand the system.

Cons

There is a wide discrepancy in the quality of customer service specialists- some are brilliant and some are very unhelpful and do not seem to be empathetic to the customer's problems. Sometimes it is obvious that the person lacks the technical knowledge to support the customer so you just go around in a circle. Maybe the support emails could be flagged in different categories such as 'interface issues', 'data issues' and that way the technical emails can be sent to someone who is an analyst. The training videos are not very helpful as they only give a generic overview that doesn't help when you have your own data uploaded and face problems. Training would be more helpful when you have your own data uploaded into the system and after a week of using Dear book a 30min training session with a support member who could answer the bespoke questions you have related to your business - as the currents videos never helped when I needed help.

Pros

There is so much to list that is good about Dear. The system is a very easy to use and their tech support are friendly and available 24 hours a day

Cons

Just the mobile app for picking and packing orders. Its a little slow and not user friendly.

Pros

What I like most is that it is built by accountants. Costing is done better than most systems. I also like that it has a fairly strong inventory management and production modules. Purchasing / Receiving is average but the WMS below average. We use it all.

Cons

Customer support is absolutely horrendous. They are reasonably fast to respond but you will always be given a tier 1 support agent who can't do much but reiterate the documentation to you. Their technical team seems outsourced because in 4 years I have not been able to have a live troubleshooting session with them.

Many times they push out updates to the system which cause problems with operations and integrations.

For over 6 months we had an issue where any advanced purchase (a purchase with more than one invoice and receiving) would not place the correct receiving record with the correct invoice. And you can't even choose which receiving note to associate to which invoice. So we would have open invoices which were actually received and closed invoices which had not been received. I had dozens of back and forth messages with support and I ended up having to get a DEAR partner to reach out to them on my behalf and get in touch with someone who could actually get it fixed. Then after we got told they would work on a fix it took another month or two for the fix to be implemented. And it still isn't perfect.

Another time, the support team deleted one of my eCommerce store applications. This meant we had to re-add the store and it re-imported and duplicated about 50,000 orders, causing a disastrous mess. Technical team refused to help so we had to go page by page in the interface and void 100 at a time.

Alternatives Considered

Odoo, NetSuite and Stitch Labs

Reasons for Switching to DEAR

It was cheaper. And it was also a mistake. 4 years later and it is by far the source of the most frustration. If you're evaluating ERPs support must be your number one criteria your business will not be able move quickly if you have to fight to get information and action from your vendor's support team. The system is not bad. And in some cases the issue was with the third party they were integrating with, but these issues can never be resolved without the two teams working together. And that just does not happen at DEAR. The technical team seems like a whole other company. I suspect it is outsourced or something. The support and willingness of the technical team to help is abhorrent. I have more horror stories but I ran out of space to write.

Pros

Integration with Shopify and the E-commerce feature

Cons

Unable to have more integrations - there are better ways to integrate the e-commerce and I think they should look at this as its very important to scale.

Pros

Dear is easy to use and it integrates well with Xero

Cons

"Comments" box to display on the list of SO's so that we don't have to open up each invoice to see the reference #'s

Pros

Fantastic support from [sensitive content hidden] at dear support

Pros

Dear is a software with a user-friendly interface that allows for smooth navigation and excellent customer support. It is one of the best software I have experienced

Cons

Dear is a good software but also has some difficulties such as speed: it is not very slow, cost: it has a high price for small companies and even large companies, and finally it is difficult to use for small companies but I think it is worth the price because it really helps our company for its development

Pros

Easy to use, value for money, cloud based, integrates with finance package, support is great.

Cons

Reporting functionality needs work, no ios app, light on more advanced features

Alternatives Considered

Cin7 Omni and Unleashed

Reasons for Choosing DEAR

Old solution was too feature rich, overkill for our current needs, Dear suits perfectly, although is probably going to be too feature light for us in 12-18 months unless their roll out of features increases.

Switched From

Dynamics 365

Reasons for Switching to DEAR

Just fitted our needs better in terms of layout and usability. Personal perference, all the options we looked at were pretty much the same in terms of features. Cin7 is more expensive though and requires implementation and a fee for that.

