ComplaintsforBeam Software

• Initial Complaint

  01/22/2024

  Complaint Type:

  Service or Repair Issues

  Status:

  Answered

  More info

  After 9 mos of conversion processes, (& $25000 out of pocket between IT, paying someone to convert our ***** ******* $7500 onboarding fees) we were FINALLY up and running with this company in September of 2023. From there it just seemed like a NIGHTMARE we couldnt get out of. Day after day, there were MORE BUGS, inaccuracies, and problems then should even be allowed in a software company. We spent most of our days trying to FIX errors, which at this point we were just bleeding money as we couldnt keep up with our day to day processes. It even got to the point where I was finding errors MYSELF in their accounting system! (money that was owed to us) Was told it was a bug Being a small business we cant afford to just lose money because their system isnt capable of handling such simple accounting tasks. Not to mention, the owner ***************** made every possible moment to make us feel small, which is so ironic considering they are a small business themselves. At our final breaking point, we approached the owner with our concerns and he basically told us to go to another company & offered no real help or resolutions. At this very moment we decided to go BACK to prior software company which ultimately ended up costing us another $5000. Buyers need to beware of this company as they have a VERY undeveloped software and make promises to offer services they CAN NOT provide. We were sold and misled on the products/services and because of this we were put into a deficit of $30000 with no consequences on their part. He actually refused to get us our data back until we paid him the remaining $4500 which was not right KNOWING he couldnt provide us basic accounting/collections software functionality we needed to run our business effectively. Not to mention the law suit we received due to their lack of knowledge of credit bureau reporting- who knows how much that is gonna cost us. This is my first complaint and requesting a FAIR resolution for their actions

  Business response

  01/23/2024

  At Beam, we take great pride in our efforts to support our customers. There are people in this world that are never satisfied despite the disproportionate effort we afforded them. This relationship was established with the best of intentions, but the description of the issues by ********* are not consistent with the way we attempted to handle this relationship. We went out of our way to 1) help a company that had a difficult self-imposed situation, 2) provide an alternative solution for their business that they obviously did not vet sufficiently, and 3) try to overcome the deficiencies of their business practices. It is unfortunate the ********** is unable to recognize the realities of the situation and feels it necessary to cast false allegations at Beam despite our herculean efforts to help them.

  While ********** is correct about the timeframe for conversion of their data from Latitude to Beam, there are significant omissions from her story and numerous discrepancies, many of which result from the inability of staff at ********* to manage their own business.

  Over the New Years weekend of 2022-23, ********** caused a huge problem for his operation regarding a backup of their data on Latitude. Without a contract or agreement, at significant cost to Beam in terms of man-hours and other resources, we restored their data on a Beam server. The verbal understanding was that we would engage to move them from Latitude to Beam over the next several months and Beam would discount the cost of conversion in exchange for their adoption of Beam as their collection platform. Unfortunately, the anticipated timeframe and cost of the conversion was not correctly projected largely due to the laissez faire involvement of ********* and the third-party IT specialist he asked **** to work with. These factors did not facilitate the expedient conversion of their data.

  Initial Rescue of the MG data: We spent more than the 16 hours billed to urgently restore the Latitude backup on a Beam Server so they would lose a minimum of production time. That cost alone is $3,520 in addition to the opportunity cost of the time of our Dev Staff. Beam also sacrificed the resources that are allocated to our internal hardware which grossly reduced the performance of internal accounting and QA resources representing additional expense of this effort.

  Conversion: We spent **** hours (at an estimated $112k cost in labor) on the program to convert their data from Latitude to Beam between January and September 2023, while billing them only $5000 for this service.During that time, ********* was repeatedly asked to check the conversion data to assure accuracy. Unfortunately, ********* apparently made no effort to check the data prior to the conversion date, and the inaccuracies that ********** refers to were never identified, which caused many additional hours to fix. Mr.and ********** refuse to admit their lack of attention to the details of the conversion but prefer to blame **** for those issues. Our CEO at that time decided to handle the conversion in exchange for future revenues from having ********* as a client, however, we did not expect that conversion to take 9 months and we expected the relationship to last more than 3 months.If the $25,000 number cited by ********** is correct and $7500 of that is to Beam,they paid $17,500 to their third-party resource while paying Beam $5000 for our services. That third-party resource charged them 3-1/2 times more than **** charged, and yet she is complaining about that expense when our cost was over $100,000.

  Training: We billed for 12 hours of training and provided significantly more than that. Despite that training, we spent many hours of additional time showing MG staff how to do things on which they were trained.

  Other efforts: I personally, along with other Support staff,spent many hours on the phone showing them how to do things that they had been trained to do. In addition, we created several custom reports at no charge, and I wrote custom programs to facilitate a feature (reporting to credit) that they knew was never a Beam feature. ********** may not have been privy to the conversations,but we never purported to provide resources to report to credit. ********* reported to credit without checking the information carefully which resulted in them being sued by a consumer.

  In addition, I had to show them how to handle what might otherwise be considered basic accounting practices. They seemed to pick up these basics relatively slowly and regularly complained that **** did things differently from the way they were used to doing things in Latitude.

  Overall: In December, ********** suggested that the engagement was not favorable to their operation, and we graciously allowed them to terminate the agreement after paying for only 2 months of Beam subscriptions. We lost money saving them from their own self-inflicted hardware issues. We lost money hosting their data from January through September. We lost money converting their data from Latitude to Beam. We lost money supporting their efforts during the 3 months that they were on Beam. We have dozens of other clients that have been using Beam for years that dont have the issues that ********* has had.

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