Evaluation guides
How to compare business software without reading a feature list
Every vendor's feature list looks complete, including ours. These guides give you the questions that actually separate one system from another — and honest answers about where Qvian is the wrong choice.
Questions, not claims about anyone else
We do not publish tables of ticks about other people's products.
A comparison table about someone else's software is out of date the week it goes up, and it never tells you whether a feature works in daily use or merely exists.
So each guide does something more useful: it gives you a short list of specific, checkable questions, and answers them for Qvian. Take them to every vendor you are evaluating, us included. What you learn from the answers — and from which questions make someone change the subject — is worth more than any table we could write.
Every guide also says plainly where Qvian is the wrong answer. Those sections are real, not modesty.
Pick the one that matches your decision
A competitor offered our clients free service for life. They stayed, at several times the price. That is the only comparison statistic we have any business quoting.
We would rather be the system people refuse to leave than the cheapest line on a quote.
Frequently asked
Not on feature lists — every vendor's list looks complete. Compare on a small number of specific, checkable behaviours: whether a supplier price change reaches the cost of your products, whether selling something takes it out of stock, whether closing the day posts your books, and whether each location can be measured on its own. Those separate systems. Feature counts do not.
Because a table of ticks about someone else's product is out of date the week it is published, and it tells you nothing about whether the feature actually works in daily use. We publish the questions instead. Ask them of us and of everyone else you are evaluating.
Ask them to show you something going wrong. Anyone can demo a clean path. Ask what happens when a delivery is short, when the till does not balance, when someone forgets to close the day. The answer tells you whether the system was built by people who have run an operation.
Often, yes. A competitor once offered our clients free service for life and they stayed and paid several times the price. We would rather be the system people refuse to leave than the cheapest line on a quote.
The data, always — and specifically, for restaurants, the menu. Qvian imports products, customers and suppliers with mapping and duplicate detection, and brings a menu across with the recipes built underneath it rather than as a list of names and prices. That is usually the difference between switching and staying put.
Bring your hardest question.
A supplier invoice and your menu is the whole demonstration.