Studio Designer

Pros: Great project management tools for the design team. If all you want to use it for is to manage your projects, then it is a decent system.

Cons: A basic accounting control is n/a - the ability to close/lock down a month/period?!?! An accounting system needs data integrity - the fact that you cannot lock invoices or an accounting period from posting at any point - example - posting something to January and we're currently in June. The system allows this and designers are not accountants so they likely don't understand the ramifications of this action. This is NOT a good option to use as your accounting system!!

Overall: Works for the design piece - if they made one simple change (ability to lock an accounting period - even as an option for people to select or not) - I would recommend as a one-stop shop software.

Pros: If this software worked properly, it would probably make my business run much more efficiently. But it doesn't.

Cons: I spent hours trying to figure out how to do make one simple adjustment that should take me five minutes. This software has done literally nothing but waste my time. Nothing on it runs intuitively. You would need to sit and do an entire month of schooling to be able to function properly within it, and that just doesn't make sense, for my business anyways, I don't have time to devote an entire month to training. The design software is for DESIGNERS for gods sake, and the number one rule of design is that if you can't intuitively use the product, it's bad design. I can't exaggerate my frustration levels with this product and with how much time it has wasted me just trying to do simple tasks such as invoicing. My opinion is that it was designed years ago and was probably revolutionary at the time, but as time goes on they just try and add to it here and there, and the end result is a product that kind of functions like a dinosaur. If this program was redesigned from scratch now I think it could be incredibly efficient and time-saving for a designer, but it's just not with the way that it's currently formatted.

Overall: Overall frustrated, time wasted. I was told in a live onboarding session that ACH payments were available in Canada via Stripe, which is one of the main reasons why I got this program, and they're not, so super disappointing there. Customer support tries to be helpful but it takes half a week to get a response to a very simple question, and I have gotten responses that don't even solve the problem, because the software is just so outdated.