Flowlens

RATING:

4.8

(22)

About Flowlens

Flowlens is a cloud-based MRP and CRM solution that helps manufacturing and dealership businesses manage stock, sales and purchases. Its key features include time tracking, forecasting, reporting and notifications. The application allows manufacturers to assemble SKUs, configure bills of materials and evaluate project costs. Operations teams can use this system to record stock levels and analyze job profitability. With its CRM feature, administrators can manage multiple accounts, capture inquiries, assign tasks and monitor leads. The system also assists users with order processing and dispatching. Flowlens integrates with Xero, QuickBooks and Mailchimp. The system's service functionality enables supervisors to track labour costs and maintain job cards and tickets. T...

Flowlens Pricing

Flowlens starts at £239 per month including 3 full users and 2 shop floor users. Additional users £39 per month. Premium subscription includes bolt-ons for Pipeline and Service management plus tailored onboarding consultancy and training package, free sandbox and ongoing refresher sessions.

Starting price: 

£349.00 per month

Free trial: 

Available

Free version: 

Not Available

Smart and easy to use inventory management - keep track of all your SKUs and track incoming stock and assigned parts to forecast your inventory and make better buying decisions.
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Flowlens Reviews

Overall Rating

4.8

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

5

Customer Support

5

Value for money

5

Functionality

4.5

Most Helpful Reviews for Flowlens

1 - 5 of 22 Reviews

User Profile

Amy

Verified reviewer

Automotive, 2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

Review Source: Capterra
This review was submitted organically. No incentive was offered

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed October 2019

Blows Salesforce Out the Water!

My overall experience with Flowlens has been fantastic. The price point is great, the support is there, and the system itself is awesome. We use the system for everything from holding a parts database to selling vehicles. The system integrates with our Quickbooks system beautifully which saves us hours of inputting stuff. It sends me daily reminders for all of the leads I need to get back to, and it just does everything- even job cards for the workshop!!! It's just awesome and if you're reading this right now then you NEED to get this software. You won't be disappointed.

PROS

Flowlens is so easy to use and understand, it saves me hours on admin and sales and the team are so helpful. It's just so easy to use I can't believe it.... having used Saleforce previously which is overpriced, not suitable for SME and ridiculously complicated, Flowlens is a breath of fresh air. Admin is no longer a dread!

CONS

There is literally NOTHING I don't like.

Reason for choosing Flowlens

Hubspot is another ridiculously overpriced system that doesn't work as easily as Flowlens.

Reasons for switching to Flowlens

Salesforce was stupidly overpriced for my business size and honestly I've coded websites before and I still couldn't work out how to configure it. I've worked with Flowlens before in a previous role and I missed it terribly. Rich messaged me on LinkedIn and I jumped at the chance to switch. Luckily managed to get a refund from Salesforce & made the switch without hesitation.

Vendor Response

Thanks Amy, we're delighted that Flowlens is making such a difference for you and your team! We put a lot of time into making the CRM and MRP software tools as intuitive as possible, whilst giving you flexibility to configure it as you need, so great to know we're doing a good job. The more admin CRM can do for you across sales, stock and jobs, the more time you have for growing sales, so we really do appreciate what this means for you and the business.

Replied October 2019

User Profile

Stephen

Verified reviewer

Mining & Metals, 11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed October 2021

Flowlens review

Outstanding level of service and friendly staff who are keen to take ideas into their development plan. There have been a number of good developments over the 2 years I've used it.

PROS

The part of the software most useful to us is being able to take an initial enquiry right through to despatch and invoice, generating clear documentation at every stage and finally pushing the sale through to our accounting package.

CONS

The feature I don't like is the email integration process - it's easy to mail out from the software but it uses a Flowlens mailbox which can be confusing.

Reason for choosing Flowlens

Yes

Reasons for switching to Flowlens

It was the inventory management process that really sold Flowlens to me.

Eric

Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 11-50 employees

Review Source: Capterra
This reviewer was invited by us to submit an honest review and offered a nominal incentive as a thank you.

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

3

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed January 2022

Good Basic MRP Tool for SMEs

After many product demos and a trial we decided that Flowlens was not for us as we need a more robust and mature MRP/ERP solution.

