Unleashed Review
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- Date Established
- 2009
- Location
- New Zealand
Overview
Unleashed is online inventory software designed for use by small, medium, and large businesses. What most distinguishes Unleashed is how extensive the system is; the wealth of different features makes it something that any type of company could use – from, say, a small independent shop to a large corporation with multiple warehouses and extensive product lines selling internationally. This is serious inventory software that lets you manage not only your inventory but your purchasing, sales, customers, and production. Integration with Xero accounting software and eCommerce platform Magento allows you to create an even more comprehensive solution for your business.
However, the very expansiveness of its feature set also makes the software almost overwhelming at times. The possibilities are vast, and in a way the software’s capabilities are what you choose to make of them. There are a variety of pricing tiers meant to suit businesses of different types and sizes and you can certainly use only the features you need and ignore the ones you don’t. But Unleashed really seems to be the best fit for larger companies that manufacture products and/or distribute them wholesale, have stock moving in and out of several warehouses, and need to simplify their supply-chain logistics and management. While smaller businesses can use the software too, from what I’ve seen of it, it’s the larger ones that will get the most of all that Unleashed has to offer.
Part of the reason Unleashed has the feel of a hardcore inventory management system may lie in its origins. Founder Greg Murphy never really intended to go into software design; rather, it was simply the natural progression of his career, which started, appropriately enough, in a warehouse. When he finished school at 16 “without any qualifications at all,” as he tells it, the New Zealand native took a warehousing course and was soon working as a storeman for a multinational company. As he moved up the corporate ladder, he got to see firsthand the frustrations of handling stock, shipping, costs, and so forth, and keeping track of everything efficiently.
Needless to say, this guy knows a thing or two about inventory. Eventually, he went to college and connected with a fellow student who knew how to write code. After a couple of years struggling to get their inventory management software off the ground, they took the opportunity to partner with New Zealand-based Xero and integrate with its increasingly successful accounting software. Murphy credits that partnership, along with the company’s customer-driven strategy, for helping put Unleashed Software on the map.
Based in Auckland and with additional offices in Australia, Unleashed now has a staff of 40 and customers in about 80 countries. It’s also developed a global distribution network of more than 100 firms and professional consulting partners (more on them later), as well as accounting, bookkeeping, and IT service providers based in countries including the United States, Canada, and the U.K.
Unleashed is powerful inventory management software, no doubt. Read on to see if it might be right for your business.
Table of Contents
Pricing
- Small
- $85/month (when paid annually)
- 1 user
- Unlimited Products
- 1 warehouse
- 1 currency
- Unlimited customers
- Unlimited suppliers
- Medium
- $165/month (when paid annually)
- 3 users
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited warehouses
- Unlimited currencies
- Unlimited customers
- Unlimited suppliers
- API Access
- Large
- $329/month (when paid annually)
- 8 users
- All “Medium” features
- Free “Unleashed University”
- Large(plus)
- $579/month (when paid annually)
- 20 Users
- All “Large” features
- Premium support
In all cases (and on all levels), if you would like to add more users you can—for a price. Fortunately, the additional user fee is figured at a discounted rate: two users on the “small” plan do not cost double the price of the base plan. For more information on the plans and the differences between them, follow this link.
You can get a 14-day free trial, no credit card required. All you need is a name and email address. But you are warned not to enter live data during your trial as the software is in demo mode and all data is cleared when you upgrade a demo account.
Web-Based Or Locally Installed
Unleashed is entirely web-based. All data in your account is accessed, managed, and stored securely “in the cloud,” meaning you don’t need to install any software on your local system.
Ease of Use
Let’s get this out of the way: Unleashed is complicated. Very. Complicated. True, it boasts a clean UI and it does start off with a nice tutorial to help make sense of everything, but it is enormous and deeply complex. For that reason, I don’t know if I can really call it “easy to use.” However, I would say that Unleashed does everything it can to simplify its complex functions and make them comprehensible. Here are a few things I was impressed with:
- User Interface: A source of early complaints from subscribers, Unleashed has developed their UI in the last 3 years into a modern, slick, simplified design. It is functional and easy to understand. I appreciate the organization, from the menu on the left-hand side of the screen to the shortcuts button located in the top middle of the interface.
- Dashboard: While most business software has some kind of Dashboard, I thought the example found in Unleashed was of particular note. In a program as complicated as this one, there really needs to be a place you can go to get quick answers. Here you get an overview of everything Unleashed tracks, from purchase history to inventory stocks and sales, including revenue and profit. You even get alerts when stocks of certain products are beginning to run low.
- Doc Designer: Use this feature, with a number of templates pre-made for you, to take some of the work out of designing purchase orders, invoices, packing slips, returns, and more. This is a pretty handy feature that is immediately useful.
