Inventry Alternative

[njreynolds]

I am just curious what is the price that Inventry charging now days? When we looked into this 3 years ago it was nearly 5 grand for the software and 2 terminals. Sign in App is £310 per year + iPads for us so was a no brainer to go with it over inventory.

 

We paid £3000 for the box and software about 2 years ago, but the hardware is only a 5th Gen i3-5010U CPU (mobile), 4Gb RAM and 64Gb HDD - so its not really worth it.

Backed by poor first line support (£1900 for 3 years), its not worth it in my option.

[localzuk]

I am just curious what is the price that Inventry charging now days? When we looked into this 3 years ago it was nearly 5 grand for the software and 2 terminals. Sign in App is £310 per year + iPads for us so was a no brainer to go with it over inventory.

We got a quote in Dec 2021 for it, they wanted £2610 per station - covered the PC, thermal printer, mounting bracket, and the software. It was then a further £337 for each RFID reader, and £1350 for a 3 year license including SIMS integration.

[k-strider]

we use Signinapp as well its prety good the app for staff is great for signing in from as well uses location so if your here it signs you in if your outside the area you sign in from home

[exventry_dev]

Hello, ex-employee of Inventry here. We often checked this forum from time to time and I thought I would shed some light on a few things.

 

Hi

Does anyone know any good alternatives to Inventry ?

 

We bought it last year, but the hardware is 5years+ old - which is causing problems.

Apparently, this is what they give all customers even now and the spec is just no good enough.

 

Thanks

 

There is some newer hardware now being shipped which can be identified easily as it has 2 webcams - one above the screen and another below it. This is actually lower spec than what used to be shipped as it was notably cheaper to buy, though I doubt that cost saving was passed onto the customer.

 

Inventry have tried my patience too. Not sure what’s happened but they’ve really dropped the ball.

 

To the extent when it next comes to renew I am going to go to the hassle of re-tendering for a new system rather than putting up with their shoddy support any further.

 

Over the past 4 years the company clearly pushed to become 'bigger' and more corporate. They began hiring a lot of staff (mostly management) from another company that has over 100,000 employees. Our guess is they are trying to make the company look better for prospective buyers, or are just squeezing as much as they can from the business whilst they can. Make hay while the sun shines and all that.

 

About 2 years ago is when things took a turn for the worst with changes in management.

 

The main issue I have is it isn't managed, unless you put it on your network and then they tend to blame anything on GPOs or our network. Their image is of 2015 LTSB, with no program to upgrade and it went out of support in 2020. The PC is the server and everything has to be able to talk to that or they just don't work, but the PC has to be rebooted nightly to get any updates and to just stay stable so often other devices get upset as they tried to contact when it was rebooting.

 

The system is just a bit flaky if you go beyond a single screen. It has that feel of a system that has been forced to expand and do more things but the underlying structure is still basically relying on it being on a single PC.

 

Administration is a pain as the UI is weird and doesn't follow conventions. It also has very limited scope for bulk editing, so there are lots of record by record updating, which isn't helped by the weird interface. Reporting is good unless you try to do anything beyond what they have thought of. Custom reports exist but can't handle anything beyond basic building blocks being put together.

 

The cloud bits are a bit hit and miss. Syncing to the app can take ages, and you have no idea if it has completed or not, except that you only have a handful of staff showing, even though a different part of the app shows the correct number of staff that are meant to be there.

 

Annoying really as when it works it is good and the visitor side works really well. But there are so many little niggles that are tricky to sort it just feels a struggle.

 

You've hit the nail on the head. It was a simple system that repeatedly had more bloated features added over time without any thought to longevity of the software. There is a mountain of technical debt and quite often when adding something new it was impossible to do it the 'right' way (as that would require lots of work due to the technical debt) so developers were told to do things in the fastest way possible whilst delivering the minimum requirements. The plan was always to fix things or improve the features in a later version, but that obviously never happened. That scenario occurred for essentially every project.