PROS

Our company recently trialled Flowlens as an MRP solution that could integrate with Xero to create a more robust ERP solution. We really liked the simple integration with Xero and the fact that it could manage the shop floor well.

CONS

We found the system could use improvement when dealing with complex sub-assemblies and when managing multiple complex products. This product is best suited for simple manufacturers.

Dan

Mechanical or Industrial Engineering, 11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed September 2022

Software that is easy to use and implement

Overall experience with Flowlens has been good, they are a company that values the input from their customer base and if they can make your life easier by working in updates to the system they always will. For us the biggest thing was the immediate visibility that the system gave us, we'd gone from having to have multiple spreadsheets and databases open to being able to jump from one section of Flowlens to another and then back again overnight

PROS

As a service company we looked high and low for a software that would manage both the new manufacture product and also customers equipment coming in for service. Flowlens fits that bill, the intergration into the company was relatively painless and would probably be even smoother should you come from an existing system most of our pain in the intergration was coming from our old Excel and Access databases but the team were fantastic in their support to get this up and running for us.

CONS

The service side of the system does function for us but it sometimes feels like the poor relative. It would be good to get some of the functionality from Sales and Projects across to the service side for service related businesses such as our own.

Reason for choosing Flowlens

We had demo's from all that we considered and shortlisted down to three of which Flowlens was one of these, Flowlens seemed to be the simplest system to use and reassured us that they would cope with the service side of our business where the other systems were unable to reassure us of this.

Iain

Industrial Automation, 2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 2 years

Review Source: Capterra

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

5

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed October 2021

Ease of use and aligned with our business

We have moved away from out team working within an accountancy package to now using flowlens for all day-to-day business activities. Only accounting and management now need to touch the accounts system. Where we perceived limitations or lack of features against some of the big CRM providers now we are using the system these have turned out to be non-issues and the simplicity and accessibility of the platform has driven adoption

PROS

The user interface is clear and intuitive and won't scare away first-time users. Compared to other offerings there are not lots of unused boxes/fields or white space taking screen space. All the key information is available where you want it. Customisations are possible using the form templates which make it very easy to capture business specific data, for example we use this within our sales leads to capture customer requirements and create technical sales-support notes or even as simple as generating covering note to print and identify some free-issued materials from a customer. Integration with Xero for accountancy is flawless. You only need to give certain people access to certain elements keeping the user interface focussed to their role. The response of support has been excellent whenever we have needed to ask a question. The product is also designed for companies like us - small-medium manufacturers / solution providers so there is an alignment of the offering to the use case which meant we weren't fitting a round peg into a square hole from day 1.

CONS

The system generated documents are fixed format, 90% of the time there is ample scope to use the fields that already exist to make the document contain what you need but there are times where an editable document would suit our need better. Some bulk actions don't exist at the moment (Like archiving multiple obsolete products) - although I believe they are coming soon.

Reason for choosing Flowlens

Sage was not 'ready' there were big gaps in the offering and it was quickly ruled out. Business central would have worked but would have cost considerably more and needed a large implementation package to get it right for us. When we showed a demo to our staff it appeared hard to use and understand so it lost traction from that point. We would also have been relying on (and paying for) a Microsoft partner to be our accountancy support which felt more risky than dealing with sage or Xero directly who know how to support their own product.

Reasons for switching to Flowlens

Poor adoption of dynamics which had so much power and flexibility we never really got it focussed to our systems. Maybe this was poor implementation but there was also no sensible way for it to link Sage Line 50 which is a mainly desktop product. So we had data in 2 places and the CRM didn't have enough data going into it to be able to extract any meaningful reports. Sage was also desktop only and we needed to facilitate remote working more and a cloud platform was the obvious choice

Vendor Response

Iain, thanks for taking the time to review your experience with the Flowlens product and people. As you've mentioned we have designed Flowlens for a specific market in SME manufacturers and industrial systems providers which allows us to keep improving the system capabilities around your needs. It's also great to hear how seamless the Xero integration makes your workflow. The feedback below is understood and has already informed plans for 2022. Thanks from all at Flowlens!

Replied October 2021