S
Stuart BURRELL
The family App is not fit for purpose
The Birdie all in one product is not yet fit for purpose We went live on 1st November and to remove it the following weekend due to it s deficiencies and the intransigence of Birdie They know it s weak Sage Care Planner and People Planner were all mentioned as a way of mitigating it s limitations During selection salesperson was elusive about references but we went ahead We realised just after the nick of time that the finance module was too limited Invoices can only be stored in Birdie using the Birdie numbering system starting at 1 If you are required to continue with your existing invoice numbers or a specific e-invoicing requirement forget it If you use planned mileage forget it You cannot add carers full addresses you have to store these elsewhere You cannot add multiple Next of Kin you cannot add multiple phone numbers for contacts unless you duplicate that contact or store elsewhere If the NoK pays bill details must be duplicated Every care visit must be confirmed manually System has no ability to block carers from working together You would need other systems to store all this information and preferences Ratesets are so complicated nobody at Birdie seems to understand them An addition of a single visit time can lead to a total deletion of all rates in the set and having to start from scratch Reporting gets updated once a day so if you need to export reports for your payroll you ll need to wait a day Good luck with staff reaction to that User interface Sometimes buttons are missing or off the screen or move about windows are set within windows that have no scroll bar so you have to use a wheelie mouse Few error messages mean you must search around to find why your form will not save Birdie s answer is to refresh your browser which leads to you losing your work Beware You can only assign 2 levels of access Carer and full admin Whole care plans and visits can be easily deleted Support is carried out through webchat by agents who are not allowed to call you or screen share If you have a question you will be sent a generic video It s a support model that may have been fit for a simple stable fully functional product but not this Requests that are important to customers are ignored The team kept telling me that there was a long-term popular request for carers to see in advance who they were working with on double-ups It s still not on the development schedule Back to my situation We carried out an invoice run using a rateset that Birdie fixed and it was still wrong We were approaching an invoice run deadline and I was losing confidence There was no escalation path so I emailed management That s when it went totally weird A few hours later we were invited to a meeting We turned up expecting to discuss our issues Birdie turned up with contract ammunition and were clear from the outset that they would not help and we should go elsewhere They kept referring to a free pre-contract period not even the salesperson who used this as an incentive would have thought this was a stick to beat us with I feared this was an excuse for Birdie to turn off the system They had no idea or concern of the damage this could cause to a small business The tone of this meeting made us feel sick and we told the Birdie team It made no difference Luckily our management team had been listening in on the call and had a similar level of nausea from the tone of the conversation After 48 hours and a monumental effort we de-risked our business by removing Birdie altogether The product is clearly not ready but my biggest issue is with the Birdie attitude With short term workarounds we were open to compromise Birdies preference was to leave us in the muck They didn t realise the damage this caused and are still asking me if I want to use the app priceless The product has been designed to demo well and these issues are hidden in demo mode For example if asked about custom invoice numbering the salesperson will show that you can manually add a number to an exported invoice Not much good when your customer or HMRC ask you to find said invoice 2 years from now If Birdie want to contact me they can use the webchat on my website