AIM

RATING:

4.09

(199)

About AIM

AIM is a secure end-to-end point of sale (POS) business solution that can be used in any retail environment. This retail management solution features customizable menus and screens, inventory management, complete POS activity and customer management, as well as a suite of add-on modules that supports the needs of a variety of specialty retailers. The add-on modules, such as rentals, repair and service, purchase orders and lesson and class scheduling, allow retailers to build their own custom solution by selecting and paying only for the features they require. AIM also offers built-in ledger and payables for those that want a fully-integrated accounting system. Retailers seeking a web presence can incorporate Active-e, an e-commerce solution which can help them...

Awards and Recognition

FrontRunner 2023
Software Advice's FrontRunners report ranks top products based based on user reviews, which helps businesses find the right software.

AIM Pricing

Starting price: 

$995.00 one time

Free trial: 

Not Available

Free version: 

Not Available

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AIM Reviews

Overall Rating

4.09

Ratings Breakdown

Secondary Ratings

Ease-of-use

3.5

Customer Support

4

Value for money

4

Functionality

4

Most Helpful Reviews for AIM

1 - 5 of 200 Reviews

Holly

Retail, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

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

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

5

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

5

Reviewed November 2020

Pleased!

Overall we are very happy with AIM for our business. The tech support is awesome! They are always ready to help and super friendly. I love that they can remote in and show us what to do.

PROS

We have been using the contract module side of AIM for our instrument rental contracts to keep track of monthly payments since the beginning of our business in 2004. We pulled away for a brief stint to try another company and it was a disaster. The instrument rental contracts are the bread and butter of our business. If it fails, we fail. If the customer doesn't feel like they can trust us with their personal info because the system fails, we fail. It's a reflection on us. We came back to AIM in 2019 and went all in with the full point of sale system and we've never looked back. We highly recommend AIM.

CONS

We do wish that there weren't so many steps to follow. Seems like there is a huge learning curve to this program. Once you live it and breath it like it do it's one thing. But my employees tend to make mistakes often because they miss a step. And for example: having to get out of one frame and into another one for the same customer with a different question about their account is sometimes frustrating. Also. I really wish that an email went out immediately to my rental contract customers on autopay when their card is declined. The ability is there, as they receive an email immediately when the payment goes through, but not when it declines. This would help our collection dept out tremendously if this option was implemented.

Reason for choosing AIM

I didn't know of any other software programs that offered what we needed in the music retail/instrument rental business other than Rain and AIM.

Reasons for switching to AIM

Their rental contract module was terrible. It was super inefficient with tons of mistakes. I felt like our customers couldn't trust us with their personal info, as Rain seemed to just take payments out whenever, and would change the amounts on a whim and then when we asked about it they would just say it was a "glitch". We were with them for a year and a half before switching back to AIM.

Rob

Retail, 11-50 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

Review Source
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 September 2022

Great POS/Gun book/Range Software

Been a fantastic system....we recommend it whenever we are asked what we use by other gun stores.

PROS

I don't have to have multiple systems running to achieve everything we need to do...AIM does it all

CONS

learning curve....set up and learning the system takes time

Reason for choosing AIM

everything I had read pointed to this being the best system for guns/inventory....and it is.

Reasons for switching to AIM

Needed something that would track sales and guns all in one

Bill

Retail, 2-10 employees

Used daily for less than 6 months

OVERALL RATING:

2

EASE OF USE

2

VALUE FOR MONEY

3

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

3

Reviewed January 2017

Great feature set and support. Very poorly implemented.

The product has features that no other has, especially for the musical instrument rental business. However, it is showing its age. The worst thing is that it wasn't written well even to standards that we had 30 years ago. (I started in the IT business in 1986.) I would recommend it, with a great many warnings, to a musical instrument rental or similar company, but absolutely not to anyone else.

PROS

The feature set for the rent-to-own business is good. So far as we have been able to discover, there is no other product at any price that supports our business. (If there was, I would be on it like a duck on a June bug.) The support staff is excellent!