Pros

I LOVE the fact that I can invoice before receiving the inventory physically. We work with an overseas company and their business practice is to invoice once the product leaves their hands, however accepting their invoice made my inventory way off in QBO. So glad to be able to maintain what the true physical inventory is and not have to try to keep up with the travelling inventory too.

Cons

The feature I would like the least is the CRM. I was really hoping that it would work for our sales team and that they would be able to have access to the inventory information easily. However, the CRM lacked a lot of the capabilities that our sales managers were looking for to help with managing their teams.

Pros

We transferred from Quickbooks to Dear Systems and it has been a great improvement. Our ability to manage inventory is far greater than before with QB. It's simple/easy to use, but also robust and has some very helpful features. We're in the wholesale industry. On the sales side - we love the pick, pack, and ship functions. This allows us to easily provide another level of detail for our customers that we couldn't before. We can enter what we packed on what pallet and then easily print pallet break downs and detailed packing lists. I also like the way you can mass pick, or mass print sales orders. The advance sale option is nice, so you can track back order shipments right on the same screen as the original order.
On the purchase order side, the advance receiving functions let you receive inventory against one PO more than once which is helpful.
We also just started keeping some inventory in another warehouse, so the ability to keep track of that through dear is nice.

Also the B2B portal has been a nice addition to our company as well.

Cons

I think the reporting tab is pretty clunky, that might be what I like least about Dear. They're on the right track, and some of those reports are very helpful. It's just that I have to export them to excel and modify them quite a bit for them to be what I want them to be.
Also I think the "credit purchase order" and "credit sale note" functions are pretty confusing/complicated.

Alternatives Considered

Cin7 Omni, NetSuite, Erplain, Agiliron, QuickBooks eCommerce and Finale Inventory

Reasons for Choosing DEAR

We needed a more robust inventory system.

Switched From

QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise

Reasons for Switching to DEAR

Great value. Many other reasons, but but was just the right fit for what we needed. It wasn't as big as some of the other ERPs but we didn't need it to be.

Pros

The great integration with woo commerce and the easy invoicing and ordering processes plus advanced inventory management capacity.

Cons

The zero/ non zero stock can be a little confusing and awkward.

Alternatives Considered

Cin7 Omni, Fishbowl and Unleashed

Reasons for Choosing DEAR

We tried to go through the onboarding process with cin 7 which was very disorganised. There was no clear structure or time frame and we were pushed to go live having absolutely no idea what we were doing. The support was terrible, so we cut our losses and went to DEAR and lost a lot of money in the process. Dear is ironically now owned by CIn 7 so we are in the process of seeking compensation.

Reasons for Switching to DEAR

Inventory capacity, onboarding, more pleasant user experience/ interface

Pros

Dearsystem is mostly diy so its easy to implement quick fixes/changes when necessary.

Cons

- No AR ageing report even though we use this software for payments recording
- We've been using DEAR Systems for 6 years now. I recently tried to add an additional external integration but the integration page simply refreshed without connecting to the external software and without any error message whatsoever (possibly a bug). Thinking that it could be because i didnt had sufficient external integration licenses in my subscription, i went ahead to pay for an additional external integration. However, the same issue reoccurred which prompted me to contact support. [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] from support reached out and we managed to resolve the issue. However, in the process, i found out that not only did i already have an extra external integration license which i've been paying for months without using before the add on, i also paid for the add on license when i tried to troubleshoot this issue on my own. I followed up with [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] to request for a credit of the additional unused license to my account (not refund) to offset future subscription charges but my multiple requests were turned down even though [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] and the management understood my position. Effectively, we've been unknowingly paying for an extra license which we did not use and now that i've added on 1 more license, DEAR is perfectly ok with keeping the extra payment from us, again, for something we do not use. I feel that the company is being really unfair to customers.

Pros

It seems that DEAR is cheaper than other options, and seems to have a wide variety of functionality -- at the very least, it has all the functionality that our company and our warehouse needs.

Cons

This product in particular has been so poor that I dedicated a lot of time to find places to review it. I started using DEAR 4 years ago when I picked up my job at this company. My company was small then, and DEAR had not been in use for very long when I got there.

