I spent a lot of time with their salesman explaining how my business works. My service techs go into the field, they determine what parts are needed for their job, we enter those parts on the work order, we order parts based on demand, then we go complete the work when the parts arrive. In all I spent close to $20,000 to convert from Peachtree to Quickbooks (just to use Smart Service) and get Smart Service up and running.
About a month after we started using it I realized that Smart Service does not allow you to see demand for parts when they are entered on a work order. My techs were going into the field, identifying the parts needed, and entering them on their work orders. My buyer was purchasing inventory as Quickbooks showed demand for it. But parts seemed to be taking a long time to arrive. We finally realized that Smart Service was not telling Quickbooks what inventory items were being added to the work orders. There was no way for us to know what parts to order! When I called up Smart Service about it they said nobody had ever complained about it before, they had no plans to fix it, and they didn't have a solution for it. Oh, but if I paid them they would create a report that would tell me what parts were on open work orders. I would then have to take that report and manually compare it to current inventory and parts on order to see if I needed to order anything else.
I feel completely screwed. Does the software do what they say? Yes. Do they avoid telling you its limitations? Yes. I spent a lot of time explaining my business processes and trusted them when they said their solution would work. I had to throw out their software. It took me another month to clean up all the work orders entered with Smart Service.