Rusty Gate Nursery & Building Supply

Thirty Years, Three Systems, One Family

Rusty Gate Nursery & Building Supply has been a fixture on Wood Avenue in Forks, Washington for over three decades, the kind of place where locals walk in knowing they can find everything from two-by-fours to flower pots to garden statues shaped like herons. Andrea Perkins and her husband bought the business in 2013 alongside their son Carl, taking over a store that had already been serving the community for roughly twenty years before they arrived. Andrea had a steady job at the time, which made the leap feel less like a gamble and more like an opportunity they could grow into together.

And grow it they did. Rusty Gate is not a single-category store; it is a nursery, a building supply center, and a garden destination all under one corrugated roof, the kind of operation where diversity of product is the whole point and no two customer tickets look alike.

Paper, Then Fire, Then Square

For years, Rusty Gate ran on paper. Handwritten receipt books that made three carbon copies, a standard cash register, and a flip-through price book that you thumbed through every time a customer asked what something cost. It worked well enough when the business was smaller, but as the inventory expanded and the customer list grew, it started to feel like running a marathon in work boots.

Then the original building burned down.

The fire forced Andrea and her family to rebuild from scratch, and when they set up shop at the potting bench to keep serving customers while construction happened around them, they decided it was finally time to computerize. Square was the cheapest, fastest option they could find, and it got them off paper. But if paper was running a marathon in work boots, Square turned out to be running that same marathon in shoes that were the wrong size.

The Square Peg in a Round Hole

Square works beautifully if you are a restaurant or a coffee shop where every transaction ends the same way: customer orders, customer pays, customer leaves. Rusty Gate does not operate like a coffee shop. The backbone of their business is charge accounts, where regular customers come in throughout the month, buy what they need, and settle up at the end with a check or a series of partial payments. A contractor might pick up lumber on Monday, come back for fence posts on Wednesday, drop off a partial payment on Friday, and return four of the fence posts the following week because he measured wrong.

On Square, every one of those interactions became a workaround. Running charge accounts meant keeping one long, open ticket per customer that just kept growing, line after line, week after week. When a customer made a partial payment, Andrea couldn't actually apply it to the ticket; she had to enter it as a note with a zero-dollar charge and then manually subtract it later. When someone wanted to know their balance, she would have to print the entire receipt, close out the zero charges, and add everything up by hand while the customer waited. Returns were even worse, because Square had no way to reverse a line item on an open ticket, so Andrea would go in and write a note that said something like "bought seven two-by-fours on March 3rd, returned three on March 10th" and hope the math stayed clean.

It was, as Andrea put it, "a lot of workaround."

And then the invoicing disappeared. Square removed the ability to convert running tickets into invoices, which had been the one feature keeping Andrea's monthly billing cycle alive. The platform shifted toward expecting every customer to pay electronically by email, which makes sense for plenty of businesses, but Andrea's clientele pays by check. They come in, they buy supplies, they get a statement in the mail, and they write a check. That is how it works in Forks, and a general-purpose POS simply was not designed with that workflow in mind.

"It's not our clientele. We take checks."

Meeting Ryan at the Horizon Show

Andrea met Ryan from the Rundoo sales team at the Horizon distributor show, and what started as a booth demo turned into a real conversation about whether a point-of-sale system could actually handle the way Rusty Gate does business. Ryan walked her through charge accounts, invoicing, statements, partial payments, returns, and all of the things that had been duct-taped together on Square for five years. Andrea and her family did a significant portion of the implementation work themselves and worked with Jason on the Rundoo implementation team to get everything set up remotely.

The Joy of a System That Was Built for Supply Stores

The difference Andrea notices most is that the workarounds are gone. Charge accounts actually function as charge accounts now: customers have real balances, payments apply directly, returns process cleanly, and at the end of the month Andrea can generate statements and mail them out without printing a receipt as long as her arm and doing arithmetic with a pencil. The things that took fifteen minutes of manual reconciliation on Square now just happen the way they are supposed to happen, because the system was designed for stores like hers instead of being repurposed from a restaurant platform.

The Kind of Support That Answers on a Weekend

When asked why another nursery or building supply center should consider Rundoo, Andrea didn't lead with features or pricing. She led with two things: the implementation process and the customer service. Jason, her implementation lead, answers her even on weekends, which is the kind of detail that matters more than any spec sheet when you are a store owner who just discovered something confusing at 4 p.m. on a Saturday and needs to be ready for Monday morning.

"Even on the weekend, he answers me."

Andrea's recommendation comes down to something simple.

"Rundoo can handle the diversity, all the different products and account types and billing quirks that make a place like Rusty Gate what it is, and when something goes sideways, someone actually picks up the phone."

For a family that rebuilt their business once from a fire and powered through five years of workarounds on the wrong system, having technology that finally fits is not just convenient. It is the kind of relief that lets you focus on the parts of the job you actually love, like filling a greenhouse with hanging baskets and helping your neighbors build something.