Shepherd vs Covetrus Avimark: Which is a better fit?

Daniel K.: My name's Daniel, and I'm the IT director. And I give AVImark a four out of five. And for more ratings like this, click below. Prior to using AVImark, we were using just a collection of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and Outlook calendar to do our scheduling and keep track of records and expenses and invoicing and everything that runs the business and it was quickly growing to be a cumbersome and labor intensive activity. So we needed to look for a new solution other than just using Microsoft Office. The reasons that we chose to go with the AVImark software was that, one, it covered all of the things that we were hoping for in a solution for our practice. It had a price that was attractive to us as an entry point to get started with, and it would run on our existing hardware. We didn't need to really go out and buy the newest and best hardware to get started with it. And setting it up, it didn't require its own server. We could just set it up in a Windows peer-to-peer network, and it just made getting it implemented and off the ground really simple and fairly quick for us. It was a pretty easy step for us because of all of our records just being so chaotic, all over the place, spread across multiple spreadsheets and Word documents and such. So we basically had just a blank slate to go and start with, so we were able to just start entering information from scratch to get things up and running. Most of our old records prior to AVImark, we just archived so that if we'd have to go back and look them up, they were still there for us. But AVImark was a nice clean slate getting things implemented. Few things we were able to go and implement from the spreadsheets, such as client information and history and stuff like that. But for the most part, it was just real simple to get the program installed, up and running, and just start entering data. My recommendations is follow their hardware guidelines, their minimum requirements versus their recommended requirements. The recommended requirements just makes the program seamless and it flies very well. It's got a nice entry in so much as the fact that it can be run on a peer-to-peer network without a server, but implementing a server if you can afford that cost really makes it a nice robust program for each of the users and their experience with it.