DEAR is now Cin7 Core: what changed and what didn't

What actually happened

Cin7, a New Zealand inventory company, acquired DEAR Systems in 2021. For a while both names carried on. Then, in January 2023, Cin7 pulled its products under one brand and DEAR became Cin7 Core. The login address moved from inventory.dearsystems.com to inventory.cin7core.com. The screens, the records and the way the thing works came across largely as they were.

That is genuinely the whole event. No forced upgrade, no data migration for existing customers, no change to how your stock is counted. A rebrand is a marketing decision that happens to land in your browser bookmarks.

Cin7 Core and Cin7 Omni are not the same product

This is the part worth knowing, because it causes real confusion. Cin7 sells more than one thing. Cin7 Core is the former DEAR, aimed at wholesale, distribution and light manufacturing. Cin7 Omni is the older multi-channel retail platform, and it is a different system with different behaviour.

The practical consequence: a guide, a forum answer or a consultant's quote that says "Cin7" may be about either one. Before you follow any instructions, check which product your contract and your login name. We have watched people apply Omni advice to a Core tenant and conclude their system was broken.

Does the rename affect your Xero connection?

No. The native link between Cin7 Core and Xero is the same connection it was under the DEAR name, and it is still the right way to get invoices, bills and payments across. If yours has been running quietly for years, leave it alone.

The reason this question comes up so often is that people search for help using the name on their own screen, find guidance written for DEAR in 2021, and can't tell whether it still applies. Usually it does. Where DEAR-era advice genuinely goes stale is in the app listings and the screenshots, not in the mechanics.

Why everyone still says DEAR

Because renames take years to land. Your internal notes say DEAR. The integration guide your bookkeeper printed says DEAR. Third-party help articles, agency price lists and half the forum answers on the subject say DEAR, and search engines keep serving them because that is what people still type.

None of that is a problem to fix. It is worth knowing about for one practical reason: when you go looking for someone to help with the system, searching both names finds you roughly twice as much as searching one. The same thing happened in print, where Tharstern has belonged to a larger group since 2023 and the trade carried on using the old name regardless.

When it is worth spending money on this

Not on the rename. Where firms on Cin7 Core do get value is the reporting the native connection can't reach: true margin by customer with carriage and landed cost included, stock accuracy by warehouse, or a link to something that has no app in the store. That is a page of its own, and it's the kind of job you need someone for a fortnight, not a permanent software engineer on the payroll.