Every day over 269 billion emails are sent. Email is 47 years old next month (October), and it remains a life-shaping technology. We organize our work lives around our inbox -- even inventing terms like "zeroing out", "inbox zero", and "email anxiety" to describe our love-hate relationship with email. In monument shops, email is a double edged sword because it's a convenient way to communicate with clients, but it's also very hard to track. Email is pouring into your office computers, but it needs to be stored with the right orders so that no mistakes are made as the monument moves through the production process.   

We think it's time for your inbox to evolve! StoneSpot automatically receives emails and routes them to the correct order so that they're always available when you need them. It's part of our goal to organize all communication about orders in one spot -- StoneSpot! 

StoneSpot is built for the monument industry and can make your monument shop run smoother and more profitably. Monument makers need special order forms that record information about the purchaser, decedent, cemetery, memorial design, and granite memorial. Because each monument or headstone is a custom piece of artwork commissioned by a family, monument software needs to also track communication with the family as well as layout approvals so that the family's expectations can be met. Each order should contain all the information about the monument -- the names, dates, design, granite information, client communication, approval information, and production status so that you don't waste time hunting for information and so that mistakes can be avoided. 

Monument software should be strong on production organization, and should easily share that information with your clients. How many times a month do you respond to questions about the status of an order? Good software--designed for monument builders--can help solve this problem by giving your clients the information they want, when they want it. 

Who's got time to document the fact that a 3-0 x 1-0 was cut-down to get a 2-0 x 1-0 for an angry customer that sat on the approval for three months but still needs their memorial in three days for a family get-together? In situations like these you pull a rabbit out of the hat. You make your client happy, and you inadvertently set yourself up for another crisis because at the same time you were cutting that three foot marker into a two foot marker, your sales person was selling it to another family because "Hey, it still showed in inventory"! 

Monument Builders face some unique challenges that make standard inventory management software inadequate. Cut-downs, custom orders, and the difficulty of moving and handling memorial inventory are special challenges in our industry that make things a bit more complicated. Here's the kind of issues we've been working on lately:

• Monument builders need an inventory system that's flexible because the production guy can't dig through a stack of markers to get one specific marker at the bottom of a pile, but in some case it needs to be specific enough to let us know which of our locations has a specific display piece. 

• We need an easy way to handle cut-downs so that you can remove the piece of inventory that's being cut-down, but still record what it was cut to.

• Physical inventory counts take too long and are too complicated for most monument shops to do more than once a year. Is there a way we could improve this because a monthly count would find and resolve inventory problems before they became a crisis?

If you'd like to learn more about how we're solving these kind or problems, then please join our facebook group! The StoneSpot Users Group is made up of over 200 monument makers, and provides ideas and insights that give direction to the StoneSpot software. Join us in the StoneSpot User's Group!