Speed has always been an issue, but it hasn't become a big issue until recently as we've become more dependent on inventory and getting things done in a timely manner. In addition to being slow, we experience almost daily shutdowns of the site where nothing can be accessed. Usually, these last anywhere from a few minutes to 30 minutes, but the other day it went down for over 2 hours! This was during our shipping time when we are entirely dependent on the system, although it should be noted that we are dependent on it for the majority of the working day anyways. We ended up staying late to compensate -- and it was a Friday.

Support was not any help as they always provide empty reassurance that their 'team is working hard to improve and optimize the servers', and don't provide any kind of real fix. I could accept that if it noticeably improved over the years, but it hasn't. Clearly it's not enough of an issue for them to actually address.

Overall, terrible software service and terrible customer service. If they excel at anything, it's making their website look pretty -- although I have my complaints about poor functionality of the website as well.

TL;DR -- Would not recommend to my worst enemy

Pros

The software is made for small businesses interested in keeping track of basic inventory, basic purchasing, and basic invoicing.
- Perfect for 1-5 employees, this is the base number of users and gives the most bang for your buck.
- Perfect for no more than 50 SKUs

Cons

- Serial Numbers are NOT UNIQUE, duplicates can be entered easily with no warning
- Navigating a Bill of Materials for more than 1 level is impossibly complicated and needs a separate spreadsheet or software to track
- Transactions randomly duplicate without warning. Several times we have had stock transfers or purchases receive twice, creating inventory discrepancies and overall chaos in the warehouse.
- This random duplication allows inventory to be a negative number. Example: A serial numbered part was pulled twice by the system instead of removing it from inventory, it created a negative line item and showed the serial numbered part as -1 instead of 0. This in turn affected the overall inventory for that SKU.
- It is impossible to find a specific inventory level on a given day, this feature simply does not exist.
- Stocktakes cannot be backdated so if a count is taken on day 1 and entered in day 2 if any assemblies took place they will screw up counts.
- Sync between Xero accounting is a multi-step process. Invoices and payments do not sync back and forth on a consistent basis. Sometimes a voided invoice in Dear or in Xero will not transfer over and the entire Sale or Purchase needs to be voided and redone for the voided payment to sync OR alternatively you can enter the information manually which defeats the point of the sync.
- Customer service is atrocious except for the basic help which is already covered in depth by videos or other consultants.

Pros

In discovering Dear Systems we found that the program allowed us greater functionality than most ERP systems. Although it is quite intuitive to use it packs a punch when you get deeper within the program with some functionality that much more expensive programs don’t have. Xero handles the accounting in the background whilst the sync between them works seamlessly so that you don’t notice that you are actually using 2 different programs.

Cons

The program just concentrates on inventory so other modules such as CRM are not fully developed and you would need to get an additional addin. Everything else works really well

Pros

Earlier this year we implemented DEAR inventory in our manufacturing company in Indonesia. The key reason we chose DEAR was the functionality. We have been searching for an inventory management system with manufacturing functionality for a very long time and couldn't understand why it was so difficult to find a system that dealt with what we felt were really core/ basic requirements without looking at customisation. DEAR seems to cover almost everything we need and is working on developing the programme for what it doesn't currently.

The other key reason was the responsiveness of DEAR to queries. I am still waiting for replies from a competitor to my requests to ask a few questions when we were looking at different systems. We had good help getting it set up. I would definitely recommend.

Cons

There are some limitations with templates - invoices, packing slips etc. - when dealing with a currency that uses a decimal place as a thousand separator instead of a comma. It also doesnt have the ability to track batches through multiple assemblies which limits the value of the production reports we can get.

