I have zero regrets implementing real green into my business even though I’m an owner/operator. The cost for the amount of features and the customer service is worth the subscription fee

I appreciate the ease of creating programs for my lawn care services. Once you have it all set up in real green it becomes so fluid to pull work, print invoices, post production, and record payments. I don’t use the software to its full potential yet but I appreciate it having expanded features that do not require a huge added cost

It was difficult at first to understand how the software works. The training was great but I have definitely used my share of customer support whether online through the videos and knowledge base or over the phone.

Customer support group is excellent. Why the development group can not, or have chosen not to correct the 2 issues that I just addressed, is beyond me.

It is fully integrated, customer management software. What it does well, it does very well. Routing work and allowing us segment out customers for marketing purposes.

Vastly over complicated in how it handles customer deposits. Software does not always apply payments to the invoice number that we type in. It will automatically apply payment to the oldest open invoice, which can cause absolute chaos in our accounting and when we communicate with a customer about an open balance and find out that there last several payments have been applied to the wrong invoice. It sews seeds of doubt in customers' minds as to whether we know what we are doing or not, or if we are somehow trying to take advantage of the. It does little to calm their concerns to tell them that our software program assigned their payment to the wrong invoice. It seems pretty straight forward fix to us. If we type in an invoice number for the payment to be assigned to, assign it there, every time.

Sad to see they took SA4 and ruined it. Great experience with RG until they sold.

I liked the idea of what they had to offer, but they did not create a solid base to add all the bells and whistles. Program is buggy and not user friendly. Basic functionality is not there.

We used SA4 in the past and it was a great program. Not sure how they managed to take a solid base and ruin it completely. Basic functionality is not there. Can't do something as simple as print an invoice without clicking through 4 windows & changing printer settings. Printing doesn't line up correctly on their own pre-printed forms, and does not look professional. Call log is a mess. Functions throughout the program are not consisten, sometimes you check a box to save a change, sometimes there's a save button at the top, sometimes it's at the bottom. Really buggy, causing user errors. System is very slow at times and usually mediocre speed. Response to tech support requests takes days. We had SA5 a few years ago, then went back to SA4, then came back to SA5 thinking they had the bugs worked out, but sadly, not so. We also asked [sensitive content hidden], the set up guy, about some of the specific issues we had in the past & he assured us they had been taken care of but not so.

It’s has been a relief to have such an effective system to manage so many different moving parts of the business and do it efficiently.

The overall effectiveness and options at your fingertips.

It should have more agronomy tips and accessible recommendations for different scenarios

Overall experience has been good but takes work to get used to the program/software.

Once set up, it helps you stay on track of your fertilizer rounds and enables you to grow rapidly if you choose to.

It was rather difficult for me to set up and learn. Even with videos it takes a long time to onboard.

It's a lot more user friendly than SA4, but considering we don't have full functionality it's disheartening.

The aesthetics of the website and advertised functionality were very appealing during sales pitch. Most of us like the fact we can see a good bit of the customers account information from the Customer Details screen without having to hop from tab to tab like in SA4. The accessibility is convenient as our other branches no longer have to remote in to access a program, but can instead access SA5 from the web.

There are several tasks we're unable to complete in SA5 because it's not an available feature and we're having to resort back to SA4 to do them. Sending statements to Real Green via direct mail through SA5 is unavailable, printing Group Billing Statements with our custom form is unavailable. We also cannot export Route Loose Work report to customer search screen. The speed of SA5 has also posed an issue, in general when entering new estimates/sales as well as posting payments. Lastly, the font size for printed invoices in SA5 is a lot smaller than SA4 and we've had quite a bumpy start trying to get everyone's printer settings formatted properly. Invoices used to also show if another service invoice was printed and that is no longer available. The CALL AHEAD message was a lot larger on the invoice and now it's not.

Horrible!

After 15 months I have yet to see any benefit from Service Assistant, the Customer Assistant Website, the Automated Marketing Assistant, or Mobile live. If you are a one stop shop, you only offer one service then this software might suit you. As long as you can afford to spend most of the day on the phone with tech support or you can afford to pay someone to spend more time on the phone with tech support then they do taking care of your customers.

After 15 months this system cost me unmeasurable losses. A complex system that doesn't work, their tech support personnel (if you can get a hold of them) can't run it. I have services completed in April of 2019 that still have not synced with my customers online account. Among other major issues, I have still have customers receiving blank invoices, invoices with inaccurate balances & invoices for services they've already paid for. Customers who have credits on their accounts have had their cards charged. My installment customers haven't been billed in 2 months. The analytics do not work, the system doesn't track your labor accurately. I spent 4 days and over $2000 working with their "top tech guy" [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN], after 4 days [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] was still not able to run a single report with accurate information. 100% of the issues I brought up to [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] his response was "yep that's not working. Let me take this to that department and find out why." After several issues [SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] got on the phone and said "I'm sorry our system isn't working for you." A factually inaccurate and intellectually dishonest statement. I could not have been more insulted, every word she uttered was carefully crafted to avoid any culpability. I have never dealt with a company lacking this much integrity. They just don't care, I paid close to $15,000 last year, they admit the system isn't working properly, yet refuse any liability. I can't even get a refund much less reimbursement for damages.