- Integration Store: It is highly likely you will be using Unleashed in conjunction with some other kind of business software. Sometimes, it can be a bit of a pain to figure out how to integrate all of your subscriptions together. In Unleashed, the prominently featured Integration Store makes finding your particular integrations simple.
Customer Service & Technical Support
There are several ways to get your questions answered and issues solved.
- Unleashed Partners: You can reach out to a “local Unleashed partner,” one of a global network of accounting and IT professionals in a variety of companies who are trained in Unleashed software. This is an interesting concept that Unleashed has implemented. You can search for a partner based on various filters, including the type of partner (e.g., API Integration, Development, Accounting Solutions), country, and region. (Keep in mind that most of the regions are in Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K.) Unleashed works with these partners to help its customers find solutions to their individual business requirements as they get set up on the software.
- Support Forum: The Unleashed Support pages. Unleashed touts the Community pages as a main source of support. On the Community Forum Q&A, users can post questions that are answered by both other users and Unleashed support staff. You can also request a feature to be added to the software. You can even request a topic you want to learn more about; the most popular topics requested are turned into a video tutorial or live webinar.
- Email Ticket: Contact Unleashed Support directly via the Help button. On the “submit” form you can attach files and record a screencast to show them exactly what problem you’re having as you encounter it on your computer. You can also simply email them at support@unleashedsoftware.com.
- Learning Centre: This section has video training tutorials on a variety of standard functions in Purchases, Inventory, and Sales, as well as on things like implementing your company and security settings, system settings (payment terms, currency rates, customer types, etc.), and integrating Magento and Xero.
- Articles: There are step-by-step articles on various features of Unleashed, with helpful screenshots. These are categorized by the different modules of the software – Purchases, Inventory, Sales, Production, Settings – as well as things like Company Settings, Reports, Import, and Processes.
A pop-out Support tab on the left side of the screen also lets you search the articles in the Unleashed knowledge base for help. If you can’t find an answer there, you can then submit a support ticket via email and record a screenshot of the problem right from the ticket.
When setting up a demo account, you can get a free “scoping session”: a “solution architect” will review your business needs and see if Unleashed is a good fit for you.
The section on Product News & Updates is also nice to have so that you can see what new features were in recent releases of the software and see what’s coming up.
Negative Reviews & Complaints
The complaints I have found about Unleashed almost all return to one problem—a lack of flexibility. Since our original review, the developers have solved many of the problems we were concerned with: difficult UI, overwhelming complexity, etc. However, while the improvements here are encouraging, Unleashed still frustrates customers with its lack of ability to bend. Some of those complaints deal with reports that, while expanded in functionality, are not customizable. Some complaints wish for the ability to adjust the dates on inventories, claiming that “real-life” inventory work is not always done in real time. Still, others complain that the search function will only find product codes, not product names. Behind each of these complaints is a single flaw: Unleashed wants to be used in only one way. If your needs fall somewhere outside that single design, you may end up a frustrated customer.
Positive Reviews & Testimonials
There are also plenty of users who are thrilled with Unleashed. Here’s a sampling of what customers on Magento’s review page have to say.
I have a number of clients running Unleashed, my SME clients love it – very easy to learn and lots of great features to help them both run their business more efficiently and manage their inventory. It gives our clients the right information in real-time. Fantastic work by Gareth and the talented Unleashed team.
Unleashed is helping us to accurately control our stock. It’s very easy to use and their support team is always helpful. I have used many inventory management systems in the past but Unleashed is by far the best of them all. I’m in love with their reporting system which allows me to create customized reports in almost every screen. They also have free webinars that will help you to learn more about the system and how to integrate with Magento and Xero. Thanks guys!
I use Unleashed with Xero, and now that I’ve integrated Unleashed also with Magento, I’ll truly have ‘an online store, offline sales, and accurate accounting data all in real time, and all online’. It’s the best solution I’ve found for my business of running a record label. I can track inventory down to the part, with multiple warehouses, multiple currencies, and the most accurate cost analysis reporting I’ve ever seen for my company! The Unleashed staff has been a great help getting started.
This user on Find the Best gives Unleashed five stars:
It truly is feature rich but user friendly! It has saved our organisation $$$ and time, no longer do we have slow moving products collecting dust in our warehouses. Being able track our landing costs and report on margins, realising that we were making a lost on a number of products.
Real-time information at our fingers at anytime anywhere!
Features
Essentially, Unleashed software lets you manage inventory, purchasing, production, and sales. Add in the ability to track supply chains, manage stock across multiple warehouses, automatically create invoices and shipping documents, and generate customized reports about your data, and you’ve got a powerful business tool. Its close integration with accounting partner Xero is also a key part of what the software does. I won’t go through a complete list, but here’s a rundown of some of the main features you’ll find in Unleashed.