Pros

The fact that it can be accessed from anywhere and that the information available is reasonably accurate

Cons

We transfer stock between locations on a daily basis eg. receipts, transfer to work in progress, then assembly and then to finished goods in more than one location and then it gets sold. when looking at a stock movement report of Raw Material, all that I want to know is receipts + stock on hand-assembly = Stock on Hand. The inventory totals in inventory do not balance with the Trial balance figures as the trial balance picks up transfers as many as three times. So the Raw Material and Finished Goods are never correct in Dear and because of Synchronisation in Xero.
second point is the introduction of the Advanced Purchase Module and discontinuation of cloning without any prior warning and with no video training module available. I have so far been unable to use that module and am working with the simple purchases module, keeping it in draft, and manually adjusting stock levels when receiving stock. I then use a new Simple Purchase to deal with the supplier invoice. Ideally, the system should be able to tell me what stock is required, but the is no correlation between Assembly and Inventory. We use about 8 to 9 different Raw Materials in different quantities to produce our finished goods, so you can understand how frustrating this all is.

Pros

I have had some really positive experiences with Dear's Support Team, [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] in particular. She and the rest of the support team have a deep understanding of Dear's functionality and were able to help my company tackle a sizable inventory issue. Dear is also a simple software to learn and understand which is extremely valuable when it comes to training new employees.

Cons

The thing I like least about using Dear are the bugs and server stability problems. These issues range from small but daily loading errors to site-wide crashes that have halted our production for hours. For the most part these are minor annoyances/inconveniences but when they are happening on a daily basis in can be increasingly frustrating.

Pros

- What we would expect from a Inventory Managment system
- Chinese interface
- advance sale function (multiple dispatches, multiple invoices for one sale order)
- integration with Shopify
-

Cons

DEAR

- faster JSON access (no limitation of 60 calls per second)
- no need to UNDO sales for non essential information fields change
- ability to edit allocation of products
- ability to edit batch/serial information
- Reports 1) shows clear information of Sale Order that have not been 1) shiped, 2) invoiced. 2) be able to extract information related to earning power of a product (% margin x rotation of a product)
- Ability to limit sales bellow certain margin or price
- Dashboard with historical inventory and accounts receivables graphs (currently not available)
- Rename product fields (example: type, category, brand, stock locator, barcode…)
- Additional fields available on more reports
- reports are missing a lot of related information that could / should be available

Pros

Well thought out sales workflow. Really flexible and powerful in ways others weren't to enter sales orders. Takes a little getting used to, but there is a lot in there. Love the ability to price tier for B2B sales. Integrates really well with Shopify and eBay. Need to check out the B2B portal that is available, but haven't gotten to that part yet.
Even though the support is all email based, we have been delighted with the speed of response and solutions to any issues we've had. I'd say on average the response time to new tickets has been in the 5-15 minute range with maybe one that reached 45 minutes. Often I'd wait longer on hold with a tech line with other companies than it takes to get a response from DEAR support email.
Great integration with our accounting.
Easy to implement API for extending the functionality of DEAR.

Cons

There are a few things that still need improvement we've run into.
Credit Notes/Memos are terribly hard to figure out and make work correctly if you wish to give the customer a credit to use at a future date not tied to a transaction in DEAR.
DEAR does tiered pricing for sales, but there is no way to have volume purchasing discount tiers beyond manually changing every time a PO is created.
If a small change has to take place during fulfillment DEAR requires you to revert the order back to the very beginning of the workflow process and complete every stage again. Rather than just let you go back one step.
The fulfillment QC process could be strengthened a lot. It's basically based on trust with no verification. Right now it assumes all counts/data entry keyed in are 100% accurate. I'd like to see some kind of barcode based QC verification.

Pros

It manages my inventory and order and is cloud based.

Cons

When Dear is upgrading its system, customers can find the software extremely slow or not working at all. This can go for weeks at a time causing massive frustration for my staff around the country as well as disruption to my business.
The lack of communication and support from DEAR mean you feel little loyalty to the product.

Pros

Nearly every single feature of the software runs like software that is 4 or 5 times the cost runs. With no setup costs and a flexible monthly account, I would strongly recommend any user to try this software if you are thinking about it.

In particular, we really loved the POS and were pleasantly surprised by the functionality.

Cons

We are based in the UK and it was very difficult to book in a call with the support team within a reasonable timeframe. Both calls I had within the 2 months of being subscribed, I had to wait 1-2 weeks to be able to speak to someone about an issue. Support on chat was available but this didn't help me to resolve my issues.

This may not be an issue elsewhere in the world.