 

With regards to UI and things not ever working as you'd expect or in a convenient manner... we knew. Many members of the team genuinely wanted to improve this, but no resources were ever allocated to this as it was not considered a valuable use of time. Developer resources were spent on adding a new feature for the sales team to use to bring in another customer, or to fix critical issues that the loudest customers were complaining about. I have heard from employees that haven't jumped ship yet (more on that later) that with the latest manager of the development team there is one of these issues every single week that has been 'escalated' and become a top priority to fix, likely because development work is being rushed out to meet arbitrary deadlines.

 

Just to add to this - although they installed a newer version of Windows 10 on ours so we're at least in support for a while, it's still bound by a 20 connection limit and once you have more than 1 screen and a few users connecting to the console app, this uses up the 20 connections very quickly and then you end up with screens that can't connect or users complaining that the console app doesn't work. Why they couldn't have offered a option to install the backend to a proper server is beyond me.

There is no technical reason the backend (the API and SQL database) cannot be moved to a server. In fact I believe this has been done for customers in the past. It wouldn't surprise me if that is no longer offered as it would require one of the few members of the support team to spend a significant portion of their day working on it, which the business considers to be a cost. Work was always being done to reduce the support cost.

 

Just to let you know that for SQL (even express) in my option the CPU & RAM make everything seem sluggish.

Its a 5th Gen i3 Mobile CPU, with 4Gb RAM. This is the spec from Q1 2015.

Occasionally, the whole system crashes/locks - which I am assuming is poor spec related.

 

The disk space is a bit concerning as well. It only has a 64Gb disk, and I only have 10Gb left after a year and this could be filled pretty quickly.

For the price of the hardware its not good enough, the PC should be at least this/last gen. I did speak to Inventry but they were pretty arrogant about it.

 

I would highly recommend you ask the spec/gen of the PC they are supplying. You have a lot more power with them BEFORE you buy, as afterwards you have none - I found this out the hard way.

 

- - - Updated - - -

 

 

 

 

Just to let you know that for SQL (even express) in my option the CPU & RAM make everything seem sluggish.

Its a 5th Gen i3 Mobile CPU, with 4Gb RAM. This is the spec from Q1 2015.

Occasionally, the whole system crashes/locks - which I am assuming is poor spec related.

 

The disk space is a bit concerning as well. It only has a 64Gb disk, and I only have 10Gb left after a year and this could be filled pretty quickly.

For the price of the hardware its not good enough, the PC should be at least this/last gen. I did speak to Inventry but they were pretty arrogant about it.

 

I would highly recommend you ask the spec/gen of the PC they are supplying. You have a lot more power with them BEFORE you buy, as afterwards you have none - I found this out the hard way.

You needn't be concerned by the disk space as the SQL express database is limited to 10GB.

 

 

If anyone has noticed significant deterioration in the software over the past 18 months, that is because almost the entirety of the development team quit in a short period of time after changes in management and the company outsourced the work to the Philippines (or as Inventry put it in their full accounts 2022 on Companies House, "highly skilled oversees team members" ).

Edited June 25, 2023 by exventry_dev

[tmleafs]

We got inventry installed around a year ago and it's been nothing but rubbish.

Just had a chat with Signinapp but they have no Paxton integration, hopefully, they might have once our contract with Inventry runs out in another two years.

 

We have disabled SIMS right backs for sixth-formers due to the system not working the way we want, had multiple staff remote in and make changes but it just breaks in a different way.

Once the system was installed and I noticed the network connection limitation of the main computer I knew we had made a huge mistake.

The sales guy said all the right things and sold it to SLT and other staff in the demo, I remember him saying it was made by an IT team in a school and it worked so well that they made a company and sold it, that has stuck with me as it just can't be true as there are so many features that just don't work or make sense that anyone working in a school would have done it that way.

 

Who even made the advanced sixth form marks needs shooting and I don't think their support understands it either.

