Not sure if anyone else has had this problem but Sonny's is a "yes man" company. We were looking to upgrade our tunnel controller to communicate with our Unitec pay stations and Sonny's was on the top of the list. We went to the big car wash conventions and talked with several company's and Sonny's seemed to be the only one who offered the options we were looking for. Nick from Sonny's promised us they could make everything work that I asked about because their software was all done in-house. Their show special was $299/month for 2 years for the point of sale and that was it. All of our current info would be transfered to new servers and we could operate immediately. Everything seemed to good to be true but I was assured it was easy to make everything talk.
After spending $$$$$.$$ to upgrade both of our washes, we started installing the tunnel controller in our south location and immediately noticed we had issues. We flew one of their software engineers up to help with the data transfer. He said the data transfer wouldn't work because we didn't have sonny's pay stations. Funny thing about this new tunnel controller and POS is they were originally designed around Unitec sentinel pay stations because sonny's didn't have their own yet. So ours should work. After waiting for the software engineers to sort that out it was issue after issue. After a week or so of talking with them, we got most of the bugs ironed out. I was told multiple time,"we can't do that, who told you we can?" by Sonny's. I was as frustrated as they were, but we were able to come up with solutions to most of the problems.
The biggest problem came in the form of an email saying that this system would now cost us $350/month for the rest of it's life, for each location. I specifically asked Nick at the car wash convention in Nashville if there were any monthly fee's and he said no. This was the main reason I went with sonny's. Emails went back and forth with Nick asking him where I signed up for this and he said I did at the show but couldn't come up with any paperwork to prove it. He threatened to erase my servers if I didn't pay claiming the information on them was property of Sonny's. This fee was a license for the software they were using.
The point of this is get things in writing. Their sales team was great in Nashville and seemed very straight forward but now I know they will say what they need to if it puts money in their pocket. I'm counting the days before I get an email or an error message on my screen and Sonny's says Unitec is no longer compatible with their tunnel controller and we are forced to purchase their pay stations. 5 of those should be cheap.
After spending $$$$$.$$ to upgrade both of our washes, we started installing the tunnel controller in our south location and immediately noticed we had issues. We flew one of their software engineers up to help with the data transfer. He said the data transfer wouldn't work because we didn't have sonny's pay stations. Funny thing about this new tunnel controller and POS is they were originally designed around Unitec sentinel pay stations because sonny's didn't have their own yet. So ours should work. After waiting for the software engineers to sort that out it was issue after issue. After a week or so of talking with them, we got most of the bugs ironed out. I was told multiple time,"we can't do that, who told you we can?" by Sonny's. I was as frustrated as they were, but we were able to come up with solutions to most of the problems.
The biggest problem came in the form of an email saying that this system would now cost us $350/month for the rest of it's life, for each location. I specifically asked Nick at the car wash convention in Nashville if there were any monthly fee's and he said no. This was the main reason I went with sonny's. Emails went back and forth with Nick asking him where I signed up for this and he said I did at the show but couldn't come up with any paperwork to prove it. He threatened to erase my servers if I didn't pay claiming the information on them was property of Sonny's. This fee was a license for the software they were using.
The point of this is get things in writing. Their sales team was great in Nashville and seemed very straight forward but now I know they will say what they need to if it puts money in their pocket. I'm counting the days before I get an email or an error message on my screen and Sonny's says Unitec is no longer compatible with their tunnel controller and we are forced to purchase their pay stations. 5 of those should be cheap.
