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Review of Clarity software
I’ve not contributed much to the boards lately, with being busy hands on with the business, and our first apprentice starting a hectic start to 2014! So i’ve spent some time writing my experience of Clarity.
So you may have looked at clarity or similar software, so here’s my experience of Clarity, what we wanted to achieve, why and how its going.
History
April 2013 I merged my sign & large format business with my dads design & print company. We both knew our own thing, pricing was a black art we both mastered for our own businesses, there wasn’t any ‘workflow’ our management system consisted of Sage Act! That still involved manually working out prices.
Solution
In November 2013 we met with Sam from Clarity, I personally was already sold on clarity as it makes my Manager/admin role easier, but it was a case of showing my dad (mid 50’s always used Macs, and pen and paper filing) how it could work and enable either of us to quote any job and have full and accurate cost information to hand.
My dad was slightly sceptical but a little more explanation and we signed up with clarity a few weeks later.
So how’s it working?
Brilliant is one word to describe it.
All our quotes are in one central place. At a glance we can see cost & profit which enables us a few things:
Quote competitively – We set our margins but if we’re quiet or up against another quote we can adjust our prices accordingly, confident that we’re still making profit.
Decide whether to outsource – With costs at hand and knowing what wok we have going on we can make decisions whether its best to outsource (Typically this is on the small format print side)
Reduced duplication So clarity makes a quote, from that quote we create a confirmation for the customer, print works orders (great for our apprentice) which later we file with printed samples If required, we print delivery notes, and invoice into sage. All from that one quotation. Meaning less errors, invoices match quotes, our apprentice gets the full job spec so he knows what to do.
Reports its brilliant to sit down each week with my dad with two reports, Sages sales invoice report, and clarity’s work in progress report. We’ve done £xxxx this month with £xxxx confirmed orders on the go, I often goeven further being able to say we have outstanding quotes for £Xxxx, and following up those quotes easily.
Beyond Clarity before clarity we had a scattered filing system. My dads and mine with artwork split between 3 computers, a neat feature I discovered in clarity is Documents. Simply put clarity will create a customer folder, inside that a folder for each job number. We’re currently now installing a 2TB file server to centralise all the jobs we’ve done, In an organised fashion.
negatives There’s not many. Yes you need add everything you use, media, substrates, even screws, eyelets if you so desire (yes I did add eyelets) and yes its a little irritating when you put a quote together and need to exit it to add a new media but its well worth it!
General opinion
We’re glad we got it, and haven’t looked back, its now integral to our daily business, we’ve certainly won jobs thanks to clarity, simply by being competitive. Regular customers comment on our speed to quote, their legebility and the fact they get a confirmation we’ve got their order!
Granted it might not work for everyone, even we were dubious, but we won’t be without it.
by the way i’m nothing to do with clarity, I know when we looked at it initially it was a big decision, financial commitment, and the commitment to use and implement it, and the boards proved a good source of information, but There are few follow upsfrom people who opted for it [/i]
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9 Replies
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Hi David
You’re right not many reviews on it here but I must say I’ve been a little disappointing with Clarity sales and is putting me off moving forward with it. Even though they’ve phoned me to sell the product on a few occasions it just never goes another step.
I’ve expressed interest in it at least 4 times over the last year and even gone up to them at the trade shows to discuss. Finally I manged to set up an online demo with them, while waiting for the demo day to come I received a sales call from them again and I said I had a demo scheduled for the coming Friday, even told them the areas I wanted to discuss and have a demo on and all was set.
Friday comes and nothing, all my staff in the office so they can all watch and see how it could potentially help and they just didn’t call even though date and time was set.
I use Xero accounting software and apparently they are in the process of integrating to Xero and this is why I really was interested and wanted top press forward but if I struggle getting them to sell me the software what’s it going to be like one I’ve signed up?
I’ve lost all faith in them (not the software as I have no idea how it will help) so have decided to continue for now with my hard copy production sheets and excel spreadsheets because I can depend on those at the moment.
Warren
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I am surprised Warren. We had a little wait for them to install it, but other than that no issues.
I would recommend getting a rep to visit you, so you can question them, have a play with it, and they’ll see how your business runs now, Sam who we dealt with didn’t once try and sell us anything we didn’t need, and in fact said we probably didn’t need the network module.
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interesting ive had it a while but only use in an ad hoc manner but its my plan for 2014 to get fully up to speed on it.
Do you know of any online demos/tutorials for numpties?
John 😀
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So…it looks well recommended…ive not used it and thought it could be another ‘gimmick’ method which you end up paying for and not using because it takes up so much time… maybe worth considering.
Cheryl
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From the little bit I’ve seen while at trade shows and ready documents etc it seems quiet good and I think for any business owner a good tool to manage costs etc. This is why I was interested and then integrating with Xero pretty much sold me on the idea but to be honest I’m getting quiet tired of chasing suppliers to sell me stuff, I’ve never come across anything like it before but in the last 7 years of trading the amount of suppliers I’ve had to chase to sell stuff to me is ridiculous, you think they don’t want my money! It’s the same as your’s 😉 :lol1:
Wow was that a bit of a rant, just slipped out sorry :lol1:
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Funnily enough, i had a phone call from Clarity this morning to see if i had time to play about with the demo i had downloaded (which i hadn’t, i completely forgot all about it) I told him that i hadn’t and then he offered to go through it with me, show me the features and have a click about really. Im sure he said they have brought out a Clarity Light version, with less modules on. So i am going to have a play
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Yes it does take time to add all the media, costs, roll widths, lengths, but I’ve really found it helpful.
That’s the trick, you need to use the software (as in actually quote through it) and know how to operate it. We skipped 2days training and had a one day crash course, which has got us up and running with essentials, there are still bits I can’t figure (such as sets of graphics) but it’s no biggie for now.
One nice feature I like is you can make products from the calc wizzards, we have ‘banner’ set up, we simply enter the size and it does it’s thing to work out a price, including hemming, eyelets etc, so we don’t need to keep re-entering the same spec.
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Hi i looked at clarity at the show this year and just had a demo this morning. Has anyone anything extra to add about the software? This thread is a few years old so wondering how you are all getting on with it. Also has anyone recently got it and how are you finding it? jean
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We’re still running Clarity, and it’s still doing what it should.
We’ve updated to latest version, and it is quicker than the previous version, they too have updated the calc wizards, which have a few minor changes, I did find an error with one, and within 24hrs they’ve re-installed a new version with the fix.
I was speaking to Warren the other day and will share 2 examples of where clarity has really helped.
We had 1 job which we used to sub out to a litho printer, at a cost of approximately £300, out of interest I ran it through clarity and it’s costing us about 1/3 of that… each time this repeat order comes in we’re now making around £200 more.
We had a repeat order from a few years ago, and I ran it through clarity, as it was for 300 boards, it required a fair bit of manual trimming, a quick e-mail to James, and they produced & delivered them for less than what I could produce it in house… again increasing our margins.
Every few jobs I will check if Clarity’s estimation is accurate to real world, in media/ink/labour and adjust it accordingly.
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