Studio Designer

Pros: This product is most suitable for interior design studios and has mechanisms to account for the nuances of the design industry.

Cons: This company has taken a nosedive since it was acquired by a venture capital firm. The quality of the customer service/support experience is non-existent.

Overall: I have been a client of this business for a very long time and have been troubled by the recent downtick in customer service that has taken place over the past year, in conjunction with multiple issues with the product itself. I have recently encountered a major glitch in their accounting platform that has ground my year end tax reporting to a halt. Their lack of on-demand customer support has left me waiting over 10 days for a response through their support portal. As a business owner, I cannot stress enough how detrimental this is to the flow of running a business. I have spent hundreds of dollars paying my bookkeeper's hourly rate as they try to navigate these issues, with no resolution in site. Not being able to get ahold of a human being who can address major issues that occur with their software is extremely troubling. I cannot stress enough to potential new users, and existing users, to fully understand what you are getting into. They do not have sufficient support. They do not have good response times. They do not support your business when things go wrong. Buyer be ware.

Pros: This software has lots of report options, it also has a studio designer capture plug-in which can be convenient.

Cons: Platform is online and slow most of the time, several times just completely non-responsive.

Overall: Not happy, had to use it because the software we used got bought out by them. Supposedly they were able to transfer our entire book from the old software to their software but everything was messed up. Customer support is slow and chat is basically useless. If you cannot trust the financial numbers in the software to be correct, then what good is it?

Pros: Great project management tools for the design team. If all you want to use it for is to manage your projects, then it is a decent system.

Cons: A basic accounting control is n/a - the ability to close/lock down a month/period?!?! An accounting system needs data integrity - the fact that you cannot lock invoices or an accounting period from posting at any point - example - posting something to January and we're currently in June. The system allows this and designers are not accountants so they likely don't understand the ramifications of this action. This is NOT a good option to use as your accounting system!!

Overall: Works for the design piece - if they made one simple change (ability to lock an accounting period - even as an option for people to select or not) - I would recommend as a one-stop shop software.

Pros: If this software worked properly, it would probably make my business run much more efficiently. But it doesn't.

Cons: I spent hours trying to figure out how to do make one simple adjustment that should take me five minutes. This software has done literally nothing but waste my time. Nothing on it runs intuitively. You would need to sit and do an entire month of schooling to be able to function properly within it, and that just doesn't make sense, for my business anyways, I don't have time to devote an entire month to training. The design software is for DESIGNERS for gods sake, and the number one rule of design is that if you can't intuitively use the product, it's bad design. I can't exaggerate my frustration levels with this product and with how much time it has wasted me just trying to do simple tasks such as invoicing. My opinion is that it was designed years ago and was probably revolutionary at the time, but as time goes on they just try and add to it here and there, and the end result is a product that kind of functions like a dinosaur. If this program was redesigned from scratch now I think it could be incredibly efficient and time-saving for a designer, but it's just not with the way that it's currently formatted.

Overall: Overall frustrated, time wasted. I was told in a live onboarding session that ACH payments were available in Canada via Stripe, which is one of the main reasons why I got this program, and they're not, so super disappointing there. Customer support tries to be helpful but it takes half a week to get a response to a very simple question, and I have gotten responses that don't even solve the problem, because the software is just so outdated.