Guides / ERP augmentation
E2 / Shoptech runs the shop fine. But the day you want a straight answer — are we on time, did that job make money, what's coming due — the numbers are sitting in three different modules and the canned report doesn't cut them the way you'd cut them. Here's the real gap, and how to close it without ripping anything out.
If you run E2 Shop System, you already know the reporting isn't the problem with getting work out the door. The problem is getting a clean read on the work. E2 Shop System reporting limitations aren't about missing data — the data's all in there. It's that the data lives in module silos, the standard reports are rigid, and the only way to combine them the way your head combines them is to export to Excel and stitch it together by hand.
I ran a machine shop for a decade before I started building software. I know what it's like to want one number — say, true backlog against capacity, or where this month's sales actually landed — and have to open scheduling, open order entry, open the accounting side, and reconcile them in your head or in a spreadsheet. That's not an E2 defect. Every shop ERP of that generation works in modules. It's just that nobody designed the report you actually need at 6 a.m., so you build it yourself, over and over.
Credit where it's due. E2 (now ECI's JobBOSS² / E2 line under Shoptech) has a real reporting layer and a dashboard that'll show you monthly and yearly sales goals, backlog in a pie chart, and the standard operational cuts. For a lot of day-to-day questions, the canned reports cover it. The common complaint from shops isn't "there are no reports." It's two more specific things:
That's the gap. Not E2's existence — the missing layer on top of it.
The built-in E2 dashboard is fine for what it is. Where it falls short for most owners I talk to is that it's a screen you have to go look at, showing the cuts somebody else decided on. What an operator usually wants is the opposite: the few numbers you care about, pushed to you, combined across modules, without logging in. There's a small cottage industry of third-party E2 dashboard add-ons, which tells you plenty — if the native reporting answered the question, nobody would be buying a bolt-on to do it.
This is the work we do. You keep E2 running exactly as it is — it's your system of record and it's good at that. We build a connector to your ERP that reads the data out of those module silos (and pulls from your accounting system too), then puts a clean, automatic read on top. No re-keying, no exporting to Excel, no new system for your people to learn.
Straight on the honest part, because it matters: the connector we've actually built and deployed so far is for JobBOSS plus QuickBooks Online, not E2. I'm not going to tell you we have an E2 connector sitting on a shelf — we don't. What I can tell you is that E2 exposes a similar database and API surface, the build is the same kind of build, and the outcomes below are real and shipped. The E2 version is that same pattern pointed at your ERP.
Two things we built for a mid-size machine shop, both running in production:
Same idea would apply to E2: read what's already in your modules, combine it the way you'd combine it, and deliver it without anyone running a single report by hand.
The Owner's daily briefing and the KPI monthly briefing described above aren't mockups or roadmap items — they're deployed and in daily use at a mid-size machine shop, built on a connector to its ERP and accounting system. The shop and the numbers are real; we keep clients anonymous unless they say otherwise. See how they're built, alongside the rest of the work.
See selected work →No. That's the whole point. E2 stays your system of record. We read from it and add the layer that's missing — the combined, automatic daily read. Ripping out a working ERP to fix reporting would be the most expensive way to solve the smallest part of the problem.
Not yet — straight answer. The connector we've built and deployed is for JobBOSS and QuickBooks Online. E2 has a comparable database and API surface, so it's the same kind of build pointed at your system. We'd scope that in the Diagnostic before quoting anything.
It starts with a paid Diagnostic, then a fixed-price Build — most land in 4 to 8 weeks. It deploys in your own Microsoft 365 or Google tenant on infrastructure we manage, with a 12-month care plan. You own the software. No per-seat license, no six-month implementation.
That comes up. Duplicate parts, customers, and materials are a known E2 housekeeping headache. We look at exactly that in the Diagnostic — a clean daily read is only as good as what it's reading, so we figure out up front whether the data supports it or whether some cleanup comes first.
Related, if you're on a different system: knowing job profitability before month-end covers the same underlying gap — finding out a job lost money two weeks after it shipped is finding out too late.
First call is free and runs about 30 minutes — mostly questions about how your shop really runs and where the report-running eats your hours. We'll figure out together whether there's a fit. No demo, because it's custom work; just a conversation.