I became a customer with We’re green August 2022. I looked forward to us having a great company relationship. However, it was exactly the opposite. To start, learning the software took up a huge amount of office-time. I was willing to bear with the process, as I thought it was going to lessen our workload, once all the systems were in place. They have a year-end renewal process. This is where the users are to call-in and schedule an appointment at the end of the year. Realgreen then puts you on the schedule to renew your customer list for the next year. I signed up too late. (I was snowed under, learning and getting through the software glitches.)Consequently, they couldn’t get me on the renewal schedule until JANUARY 25th!! So now, I’m behind on 2023 invoicing of customers. We purchased invoices and wrote them out for January. (As we did before our purchase). Software was still glitchy, for February. Wrote out invoices again. Mind you we’re still paying. (This continued the remainder of our contract). We basically paid them while we wrote out invoices. Upon trying to get out of the year contract, they reminded us, interestingly enough, that the CONTRACT is AUTOMATIC RENEWAL. My question is why THE END-YEAR RENEWAL PROCESS ISN’T AUTOMATIC? We were scammed. We paid for a complete year and was never really able to use the software. They don’t care about their customers; they just want you to pay.

The technicians would try to help, but there were times where they were out of the loop and didn’t know how to help. Most of the techs were very kind.

The accounting department was responsible to make financial and final decisions on major issues. So when I was told to contact them, the first 2 or 3 times I contacted them, they’d call me back. Lol. After they learned I was having major issues, they stopped returning any of my calls the duration of our time with them.

Overall I think it's a great product. It can be a little more expensive at times than what I think it should be but I'd rather pay a little more for a good, helpful product than have it cheaper with more issues. Overall I'd highly recommend Real Green. I've used it for 20 years and it has helped me create a successful business.

The options that help me organise daily activities and customer history.

Every now and then there are some quirks that have to be worked out, which is expected but sometimes customer service depending on who you get isn't as helpful as you'd like depending on who you get.

It's been good. I do not have anything to compare it to, so I guess maybe I am bias?

Customer support and all the moving parts of the program are good.

It's not "always" as user friendly as we would like on some things and cannot control a percentage when splitting a sale. Wish splitting sales was treated like production when that has to be split in that it will as for a percentage value.

It is mixed because there are so many great features, but as I said above, the company tries to be the entire solution to every service business, and it falls quite short in this capacity. Operating a small business myself, I have found that finding what you are great at and focusing on that is the key to success. It seems to me that RG is working awful hard on trying to stretch beyond their wheel-house.

I like the idea of SA. It does things many other solutions in my industry don't offer. SA manages our customer's services very well. It handles billing and service dispatch very well. It allows us to give nearly instant quotes to many many people in our service area. It is quite accurate with day to day operation based services.

It doesn't integrate with other marketing software like Hubspot. SA tries to be a marketing company, a printing company, a customer service company, an accounting company, essentially it tries to be too many things. If SA would focus on getting the service scheduling and dispatch and billing 100% correct, I feel like they would easily be the best in the industry. There are often errors when running reports out of SA. Some of the information dispersed through the reports needs to be verified because it is so often incorrect. There are times when the program is slow to operate (web based version). There are some essential features such as entering a day of production, that simply don't work and are not fixed. The scheduling feature doesn't work when trying to schedule 2 services in the same time slot for the same customer which happens frequently in our area. Their marketing solutions are not that good overall.

Being a user of Service Assistant Software since 2002, we have come to rely on it for our business management software. The software is all encompassing and runs our business well. We are in a self hosted environment and have control over our computer system. The software on our self hosted service has been quite stable. We will continue to run in this environment until a time that we feel the online hosted software is comparable.

What I am quite disappointed in is the switch to online hosted software run by Real Green. They are pushing companies to use their online software at a ridiculous cost. To use their online software would run us almost 10 times the monthly maintenance cost. The online hosted software is NOT STABLE and users are being used as guinea pigs while Real Green tries to work the bugs out. An example would be TODAY where the system was down for most of the day for many users. In this day and age where users have come together to form user groups online, Real Green is making a huge mistake rolling out software with continued issues. We've heard from more than 10 different online users in our group that there was limited and NO access to the software today. This is the start out our busy season for most companies in the lawn care industry. It is unacceptable to have a system go down for all the online users. I am glad that we made the decision to stay self hosted. I returned from the conference in January almost convinced to switch to their online hosted software but the reviews from users are far from good. It is too bad becuase Real Green software has been good and stable up until this major change. Maybe they should stick with what they know, software and let users continue to self host. THank you.