Things like this "Preferred Names of pupils will ONLY appear on the Core Touchscreen, the pupils name will remain the same within the Console and any reports that are run." is just mad why waste time on writing that in a support article instead of fixing the console and reports to display preferred names ASAP. They also show features in the demo we didn't even get so the demo person and the salesperson weren't in commutation at all, and had to spend another £300 to add the other Paxton gates to the system which took them over two months to remote in for 30secs to install the licence.

 

The console is getting slower each day to open, the app for mobiles takes ages to sync if you are on-site or not and in some cases it's wrong it will say I'm signed out but if I click on staff, look for me and I'm marked in.

They have a Windows app so if a member of staff forgets to sign in it will ask to sign them in its a nice little backup option, but the software puts this huge V sign in the right corner and it cant be started minimised it's like they want to only annoy me with their limitations but also annoy all staff, we also had to pay extra to use this windows app.

 

So yea, one of the worst things we have purchased and thank god we haven't had a fire or a fire drill since Christmas when we got rid of the paper base systems in place. I'm hoping the Paxton work over the summer will help but I'm not looking forward to a drill happening.

Edited June 29, 2023 by tmleafs

[localzuk]

Contrasting the comments about Inventry with my experience of SignInApp... I had an issue where our Paxton fobs were being read with a different format than how we store them in our AD for the PaperCut system. Their solution was to ask me how we'd like it formatted, and then they developed a specific format type for us, and rolled it out in a new version.

 

We had an issue with some RFID codes not being picked up properly even though they were present, and they worked diligently to fix that as well for us.

 

Their support is excellent, and helpful.

 

Seems like 2 very different companies. SignInApp want to get customers by having a great product - which is why we put it in our 8 sites.

[NewFormz]

Another unhappy Inventry customer here. It doesn't work as sold and has very poor security as well.

 

We're also looking to move to to another solution, possibly Sign In as it ticks a lot of our boxes.

[tmleafs]

So far

 

SignInApp - No Paxton integration

E-Reception Book - No Paxton integration told me it's due to Paxton not having a Cloud API

EntrySign - Has Paxton integration - Might still have the high install costs due to the same hardware as inventry going to ask them if they can reuse it

 

EntrySign looks like what inventry should have been, The other two are cloud and use iPads

[localzuk]

What sort of integration are you wanting with Paxton?

[Michael]

I've never quite understood why modern MIS providers don't provide a native sign in option for parents/carers/visitors. Schools would then have the option of using iPads and/or AIO systems, with everything working within a browser.

[bobsmith]

The integration on offer from Inventry was that signing in could trigger an adjacent paxton door to unlock and allow access.

 

But you've probably already got a RFID reader on the door anyway so not a showstopper if you don't have the integration.

[tmleafs]

What sort of integration are you wanting with Paxton?

 

Rather than paying for Inventrys quick scanners at £1000 each for the indoor ones, we can add our Paxton gates for £150 per gate and when a member of staff or sixth form taps the gate in or out sensors it sends that information to inventry, inventry can do the triggers but its easier to leave that to Paxton to that. Otherwise, every sixth-former would have to go to the main office to sign in and out. This is what sold us the system rather than having to add at least two quick scanners for staff/sixth-form to use we get them on their way in or out on the gate system we already have but there are limitations to the Paxton system and to get the system to work the way it was sold to us we really need to buy the quick scanners but now SLT feel burnt on inventry and don't want to spend more money on devices that become redundant if we decide to dump inventry when the contract is up.

 

Just got a call from inventry due to my complaint email I sent last week, In which I did mention this forum post and they are setting up a teams meeting to discuss my issues next week, if anyone wants to rise anything either post on here or PM me

 

So far I have

1. Slow console access - takes nearly 30 seconds to log in for me
   
2. The Windows network connections limit
   
3. Slow/terrible Android/iOS app - takes forever to sync and can be wrong
   
4. Advanced mark options - needs a complete rewrite in my opinion
   
5. If I replace a Paxton card the staff/sixth form needs to be set to auto code again and they need to go to inventry to do this - so what's the point in user association in door access control?
   
