Brightpearl

Brightpearl is an Online Accounting Software with built-in CRM functionality for relatively well performing retail/wholesales businesses and comes with a lot of features. Yet, stuffed with various functions, Brightpearl proved inflexible when it comes to editing data/ past transactions.
There are also gaps in the workflow, which do not serve for better user experience, and critical bugs
in core functions.



Getting Started

Signing up with Brightpearl is well guided via Step-by-Step approach and proved quite intuitive.

During the registration, Brightpearl requires quite vital data from a business to fill out, such as company information, tax settings as well as types of business, revenue projections. Thus signup and basic setup requires no special knowledge in Brightpearl.

We also favored the importing functionality that lets users transfer customer and suppliers' lists from Outlook, Excel file, MYOB and Sage.

Users can also customize and introduce their own Chart of Accounts

Contacts

In Brightpearl users can upload their customers and suppliers via various files and options, which makes transition from excel spreadsheet or existing accounting applications a breeze.
Also users can fill out comprehensive list of financial info, payment preference, banking information of customers, yet, there is no direct way of adding beginning balances of customers/suppliers, which makes it a bit inconvenient and entails extra steps to accomplish it.

Products

One look at products in Brightpearl describes the major application of the system - retail businesses and provides every field needed to add your product for listings in e-commerce websites. However Brightpearl proves quite inflexible when it comes to editing transactions.

Also, stock adjustments in Brightpearl does not allow to set a custom account for adjustments, and rather deals with a default expense account - Stock Correction. In fact, depending on nature of adjustment, adjustment account can be equity, which is not accounted for by in the system

When creating Purchase Orders in the system, we could not find a way to add inventory items without having to leave the screen, which breaches the continuous workflow.


Invoicing
Users of Brightpearl can capture sales data in myriads of statuses such as Web, Phone Order,; track completion status of sales data by assigning Picked, Packed, Shipped states. Users can also create custom invoice templates in rich text-editor, that adds the ability to create branded, professional invoice templates.
However, adding sales order is quite inconvenient and entails more clicks than in most other accounting SaaS.
We also came across a critical issue when convering Sales Quote into Sales invoice, where the total amount was assigned NaN value.

In addition, users cannot re-edit orders converted into sales invoice, that considerably reduces the control over past/erroneous transactions in Brightpearl.
Another drawback in the system is that each sale can be tied to only one warehouse. For an accounting application with multi-warehouse management, it should be clear as a day, that issuing an invoice bound to multi-warehouses is not a rare case.

Expenses
In Brightpearl users can capture expenses via bills and / or cash withdrawals. However, unlike major accounting applications, there is no way to add multiple expense items in one go.

It is also worthwhile to mention that critical bug in Bills still persists. (we had a chance to review the software some time before)
When adding a bill, Total amount resorts back to NaN value, a similar issue when converting Sales Quote into Sales Invoice.
For an accounting app with at least $99/month subscription fee, this sort of issue is inexplicable.


Reports

In Brightpearl, users can find a comprehensive list of financial reports.

The only room for improvement is to make printable reports more appealing, and adding charts/graphs for management reports, which they miss.