G2

Verified User in Supermarkets

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

10/28/2026

"Straightforward, Customizable CRM for Vendor and Loyalty Tracking"

4/5

What do you like best about Friday CRM?

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.

What do you dislike about Friday CRM?

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.

What problems is Friday CRM solving and how is that benefiting you?

For Harvest Lane Grocers Inc, our regional supermarket chain, Friday CRM is mainly fixing the chaos of having vendor and loyalty member information scattered all over the place. Before we started using it, our purchasing team stored distributor details, delivery feedback and quality complaints in random spreadsheets, long email threads, and even separate notebook files. Our loyalty shopper notes lived inside our curbside ordering platform, with no simple way to tie customer feedback to our weekly promotion planning. Whenever a supplier issue popped up — like late produce drops or inconsistent product quality — someone would waste time hunting down past conversations instead of jumping straight into resolving the problem.

The biggest problem it solves is giving us one shared hub for both wholesale vendor profiles and our loyalty program members. All our purchasing staff and store managers can open the same record and see the full history: past delivery issues, agreed delivery windows, recall contacts, and any special arrangements we’ve worked out with each distributor. Earlier this quarter, we had a recurring issue with a packaged snack supplier sending incorrect case counts. Our purchasing lead pulled up their Friday CRM record right before our weekly check-in call, reviewed every prior note we had logged, and laid out the pattern clearly. We didn’t have to sift through months of emails to make our case, and the supplier adjusted their picking process quickly. That kind of context was really hard to gather before.

It also helps us keep our loyalty outreach consistent. We built simple automations to reconnect with members who haven’t engaged with our weekly sales offers for a while. Previously, we only sent mass blast emails to every loyalty contact at once, with no way to target quieter shoppers. Now those gentle re-engagement messages run automatically. It doesn’t replace our main marketing tools, but it fills that gap for small, targeted loyalty nudges without adding more manual work for our back-office team.

Another pain point it eases is handoffs between our back-office purchasing group and in-store leadership. Store managers often spot problems firsthand — damaged pallets, missed delivery windows, or customer requests related to our loyalty program. They can log those observations directly as activities on the matching vendor or member record. Before, those updates would get relayed through text messages or casual conversations, and details would get lost or miscommunicated. Now everything is timestamped and attached to the correct profile, so whoever follows up has the full picture.

For my role as Business Applications & Operations Coordinator, it’s also been helpful for onboarding new purchasing team members. Instead of handing them a messy folder of spreadsheets and explaining where to find all our supplier background, I can point them to Friday CRM. New hires can read through past activity logs and get up to speed on our key distributors much faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.