6. Preferred surname needs to be default in the console and reporting
   
7. Inventry InView - let us start it minimised
   
8. We were mis-sold on the SIMS integration - there is no writing to inventry from sims, and inventry can't read the current morning code so gets changed when they scan a reader (for example we know they have got for let's say an interview, they scan in at 11 pm and it changes that interview code to a U
   
9. Installation of extra paxton licences signed the document on 27th Feb got told it's normally 10 days from signing - wasn't completed until 13th March
   
10. Visitor signing when searching for the staff there visiting can't find anyone as they are limited to searching first initial space surname, they should have to select someone not type in anything they like the system should bring up all chris's if that's what someone types, I think I have had one notification someone is here the whole time we have had inventry as the just automaticity type just me first name and press continue
    
11. Visitor default of opting out of keeping their record - We have visitors with 5 or 6 records as they don't opt-in which makes the visitor history a complete mess, give us the choice to make it less messy or give us a merge tool
    
12. Visitor companies we have inputted all the main companies we use they just type any old rubbish in - just display a list of all the companies with an "other" button at least some might press the correct one
    
13. SIMS staff images don't sync over to inventry
    
14. Complete rethink of the settings page in the console its a complete mess and why isn't there an information button next to everything giving more details on what it does
    

Edited June 30, 2023 by tmleafs

[tmleafs]

This morning the Android Inventory Anywhere was updated completely refreshed

[dapaulio]

Also a sign in vote here. Very easy setup and works well with mobile auto signin thru location services. And we have ours azure AD integrated

Great for large events as organisers can pre-stage the invite and the guest sign in with a qr code.

We use a feature also where the students who are late sign in and the late mark is sent thru to SIMS (premium feature) and if a student leaves early eg medical appointment similarly it writes back to SIMS

Not that I’ve used it but it looks good if you have multiple sites or trust with multiple schools as you can link multiple sites together

Edited July 1, 2023 by dapaulio

[snagrat]

I’m looking at Sign-In for our 16 schools, currently we use paper sheets.

 

What’s the Azure AD integration? How does that work and what does it do?

[njreynolds]

Hi. Just spoken to SIGN IN APP and just to let everyone know SIMS write back is only supported when SIMS in CLOUD BASED. Sadly, on prem SIMS won't work. Seems very limiting.

[tmleafs]

Hi. Just spoken to SIGN IN APP and just to let everyone know SIMS write back is only supported when SIMS in CLOUD BASED. Sadly, on prem SIMS won't work. Seems very limiting.

 

That's why they can't do Paxton integration as Paxton doesn't have a cloud API and without them developing an app to install on an on-prem device to be a middleman, so they can talk to on-site devices/systems it's a no-go.

 

I have messaged EntrySign twice now and they still haven't got back to me.

 

My Teams meeting with Inventry about all the issues we have is tomorrow.

[Scan099]

Rather than paying for Inventrys quick scanners at £1000 each for the indoor ones, we can add our Paxton gates for £150 per gate and when a member of staff or sixth form taps the gate in or out sensors it sends that information to inventry, inventry can do the triggers but its easier to leave that to Paxton to that. Otherwise, every sixth-former would have to go to the main office to sign in and out. This is what sold us the system rather than having to add at least two quick scanners for staff/sixth-form to use we get them on their way in or out on the gate system we already have but there are limitations to the Paxton system and to get the system to work the way it was sold to us we really need to buy the quick scanners but now SLT feel burnt on inventry and don't want to spend more money on devices that become redundant if we decide to dump inventry when the contract is up.

 

Just got a call from inventry due to my complaint email I sent last week, In which I did mention this forum post and they are setting up a teams meeting to discuss my issues next week, if anyone wants to rise anything either post on here or PM me

 

So far I have

1. Slow console access - takes nearly 30 seconds to log in for me
   
2. The Windows network connections limit
   
3. Slow/terrible Android/iOS app - takes forever to sync and can be wrong
   
4. Advanced mark options - needs a complete rewrite in my opinion
   
5. If I replace a Paxton card the staff/sixth form needs to be set to auto code again and they need to go to inventry to do this - so what's the point in user association in door access control?
   