[SENSITIVE CONTENT HIDDEN] sold me the and another Lawn Doctor franchise the software in 2000 or 2001. I know I am no longer a franchisee but to increase as quickly as it has seemed unreasonable to me. Although this is the first time I have put my thoughts down on paper.

I feel the software, in general, meets my needs and support always gets the job done whenever there is a problem. The cost of using the software is getting very expensive. I wish I could say that I haven't thought about researching other software. I was paying $2500/ year but now I am spending like $20K +.

Cost is getting out of control and sometimes I feel like no matter what I do the cost increases. Sometimes I get charged for technicians signing on to SA for clocking in. It wastes my time to research the issues when I receive an invoice. This was happening monthly for most of 2019. I haven't had time to check 2020.

The database and customer history is the biggest plus for SA. We have historical data on all of our maintenance customers which makes it super easy to provide maintenance estimates and do contract renewals each year.

I love that it is internet based and I am able to log in anywhere. The functionality is a big improvement over the SA4 version.

Reporting is always an issue. For a simple customer list - every time you run the report - you get a different result/number. You clear out the report, start over - and again a different number. It's difficult to provide accurate numbers to your boss when you aren't sure yourself if they are correct. Also - our we are a full service landscape company - and the software cannot handle the landscape division. We need to Create estimates for landscape jobs that will populate each individual plant, flower, tree, shrub, hardscape material, sand, etc.; thousands of different items with pictures of these items too. Unfortunately - SA cannot handle this amount of customization - so we need to use multiple software programs in our company instead of one. One of the BIGGEST nightmares with SA - is that it doesn't play well with QuickBooks. Almost everyone in our industry uses QuickBooks - and it is the biggest pain in the butt - and I mean HUGE that SA doesn't integrate with QuickBooks. In fact - we are actually researching other software programs that will address all of these issues I have listed. Logging time in twice (once in QuickBooks and once in SA), payments, etc. - it's double duty for a lot of items - which is a big waste of admin time.

We are able to keep such detailed history on our customers, and even better that our technicians can even access that in the field with Mobile Live!

This software has so many different "layers" that allow you to do so many things. There are tons of reports, on top of everything else it has to offer. It is a huge time-saver for our company, and I can't imagine we would be able to handle the amount of current customers we have without a program like this. We use so many features in the program as well as extended features (CAW for payments only, Mobile Live, Routing...).

We currently still have SA4, so there are no longer any updates. It is also a VERY complicated program to learn, but sooo worth it!! The technicians at Real Green are wonderful at helping you get through any stumbling blocks you may run into.

I've used this software with other companies I worked for before starting my own business. It was always great as an employee, but as far as helping me run my business, not so much. It's too exspensive. $/ month for basic customer tracking. Billing is awful. You have to print every invoice, even if the customer doesn't want an invoice left, with the invoice paper costing a minimum $ for 500 that you have to purchase through the company. If you email the customers an invoice, you just have to have faith that it went through, because there is no CC option. There is also no link for the customer to pay online in an emailed invoice. You have to pay an extra $ month to create a Customer Assistant Website for the customer to pay online, but they give no assistance in actually helping your customer find said website to pay their bill. The credit card processing is super slow as it takes 2-5 minutes just to log into your account to see who's paid you today, and for some reason only syncs with the software every 2 hours. So customers could call you saying they've paid, and you'll be none the wiser. None of this is mobile friendly, and everytime you call them asking why the system doesn't do something, they try to up sell you for another $ month. Mobile access is $ per device Emailing customers an invoice with a link to pay on-line is $ per email. The routine software is more. The paper to print is ridiculously expensive. They never solve a problem when you call, they have to enter a ticket so that a service tech can call you back, eventually. There are too many moving parts that creat too many opportunities for mistakes with this software. Spread sheets and QuickBooks at $/month is a much smarter option, unless you just like throwing money out of the window.

Overall, once you learn it, it can be a very powerful tool. The newest version is a lot more user friendly from what I have heard and read, so this may not be so true with SA5 as it is with SA4. They also offer many additional services such as the automated marketing assistant and customer assistant website, which we also use and find to be great!

- can do many things within their software they have available - tech support is always a delight to deal with - many software "add ons" available to help with your business needs and change how you interact with your customers - webinars and in-person yearly conferences are offered - always coming up with updates and new, innovative products

- the software can be complex to learn, especially for new hires and they get hired during the busy season (I realize SA5 will improve this point a lot, but I am only unable to comment on that from a user and trainer point of view at this time) - many reports and such can be easily pulling the wrong information with a simple mistake of not clicking a box, or clicking a box we shouldn't have

I wish we would have stayed on SA4 longer.

