"He who marches out of step hears another drum." ~ Ken Kesey
What's available that's cloud based/can be accessed from any computer?Printavo (I am playing with the demo now)Shopworx (Too far out of my price range)Ink Soft (Which I have now. Not sure if this is true shop mgmnt software though).Anything else?
If you've got some time to dial it in, we use a mashup of google sheets & google calendar, it's cloud based and totally free. Then we do invoicing and purchase orders in Quickbooks. Shopworkx looked amazing and has some great functionality, but overall I didn't like the interface and the price was way too high. Our staff can check the production schedule from their phone, home, office computers and there are no limitations to number of users. There are some things I wished was better but our system is pretty damn solid for free.
FWIW, We were on TeeCal,DecoNetwork,tried to build our own on Filemaker, Quickbooks Online, Printavo, and now we are back to TeeCal and we are not going anywhere. We wanted the cloud based option too, but none offered what we really wanted. I like Printavo for ease of use and the quoting/invoicing, scheduling, but it lacked the production side and the catalog features that a stand alone like TeeCal offered. You can use TeeCal and use logmein or teamviewer to use it remotely. But really check out Tee Cal. After sitting through a demo of Shopworx, Tee Cal is damn near identical in a lot of ways, but for $40 a month.
I've trialed them all unfortunately and nothing stands out as an all around winner. I really liked the back end features of TeeCal if I recall, excellent scheduling which is paramount and a massive labor saver for medium and up shops. I couldn't swallow the PC only thing combined with the invoices that look like they were drafted on a word processor in 1995. But I'd put TeeCal up there as best bang for the buck by a long distance if you can get over those things I couldn't. FastManager looked pretty good as I remember it and if it went cloud could be a contender. Can't find anything online about this aforementioned move to the sky however. We're on Printavo which has a great look for the cal and client interaction but desperately need more backend functionality. To that end I'm starting to use API to get the true mgmt functionality going via other apps, namely using javascript in the giant, gmail integrated gantt chart that is our CRM. Trouble is, the API is missing core fields like due dates...so we'll have to ramp it up into web hooks, or whatever the term is for essentially "plucking" visual data form a web page and inserting into another and such. Eric and I took an initial stab at developing our own at one point and I've continued that conversation with all sorts of folks, most recently one whom did dev at Microsoft and Amazon and barring the massive free time and funds needed to actually roots up develop something it feels tying together multiple cloud apps may be the direction to look in.
I wouldn't consider inksoft shop mgmnt software. We use priceit, but it's not cloud based. Shopvox is another one we were browsing