A & D Hardware

Carrie Montgomery admits she is not, in her own words, "the best person to answer the phone for a sales call," a fact a Rundoo rep learned within about a minute of calling the store in March of 2026. She remembers her response as "very short, courteous. No, I'm not interested."

A & D Hardware sits on Main Street in Coatesville, Indiana, a town of roughly five hundred people half an hour west of Indianapolis, and many of the customers who come to the counter are farmers working from handwritten lists. The store had run on the same desktop point of sale for years, and Carrie had been unhappy with it for nearly as long, but being unhappy with a system and being ready to replace it are two very different things.

Her complaints were less about a feature list than about what happened when she needed the software to work. It lived on one machine, and it tied the store to that machine along with it.

"It was not internet cloud based. I could not access it without being on the computer that it was registered to."

When something went wrong, reaching a person was another project entirely. Angie Rogers, A & D's bookkeeper, puts it plainly, saying "It's hard to get somebody on the phone when you need help," and Carrie adds, "Yeah, or to even answer emails too." More than any individual problem, though, what worried Carrie was that Cashier Pro had stopped moving forward. Her word for it is "stagnant." "They weren't growing whatsoever," she says.

The postcard that sat on the desk for a month

Two weeks after the call she cut short, a postcard from Rundoo arrived in the mail, and this time she did not dismiss it.

"I got a flyer, a little postcard from Rundoo. I don't know, I hung onto it and I had it for a month and I looked at it."

Then came an afternoon frustrating enough to make her act, and she "started Googling and brought up the website." The postcard had waited on her desk until the day she was ready to look, which meant that Carrie came back to Rundoo on her own terms.

What stood out was not a feature grid but the direction Rundoo was heading. "Okay, AI is one," she says. The other was the freedom to leave the store without losing sight of it, because as she puts it, "I can travel anywhere, which I like to go on cruises, but I can have access to be able to see what's going on and help if needed. Even when I'm away." Then she called Rundoo back.

Asking around before saying yes

Carrie did not take Rundoo's word for it, and rather than shop for a competing quote, she asked people she already trusted.

The first was a hardware store fifteen miles up the road in Roachdale. It turned out that store was talking to Rundoo at the same time, and the two businesses would end up going live within three days of each other in June. "I came to find out another hardware store close to us in Roachdale was also working with you guys at the same time," she says. "So I reached out to them going, hey, you guys are doing Rundoo also?"

The second was Kevin, her Orgill rep, who "had spoke to you guys at the show in February" and stopped by A & D on a Friday in April. Support was the point he kept coming back to, telling her that "a lot of people are thinking about Rundoo because of one, support." As Carrie recalls it, "That was Kevin's biggest thing that he took away from it was you guys and your support."

Both references came from people Carrie already knew, and neither of them had anything to sell her. She signed the following Monday.

Six weeks from the signature to the register

A & D's data moved off the old desktop system into a store built from scratch in Rundoo, and across four training sessions in the second half of May the team practiced the work of a hardware counter: checking out contractors and homeowners, handling returns and charge accounts, managing the cash drawer, and setting up tax-exempt customers, price tiers and product categories. Two thermal printers, two barcode scanners and the card readers arrived by mail, and A & D went live on Rundoo at the beginning of June.

The Orgill integration changed the purchasing workflow as well. Purchase orders now go to Orgill electronically and come back with an acknowledgment, and vendor price changes flow into the store's pricing without anyone retyping numbers off a sheet.

The part the customers noticed

The clearest change at A & D was at checkout. On the old setup, every card payment required its own little series of prompts. "I always had to ask customers credit or debit, confirm the amount first, then tap or swipe," she says. "It was just time consuming and old." When the card terminal locked up, and it locked up more than once, it took the point of sale down with it, and the card could still be charged even though the system had no matching sale.

"So we had to go in, fix inventory, fix that transaction so to speak," she says. There was never any missing the problem, because "we always knew when it happened because it locked everything up," and staff then had to rebuild by hand a sale the customer had already carried out the door.

That work is gone. Card processing now runs through Rundoo on the same screen as the sale, and Carrie's assessment is "It's been very simple. A lot better." The customers noticed too.

"I've had lots of compliments from customers of, wow, this is easier. So much easier now."

A reader and a doer

Angie came at the software from a different direction and found a resource she had not expected.

"I am a reader and a doer, and I really appreciate the amount of information that you guys have available to go out and watch quick little things on a certain item."

What she is describing is the Rundocs, the help center that comes with Rundoo, where written guides and short walkthrough videos cover the setup work and the counter workflows that store teams ask about most, and any client can read it without waiting on a ticket first. Angie had also described herself in our own vocabulary, because we are all Dooers around here.

When a question threatens to hold up the rest of her work, she can go find the answer herself. "I can just say, I need to know how to set up a tax exempt customer, and I can go out there and figure out exactly what I need to do really easy," she says, and the contrast with other software she deals with is stark: "I have another company that doesn't do any of that, and it's impossible to get an answer for anything." Her tax-exempt question is one of dozens the Rundocs answers on its own, and for Angie good software answers the question and lets her get on with her day.

What she would tell the store down the road

Carrie had already asked a nearby store for its opinion, and now she was ready to answer the same question herself, though her recommendation comes with a candid caveat. "I would highly recommend you guys. I really would, even with all of the..." she says, "because of your innovation, moving forward, building AI, trying to move forward with the times." She filled that unfinished sentence a moment later by acknowledging that "Any change with any program, you're always going to have the glitches." To Carrie that is part of adopting any new system, and is expected, as long as the issues get fixed quickly along the way.

"Yes, I would recommend you guys to any other retail store."

She still has a list. She wants a faster keypad workflow for the farmers who arrive at the counter with a quantity and a price already worked out, and she wants to see how far the accounting tools develop over the next six months to a year. Our team is aware of all her asks, and she credits them for the service received: "You guys have been good on the support and getting us where we need to be, or answering how to do something, or change this or that. So we appreciate that."

The software Carrie called stagnant is behind her now. A postcard outlasted a phone call, which is a fair trade for anyone who has ever screened a sales call, and the next cruise is already booked.