I love how you can access SA5 anywhere you have internet. It's much easier to get around than SA4.

*DOWN TIME or Super SLOW *Features like associating services was not complete and it messed things up big time. Need to launch complete features. If something doesn't work it puts a lot of doubt in my Team about Real Green. *Quit adding features before everything else is working like a well oiled machine. *There isn't a way to figure out our customer attrition rate. *There isn't a dashboard that you can keep track of KPI's or anything else at a glance. *Real Green says they are an open API but they never allow any other company to connect * Needs to be 1 platform - You have to write a proposal in SA5 to send out through AMA (Different Platform). When you have to have a setting in a different platform to work in the intended platform, doesn't make much sense and it's very confusing.

Horriable

The lady doing training was great. the only redeamable quality

I will never give a negative review simply because a company made a mistake or oversight. But when a company shows a complete lack of customer service and end user support, is apathetic and rude, and in the end shows that the only thing they are concerned with is trapping you in a contract, then they deserve it. If those were qualities being rated this place is a 5 Star, but as far as business ethics and professionalism a 1 star is generous. When we first crossed paths with Workwave They talked about how great their software, support and training was, once you’re in forget it. When we started the software right off the bat, we encountered a software problem which made the software completely unusable. 18 days later it still wasn’t fixed so we requested to cancel (this was ignored). After 21 days they finally fixed this problem, so fine we’ll give it another chance (some parts of the software still didn’t work). Then when we finally were able to test it, we were informed that even as administrators we would need to buy additional licenses to use the mobile app (They seemed to not have mentioned this in the sale). But still as fed up as we were we tried it (for 4 hours). At this point we realized the software was not right for our company or our clients, so we submitted a final cancellation and made sure to CC it to everyone that we delt with so it would not be ignored again. Unfortunately, it was, and 5 days later we received congratulations for being with the company 30 days

Service assistant was great, then they decided to be cloud based so they could sell sell sell. What they forgot was to make it work first. They seriously need an internal IT and coding department because what they are doing doesn’t work. 4-5 hour callback times, had to outsource call answering due to being overwhelmed with issues, product instability is such a problem I’d love to go back 3 generations and do things the old way. This is a classic case of rush to market, oversell, over promise, and under deliver. It’s shameful.

Looks pretty Works good...when it works Ability to incorporate so much marketing....when it works

Cost, value, functionality, support, customization, dependability

How it helps office staff communicate to the customer using AMA. Also all the marketing functions.

Improvements with accounting features. More ease on applying installments to invoices rather than balance. Improvements on aging and better explanation how and why accounts get aged. Better communication with accounting software to carry GL over. I feel like to do this correctly you have to have a lot accounting background. While larger companies have a department of the ability to contract this out, smaller users would have a difficult time. We had this issue early on when the company was forming.

Overall, it was easy to use after learning the basics. The mapping and scheduling functionality is this softwares best feature.

I really liked that I could see all customers who are currently due for service on the map at one time. Selecting an area on the map of customers was so easy! I could just click and drag an area on the map and a list of those customers would pull up for scheduling.

The company I worked for offered pest control and lawn service. This software is definitely designed for lawn service functionality, but didn't work perfectly for the pest control aspects. We made it work, but the software wasn't designed with pest control and termite control services in mind.

It needs to let us go back to ABTEK credit card processing or we will find something else.

I can schedule many services, and see past records and notes.

It requires you to use real green credit card processing which is more expensive and labor intensive. The routing isn't setup for lawn spraying (servicing lawns from one side of vehicle), and the mapping is outdated.

See above...

It is online so I can work from anywhere.

In the past we used SA4 with out lawn care, it is very user friendly and takes less time to enter in new customer as well as services than SA5. There seem to be a lot of glitches in SA5 even when entering a customer. When entering in the address on the address search line, I often have to reenter the info on the individual address blocks as it does not find the address and auto enter the info in the correct fields. I still can not figure out how to schedule correctly even though I have been walked through it a couple of times. We use the software for Christmas Light Services. Our main area that we enter info for our customers is the Work Order. The function of that is so bad that we use SA4. SA4 takes me half the time to enter and edit all my info. The notes for each item is view able without having to scroll and ope each one as in SA5. Overall, I don't like SA5. It is very frustrating. I wish you had more video tutorials for the functionality as every time I go to search for help, I am not ever able to find a usable fix without calling into tech support.

As far as problems I can't think of any, however we are not using SA5.

Works well in our industry. I like the routing and truck tracking features. Having the ability for clients to log into their account and make billing changes helps the office staff greatly. Using tablets in the field is a great advantage as well!!

Can't think of a particular issue. Have requested for years to make the credit card expiration date numbers instead of the words Example November = 11.