Honestly, what I like best about Friday CRM is how straightforward it is to tailor to our grocery operation, without all the bloated sales features we’ll never use. I’m the Business Applications & Operations Coordinator at Harvest Lane Grocers Inc, a regional supermarket chain with 51–200 team members spread across our store locations and back office. A lot of CRMs out there are built strictly for B2B sales teams chasing new leads, which never fit our mix of vendor management, loyalty member tracking, and wholesale supplier follow-up. Friday CRM keeps things focused and doesn’t force us to work around features meant for deal closing pipelines.
We mainly use it to keep organized records for our wholesale food distributors, local produce vendors, and our in-store loyalty shoppers. The custom record fields are a huge win for us. I added fields to log delivery window preferences, minimum order sizes, recall notification contacts, and vendor quality notes right on each supplier profile. Before Friday CRM, this kind of information was scattered across shared spreadsheets, email threads, and handwritten notes kept by our purchasing lead. A couple months back, we had a dairy supplier miss three deliveries in a row. We were able to pull up their whole history inside Friday CRM quickly — past delivery issues, our agreed-upon lead times, and the contact for their operations manager — so our purchasing team could hop on a call and resolve it instead of digging through weeks of old emails.
It’s also really easy for our non-office staff to jump in and add updates. Our store managers don’t spend all day at a desk, and they aren’t super tech-focused. The clean layout means they can log a note about a vendor’s late shipment or flag a loyalty member’s special request without getting confused by complicated menus. We set up simple activity logs so every follow-up call or email to a distributor stays attached directly to that vendor’s profile. That gives everyone on our purchasing and operations team the same up-to-date view.
I also love how simple the automation builder is for our loyalty communications. We built small, low-fuss workflows right inside Friday CRM. For example, if a loyalty member hasn’t redeemed any weekly offers in 45 days, it triggers a gentle message highlighting our current produce specials. It wasn’t hard to put together, and I didn’t need to loop in outside help. We don’t run super complex nurture sequences, so this lightweight automation fits our needs perfectly, without the steep learning curve that comes with bigger marketing automation platforms.
Another thing that stands out is how well it plays with our existing rhythm around store promotions. When we’re planning a seasonal sale or a remodel project, we can tag vendors inside Friday CRM to note which suppliers are providing promotional items. That ties our vendor conversations directly to the project we’re tracking in our project management tool. It keeps our purchasing aligned with the marketing and store teams.
For my role, training is a big part of the job, and Friday CRM makes that part much easier. I can get our purchasing staff and store leads comfortable with the basics in a short session. There aren’t dozens of modules and settings to walk them through. We only turn on the pieces we actually need. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
To be honest, Friday CRM has some notable drawbacks that create extra work for our team at Harvest Lane Grocers Inc. I’m the Business Applications & Operations Coordinator supporting our regional supermarket chain, and while it works well for basic vendor and loyalty tracking, there are several rough spots that pop up constantly for our purchasing managers and store leadership.
First off, the inventory and supplier order tracking functionality is really limited. We rely heavily on tracking purchase commitments, backorders, and incoming shipments from our produce, meat, and packaged goods distributors. Friday CRM isn’t built to link directly to line-item PO data. We can log a general note that we placed an order, but we can’t attach full POs, track partial shipments, or flag backordered SKUs natively. Last month, one of our purchasing coordinators logged a follow-up with a berry vendor inside Friday CRM, but there was no easy way to attach the actual PO. When that shipment arrived short, we had to flip over to our ERP to pull the order details, then manually paste the update back into the CRM. It breaks that single source of truth we were hoping to build for our vendor conversations.
The reporting tools are another frustration. We need straightforward reports like vendor on-time delivery rates, recurring quality issues, and engagement stats for our loyalty members. The pre-built reports are pretty generic, and the custom report builder feels clunky. Filtering across multiple record types — vendors and loyalty members together — just isn’t supported. I tried building a monthly report to flag suppliers with repeated late deliveries, and I couldn’t get it to group results by vendor location or product category. I ended up exporting raw CSV data and cleaning it up in a spreadsheet every week to share with our purchasing lead. That manual reporting overhead adds up fast.
Permission controls are too broad for our setup, too. Our store managers need to leave quick notes about vendor deliveries or customer loyalty feedback, but we don’t want them editing core supplier pricing, minimum order values, or our negotiated contract terms. Friday CRM’s roles don’t let us split those actions cleanly. If we grant a store user edit access to add activity notes, they also have the ability to change critical vendor details. We had a close call a few weeks ago: a store manager updated a delivery window field but accidentally overwrote our agreed minimum order quantity for a bread supplier. It took us a couple days to catch the mistake before we sent our next weekly order. As a workaround, most store staff are stuck with view-only access, which means they send me separate emails with notes for me to enter into the CRM. That defeats a lot of the purpose. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
