Straight answers.

Technically, all three are the same kind of thing — cloud software you use in a browser over a secure connection, nothing installed on your computer. Nobody has a technology moat there.

The difference is weight and shape. QuickBooks and Zoho are enormous platforms built for every business on earth — restaurants, law firms, freelancers — so every screen is general-purpose and your trade's realities have to be bolted on with workarounds, apps, and a month of configuration. Tillfront is lean and built for exactly one trade: pack sizes and jobber invoices, license numbers where regulators want them, wholesale and retail as truly separate channels, state vape excise computed per ship-to state and frozen for audit, delivery routes, a customer ordering portal. Those aren't add-ons here — they're the bones. And because it's small and single-purpose, it loads in about a second on the dusty PC at the counter.

And the shape difference: QuickBooks is accounting software — a ledger with invoicing attached. Tillfront is operational software — it runs the day: the scan, the invoice, the route, the register, the time clock. Most of our customers keep QuickBooks for the books and run Tillfront in front of it; your accountant gets clean reports and CSVs, and keeps working wherever they like.

Two ways, both optional. ✳ Ask is an assistant inside the app that answers questions about your business — "who's over 90 days?", "top customers this month?", "what should I reorder?" — using the exact same code as the Reports tab. It never estimates, never states tax rates, and can't change anything.

Connect AI goes the other direction: link the Claude or ChatGPT account you already pay for to your Tillfront data as a read-only connector, and ask from there. Works with both. Every question either way is logged on your account, and you can revoke access in one click.

Three ways, pick your favorite. The add-on ($10/mo): we supply the AI, a monthly usage allowance is included, and there's nothing to set up — tick it at signup or add it any time. Your own key (free from us): paste your own Anthropic API key in Settings and the assistant runs on your account with your own spending cap — a heavy month costs a couple of dollars, paid to the AI company, not to us. Connect AI (free): link the Claude or ChatGPT subscription you already pay for to your data as a read-only connector. Whichever you choose, every question is logged on your account.

Correct, and on purpose. There's no general ledger, no bank feeds, no payroll filing in Tillfront — that's your accountant's territory and their tools are good at it. Tillfront produces the operational truth those books are built from: invoices, payments, sales, excise, hours. Reports and CSV exports hand it over cleanly.

Nothing installs. Tillfront runs in the browser on whatever you have — the office PC, a laptop, a tablet, your phone. Any USB or Bluetooth barcode scanner that types what it scans (which is nearly all of them) works out of the box. Invoices print from the normal print dialog to any printer, or save as PDFs.

Fourteen days, full software, your real data. A card goes on file when you sign up but $0 is charged today — the first monthly charge happens automatically when the trial ends. Cancel before day 14 and you pay nothing at all. Two weeks is deliberate: it's enough time to import your catalog, run real invoices, and see a full pay cycle before you decide. Pricing is on the front page: Wholesale $199/mo, the ordering portal +$50, retail sites +$50 each, or a standalone retail store at $79/mo.

Export a CSV from whatever you're leaving — every POS and inventory system has that button — and Tillfront's importer reads it, guesses which of their columns is which, lets you correct any guess, and imports. Matching UPCs update, new ones create, and the default mode never overwrites data you already have. A thousand products usually lands in about ten minutes. Rather not touch it? We'll do it with you on a call.

All 50 states are configurable — per-mL, per-unit, percent-of-cost, or percent-of-wholesale-price, whichever your states use. You enter your rates (they come from your accountant or the state; we don't supply tax advice), flag your taxable products once, and every invoice computes excise from the customer's ship-to state and freezes it on the line — rate changes never rewrite history, which is exactly what an audit wants to see. At filing time, one report shows what's owed by state and by customer, with every invoice a click away and the whole period's paper trail downloadable as a single PDF. See it step by step.

Your data lives in a professionally-run cloud database, encrypted in transit, and access is enforced in the database itself, per login — a store login sees its store, a portal customer sees only their own account and never your costs, and nobody sees another business's anything. You can download a complete backup of your account any time, and if you ever leave, you leave with your data — it says so in the terms.

Honest answer: Tillfront is cloud software, so it needs a connection — same as QuickBooks, Zoho, or your card processor. The flip side of that trade is real: nothing is stored on any one machine, so a dead register or a stolen laptop costs you a device, not your data — sign in on any other screen and keep working. Most shops run fine on a phone hotspot in a pinch.

Yes — that's the ordering portal. Each customer gets a login, sees your catalog at their prices with their order history and invoices, and sends orders that land in your Orders tab as drafts you review and turn into invoices. Reorders happen at 10pm from the couch instead of in Tuesday's voicemail.

Yes. Retail sites attach to a wholesale account at $50/month each — every location gets its own register, its own counts, shared rewards, and the same promos, all under one login. A store standing alone runs on the $79 retail plan.

Tell us and it ends at the close of the paid period — during the trial, it ends free. Ask and you get a complete export of your data, and then it's deleted from the live system. No hostage-taking; the backup button on your own Settings page proves the data was always yours.

A wholesale distributor who got tired of running the trade on software that wasn't built for it. Tillfront runs a real wholesale operation and real retail stores every day — the features exist because the business needed them, and new-account setup is handled personally by people who do this work themselves.