- Inventory Management
- In-depth, customizable reports and analytics to gain insight on your business. Change the layout of columns, display subtotals per group, and save your preferred report layout as a template to use again in the future.
- Multiple warehouse locations
- Consignment stock capabilities
- Sync stock across all your sales channels
- Multi-line stock adjustments
- Cloning of sales and purchase orders
- Track individual or batch serial numbers across its entire time in your stock
- Purchasing Management
- Multiple currencies
- Costed receipting – add costs like freight and importation
- Customized purchase orders
- Split purchase orders into sub-orders if necessary
- Low/high stock alerts
- Late purchase alerts
- Manage supplier returns
- Sales Management
- Margin transparency – see at a glance the margins and profits on a sale as you enter it, or see all margins on the dashboard.
- Invoices, quotes, and orders – create customized invoices, then email them right from the interface
- Create value or return credits for sales returns
- Manage customer returns
- Customer tracking and management
- Native POS integration
Unleashed also emphasizes how you can use different features based on whether you have a small, medium, or large business. Some of the features listed above aren’t available with all pricing tiers.
Reports
There are an extensive number of ways to view reports on your data, via the Purchases, Inventory, and Sales tabs:
- Purchases
- Purchase Enquiry
- Costing Analysis Report
- Reorder Report
- Inventory
- Product Enquiry
- Stock on Hand Enquiry
- Transaction Enquiry
- Product Allocations
- Quick Stock Count
- Stock Movement
- Price List Enquiry
- Sales
- Margin Enquiry
- Unit Sales Enquiry
- Sales Enquiry
- Backorder Enquiry
- Shipment Enquiry
- Credit Enquiry
A cool thing about Unleashed reporting is that you can create your own grid layouts if you don’t like the way the default reports are displayed. You can decide which columns you want to show (or hide) and what positions you want them in, group columns in multiple levels for a more meaningful view of the data, group fields and display a subtotal for each group, and more.
After you design a customized layout, you can save it as a template to use again the next time you run that report. If you have more than one user in your account, each user can design and save his or her own report templates, so that each of you sees reports the way you want.
Integrations & Add-Ons
- Xero
- Magento
- GeoOp
- Vend
- Zeald
- Quickbooks
- Shopify
- Salesforce
- Zapier
- Lokad
- BigCommerce
- WooCommerce
- Neto
- Crossfire Cloud
- Geo
- Neatly.io
- Wink Reports
- Plan It
- Ship Theory
- Cyber Workshop
- Zoey
- Starship It
- Product Fitter Stockist
Security
Unleashed is secured by 128-bit SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) encryption, right from login onward, so you can be certain the data in your account (as well as your password) are always protected.
The company’s data servers are regularly backed up in both onsite and offsite data centers. The software is hosted at three different Tier 3 locations in New Zealand, providing redundancy and ensuring that your account is accessible more than 99% of the time.
Final Verdict
While there is no doubt that Unleashed is a comprehensive inventory management system, it may be better suited for medium to large businesses that have a larger amount of inventory and orders and that don’t rely excessively on online sales, given the fact that only Magento is directly integrated with the software so far. The Production module makes the software ideal for manufacturers and other companies that assemble products.
There are a ton of features available and it’s evident that the Unleashed software is quite powerful in the sheer breadth of things you can do with it. But this also might make it feel rather complicated, especially for smaller companies, and the software doesn’t do the greatest job of diminishing the complexity of inventory management for the average business user. If you’re not a power inventory specialist, chances are you might run into some stumbling blocks as you work in the system, or at least some points where you’re a bit confused and need some assistance.
Smaller companies or those that just have a simpler business model (selling already-assembled products, for example), can simply ignore the parts of the software they don’t need. But they might also want to look at some of the other online inventory software programs out there with more streamlined feature sets. Then again, if you expect your business to grow substantially and/or evolve into something more complicated in the near future, Unleashed just might be the way to go, as it’s highly scalable.
If you’re looking for a powerful, full-featured online inventory management solution, you could do a lot worse than Unleashed. Just be advised that there is a bit of a learning curve involved before you get totally comfortable with the software. I found it a bit clunkier and more complicated than I would have liked, but I couldn’t help being impressed with the power and possibilities Unleashed gives you as you manage and grow your business.
Merchant Maverick Contributor
Merchant Maverick is a highly successful partner referral site which has helped over 1 million business since 2009. We provide high-quality, non-paid, unbiased reviews of business and e-commerce products and services to allow entrepreneurs make better decisions. At Merchant Maverick we make small business simple.
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Really enjoying these comprehensive reviews of yours Ted. Helps us advisors cut through the guff and get to pros and cons of the application which helps us help clients save time. And time is king!
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.