CONS

I would have fired an experienced programmer or seriously chewed out a beginner 30 years ago if they designed a user interface that was so poorly implemented. You never know from screen to screen what you have to do to do a "find." Sometimes you have to hit Tab for the program to work, sometimes you have to hit Enter. The mere fact that in a good many places the programmers apparently elected to use the tab key or enter key events rather than the OnExit event is inexcusable. (Click the OK or Save button without first tabbing out of a field and there is a great chance that the changes to the field you were last in were not saved.) Things as simple as standard naming conventions for naming reports are just an example that someone either didn't understand design or didn't care. (The reports aren't in report name order because some inept person decided to put "Print" or "List" in front of the report name, thereby making the lists sort out without rhyme or reason. Having a table of variables to STORE system options is fine. It's even okay for a first release. However, how a system that has been on the market this long without having a user interface on said table indicates a huge lack of caring. The user interface flaws cannot be excused by the fact that the programs are old. The design flaws would not have been acceptable in a DOS or even a CP/M program. The back end modules are simply sad. The fact that they decided to write the back end all over again in the new system that they plan to release someday indicates a huge lack of judgment. Why the devil would one reinvent the wheel, especially after doing such a poor job the first time around, when one could interface to any of several well-written, mature, user-friendly and well-supported G/L, A/P, A/R, etc. systems and focus on the specialized modules that make me use AIMsi to start with? (QuickBooks immediately comes to mind.) Doing so would save well into six figures of development cost, give one a solid base on which to build, and even give one a huge marketing opportunity by being an enhancement to a widely-used system rather than being a home-rolled thing. It would also give me some hope that the new release would be available in my lifetime. They are simply burning man-years of programming effort and stretching lead times unreasonably. As bad as the G/L module is, their "Purchase Order" module simply boggles the mind. They make a sad effort to somehow combine P/O and Customer Order Processing while making both the COP features and the interface to A/P damned near unusable. One need only looks at the database design to see that whoever wrote the COP programs had never actually worked on one before. No Order Header and Order Line Item tables? Really? They sort of sludge everything together in something that they dreamed up from scratch. Even the terminology used for field names and labels is non-standard. "Picked" has a very well understood meaning in the COP industry. They have a whole new definition. I could go on forever...

Ron

Retail, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

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

OVERALL RATING:

5

EASE OF USE

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed September 2022

Has made us MUCH more efficient

PROS

For a small retail store this is excellent! Helps manage inventory, as well as daily and weekly check out.

CONS

There was quite a learning curve for us. We had no POS before AIM.

Reason for choosing AIM

AIM was a better choice for a Retail/Service business

Emily

Retail, 2-10 employees

Used daily for more than 2 years

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

OVERALL RATING:

4

EASE OF USE

4

VALUE FOR MONEY

4

CUSTOMER SUPPORT

5

FUNCTIONALITY

4

Reviewed September 2022

Emily's Review of AIM

I have worked with many people at Tri-Tech we have been using there POS for about 4 years. I have had to call the customer help line many times in those 4 years. And no matter how frustrated I am they do an excellent job helping me solve the issues I run into.

PROS

I enjoy the easy of being able to create things and customize the POS easily. The system does all I need plus more that I probably don't know about. Seems like I learn new things about it all the time. My most recent call was with [SENSITIVE CONTENT]. He was very knowledgeable and the questions he didn't know the answers to he was very speedy at finding them. I enjoyed my early morning conversation with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] while he helped me work on multiple issues I was having. We got them all fixed in under an hour (I was expecting it to be a multiple hour kind of call). I look forward to working with [SENSITIVE CONTENT] again.

CONS

The worst part about this POS was the set up. Although I believe that is mostly the fact that we were transferring information from a system that was very VERY old and outdated system. But the service team was there for me whenever I had questions; and boy I had a lot of them. Those first few months most of the service people knew me by first name.

Reason for choosing AIM

I was not part of the picking of systems. The gentlemen at my store who was spearheading this project, found out his wife was pregnant about 1/3 of the way through the process as in. Picking, Set-up, upkeep. So I Set-up and upkeep the program so he was able to focus on his wife and new son.

Reasons for switching to AIM

The business had shut down and they were not supporting the system anymore and it couldn't be used on a computer newer then windows 8. We loved they system and were heartbroken to have to change but keeping customer information, and not having to worrying about the system shutting down and never turning back on again was something that was important to us.