6. Preferred surname needs to be default in the console and reporting
   
7. Inventry InView - let us start it minimised
   
8. We were mis-sold on the SIMS integration - there is no writing to inventry from sims, and inventry can't read the current morning code so gets changed when they scan a reader (for example we know they have got for let's say an interview, they scan in at 11 pm and it changes that interview code to a U
   
9. Installation of extra paxton licences signed the document on 27th Feb got told it's normally 10 days from signing - wasn't completed until 13th March
   
10. Visitor signing when searching for the staff there visiting can't find anyone as they are limited to searching first initial space surname, they should have to select someone not type in anything they like the system should bring up all chris's if that's what someone types, I think I have had one notification someone is here the whole time we have had inventry as the just automaticity type just me first name and press continue
    
11. Visitor default of opting out of keeping their record - We have visitors with 5 or 6 records as they don't opt-in which makes the visitor history a complete mess, give us the choice to make it less messy or give us a merge tool
    
12. Visitor companies we have inputted all the main companies we use they just type any old rubbish in - just display a list of all the companies with an "other" button at least some might press the correct one
    
13. SIMS staff images don't sync over to inventry
    
14. Complete rethink of the settings page in the console its a complete mess and why isn't there an information button next to everything giving more details on what it does
    

 

Hi, Did you resolve these issues as we are having pretty much the same ones?

[tmleafs]

Hi, Did you resolve these issues as we are having pretty much the same ones?

 

What are your main issues from the list?

If you can give me any more detailed issues here or by PM

As I have a Teams meeting tomorrow with and I quote "higher-ups and 2nd line support" about all of our issues.

[Chclark]

They have changed how our inventry system works instead of per site setup for staff, all the sites sync staff from central which is populated by a console install on a server we host which syncs our staff from ad and also pulls in Paxton scan codes from a CSV salamander makes nightly. It's far from perfect but the solution is less problematic as the biggest issue we had was roaming staff getting invalid barcode.

 

This only came about after they sent David from the dev team to speak to us and he came up with this solution based on our network setup.

[Guest Guest]

Hi. Just spoken to SIGN IN APP and just to let everyone know SIMS write back is only supported when SIMS in CLOUD BASED. Sadly, on prem SIMS won't work. Seems very limiting.

 

That’s not right, we have on prem SIMS and write back works without issue

Edited July 4, 2023 by Guest

[Scan099]

Hi all

 

InVentry have tried my patience and getting the same errors time and time again so we have had enough.

 

Seen some good reviews for Sign in app but just wondering if any of you have the net2 paxton system. We have this for the gates and barrier as staff swipe their badge and its how they sign in. Wondered if it will integrate with the sign in app to do this.

[ITGuyNW]

What issues are you seeing? We've just had a weeks troubleshooting to get the label printer to work.

[tmleafs]

Hi all

 

InVentry have tried my patience and getting the same errors time and time again so we have had enough.

 

Seen some good reviews for Sign in app but just wondering if any of you have the net2 paxton system. We have this for the gates and barrier as staff swipe their badge and its how they sign in. Wondered if it will integrate with the sign in app to do this.

 

http://www.entrysign.co.uk is the only alterative with Paxton integration that I have found

 

 

I have used their contact form twice and haven't heard a thing

[bknaggs]

Hi all

 

InVentry have tried my patience and getting the same errors time and time again so we have had enough.

 

Seen some good reviews for Sign in app but just wondering if any of you have the net2 paxton system. We have this for the gates and barrier as staff swipe their badge and its how they sign in. Wondered if it will integrate with the sign in app to do this.

 

When you setup a card reader in Sign In App it asks for the format and Net2 is one of the options. I don't know if this is just so you can add the card ID in a format you already know or if there is any further integration.

 

Their support is pretty quick at responding so it wouldn't hurt to ask if you don't get a response here.