Pricing
User: One of the primary reasons I went with Corebridge was because it was capable of doing a lot of different things in pricing. I inherited a very complex pricing structure at the company that I own, and wanted to be able to replicate as many of those different pricing methods as possible. So, Corebridge allows you to do cost-plus pricing, or what they call market-based pricing where you just set the price, it is what it is. And then you can do volume discounts, of course, and you have control to do those. You can either say, "I want it to go 5% at every step," or you can set it down to a hundredth of a percent.
And then you can also set eight different pricing tiers. So it has tier one through eight and you can set different pricing for each of those, and then assign your customer to whichever tier is appropriate for them. And then there's some other stuff that's a little more nuanced, but lots and lots of different ways to manage your pricing. And this was the only system I saw that had that level of flexibility.
Inventory
User: Their inventory is a little weak. I think they're building some additional functionality in here, but today all it does is have static inventory levels. We looked at whether we could even use it to track our monthly physical counts, and it doesn't work for that. They also have this purchasing module…It'll generate a purchase order but it doesn't do much more than that. It doesn't allow you to receive in the product and add it to inventory. And then the system, even though it knows how much material you're using in every order, it doesn't decrement that from the inventory. So, that's definitely one of the weaknesses.
Online Customer Interaction
User: Yeah, there's a customer portal and you have to activate it and give each customer access, so we've done that with our billing contacts at each account. And then they can log in, see any of the invoices for their account, and pay online. It looks like, currently, they can only pay online using credit card, but that is a lot better than what we've had historically, where people are sending us $6.00 checks in the mail for small orders.
Accounting
User: We work with QuickBooks and there's a daily integration that my bookkeeper runs. All of the customer data and all of the invoices live in Corebridge, so those are not ported over to QuickBooks. I think you can port those over, but there's a lot of complexity then because you have the same data living in two places. So, what we do is every night there's kind of a bulk update of journal entries to QuickBooks that tracks the sales for the day, the cogs, receivables, et cetera. So, customers, receivables, invoices, they all live in Corebridge and that's where we're managing all that information.
Training
User: My team only did about a week of training before we went live, so that was a little tight. I have a big team, we have twenty-some people. So that was a little light on the training, but it was a rough first week or two.
Tech Support
User: Their support is really quite good. There's a bunch of different ways you can contact them. I end up just emailing them and they generally respond within half an hour or so. And then they'll jump on a screen share with you to walk you through things as well. And that's not just for me, that's for my entire team, so anybody on my team can reach out to their support and get help walking through something.
Cost
User: I don't remember the exact startup cost. It was somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000, let's say. I honestly don't remember. Probably right in the middle there. And then, the monthly is less than $1,000, and I think I have 20 users on my system. They have a bunch of different packages depending on how many users you have, as well as which modules you're using. We also have two locations, so that increases the rate a little bit as well. But, their pricing, I thought, was very, very reasonable.