Paraphrasing what I posted in Slack:
Howdy all, I am the CFO for a system integrator that sells, installs and configures video surveillance and access control systems to businesses. We are a young business but moving fast and pressing hard to grow as fast as we can without the wheels falling off.
We have a very modest IT stack and no real appetite to buy an off-the-shelf system due to cost and complexity and the probability that one off-the-shelf system won’t capture and manage all our data anyway. That said, as is usually the case, we have a lot of data elements to track so the appeal of just buying an off the shelf system is high sometimes!
We are using QuickBooks online for accounting, and HubSpot for basic lead and sales tracking (nothing more and not running campaigns).
I chose SmartSuite as a data service 1 year ago and have mixed feelings about it. It is maddening to an old database fan because all the record linking is, in my opinion, very clunky requiring automations rather than an established data schema. However, the interface to managing the tables is easy to approach and I thought it would foster adoption by my business partners.
I have found, however that I need to obfuscate the data into an app so I am exploring Noloco to present the data in a more task oriented format.
The last bit of our stack is make.com which I am a big fan of. I am using that to extract data from QBO to SmartSuite.
Thanks in advance for any assistance and although I don’t have an expansive history with any of these tools will offer help if I can.