Alpine Design Co.

Brad Robertson knew that his existing software was wrong on his first day using it. He had taken on a paint store in Cornwall, Ontario, inherited a point of sale along with it, and reached a verdict almost right away.

"I decided the first day I saw it that it was not the right software for us long term."

Knowing that and being able to do anything about it turned out to be two different problems. Cornwall sits about an hour southeast of Ottawa, and Brad's store sits in a market that most point of sale companies quietly decide is somebody else's problem, because a Canadian independent, in a buying group, selling paint, is a narrow enough description that plenty of vendors never get around to writing software for it at all.

"I didn't understand that there was another option in the market."

"Whenever you're ready, I'd be the guinea pig"

That changed at the AllPro show in the spring of 2025. Brad found the Rundoo booth, talked to the team, and understood that the platform was not ready to go live in Canada yet. The system had been built for stores in the United States, and going live in Canada was going to take real engineering work.

Brad's response was to get in line for something that did not exist yet.

"They said, hey, we're probably years away from being in Canada. I told them whenever they're ready, I'd be the guinea pig. They messaged me a few months later and said it was ready."

He did not ask for a demo before he committed, and he did not take a second meeting with anyone else, because he knew that a web POS platform would be significantly better than a desktop one, and that it would grow with them without needing to get constant software updates.

"They didn't even need to show me the product. I just knew an online platform was better than a desktop platform, and obviously it'll evolve because it can. Whereas desktop technology, it's impossible for it to evolve as quickly as we would want it to."

He signed in May 2026 and picked a go-live date in August, which gave everyone ninety days and a long list of features needed for launch day.

What "ready for Canada" had to mean

Alpine is the first store in Canada to go live with all of the major Canadian features working on day one, from the three sales taxes to the province and postal code selectors on every address field. Ninety days is not much runway for an entire country, so the list got written down and then knocked off one item at a time.

Addresses had to stop assuming clients were only in the United States, so every customer record, every contractor, and every employee file needed provinces instead of states and postal codes instead of ZIPs. Payments had to run on Canadian rails, which meant Alpine's own Canadian processing account, set up and verified before a single card touched a reader.

Then came taxes, which is where Canada stops being a version of the United States that spells colour with a u. Sales tax up there arrives in three varieties, and a platform meant to work anywhere in the country has to speak all three of them. There is the federal GST, there is HST in provinces like Ontario that fold the federal and provincial pieces into a single harmonized rate, and there is PST in the provinces that still charge their own tax alongside the federal one. Rundoo had to know which of the three applied, at what rate, and on which line of the receipt, and all of it had to hold up in front of the accountant who reconciles the remittance at the end of the month. Building that for Ontario alone would have been quicker, and it would have meant building it a second time for the next store.

The Benjamin Moore integration had to work with Canadian specifics. Alpine's product identifiers went to Benjamin Moore for review, came back with corrections, got fixed, and went back again, because no electronic orders can flow between a paint store and Benjamin Moore until those match.

Brad brought one specific ask to the table himself, in detail, with a screen recording of how his team handles it today. When one of his customers orders direct from Benjamin Moore, Benjamin Moore invoices and taxes that customer, Alpine supplies the product, and Alpine takes a credit on its statement. It is not a sale at Brad's register, and treating it like one would mean paying tax on revenue he never collected. That is the kind of detail that only ever surfaces when the person running the store is in the room.

At the same time, a paint store is still a paint store. Two thermal printers, two card readers, and two scanners came in the mail. His existing label printer stayed, his cash drawers kept working off the printer, and his staff kept signing in with PINs because that is what they were used to.

Going first, with your eyes open

Brad signed up for this part too. A system that had only ever run in one country was going to meet the edges of another one, and he priced that in rather than pretending it away. He was aware that issues would come up, but he cared the most about what happened in the ninety seconds after they did, and how the Rundoo team responded.

"Any time we've seen a hiccup, whether it was, oh, we can't select Canada, it was defaulted to US, it was fixed just like that. It was amazing."

That is a high bar to clear, if you have never done business in more than one country, because it means someone on the Rundoo team reads the message the evening it arrives, and it means engineering is up to speed with every detail so that changes can be made on the fly. If you ask Brad how the go-live went, he will talk about the people first, rather than just the product.

"It's been amazing. Understanding that we're one of the first ones in Canada, understanding that there was going to be hiccups, I'm glad we took the time and ironed out all the things, and you guys being here."

He says one of the first, which is him being modest, because no store in Canada had run the full platform before his did. Those last four words are the ones worth sitting with, though, because of who was standing in his store. For a go-live in Cornwall, Rundoo sent two software engineers who had spent months getting the system ready for Canadian stores. They introduced themselves the week before so Brad's team would know who was walking in, they came up the night before, and they were at the store when it opened. The person who wrote the Canadian address handling was on the floor when someone at the counter typed an Ontario postal code into a live transaction for the first time.

Brad, for his part, had a working morning on job sites and told them his team would take care of them until he got back by one, which is its own kind of compliment. Before the day was out, both teams signed an Alpine shirt and dated it 8/4/26, which is the sort of thing you only do when the launch went well enough that everybody wants their name on it.

What he tells the other paint store owners

Brad is not a soft-sell reference, which is exactly why the other AllPro paint store owners should call him. Asked what he would say to one of them, he split the answer cleanly, talking about both product and people at Rundoo.

"The service is fantastic. The software is fantastic. It looks more professional. It's a modern system. Everything at your fingertips, POS, everything."

On the decision to change POS providers, he talks about money, and how a new system is a line on the ledger before it is anything else, and that each owner has to follow the revenue, as well as reporting capabilities as the justification for adopting a new system.

"Yes, you will see it in your reporting and everything. There's only so much of that. Finding value on actual return and additional sales, I think we're going to see that."

We are happy that Brad made the call on where the technology was heading, and that he made it early enough that the technology needed to be built to meet him. Now he wants a second location, and eventually more than that, so there is a good chance the next Cornwall story is about opening rather than switching.