ive been asked by a friend if i could recogmend some software to them for their expanding business.

 

Their business is a mainly a telephone comunication / sales business. at the moment they have 4 members of staff but are looking to expand.

 

At the moment they are using quickbooks for they invoicing etc an using quickbooks customer manage for the sales staff to use for appointments, reminders and loging information and keeping track of customers money / payments etc.

 

The problem they are running into is that this is now not powerfull enought due to an upcomming expansion and are looking for a new customer manager software to take over

 

This new software would need to be able to keep track of payments and outstanding payments from quickbooks, and control all the normal information, name address etc, and also allow notes and appointment/reminder to be set exactally what quicknbooks customer manager can do but with the added capabilities to have,more users, and for users to be in a different building and access the same information.

 

Does any one know of any??

 

Thanks for any support.

What you need to look for is CRM - Customer Relationship(?) Manager. I've never used any of them myself so can't point you in any particular direction but a web search should reveal lots of them

Try something from Zoho or 37 Signals. Should give you a very good CRM to get started with and most provide 3rd party integration.

I can't recommend anything specific, but I've seen a demo installation for vTigerCRM and thought it was impressive. It's a free CMS so I think it's worth checking out.

This new software would need to be able to keep track of payments and outstanding payments from quickbooks

 

This is going to be the difficult part of the requirements, as interfacing to quickbooks isnt the simplest of things, and the products that do, generally have high-price-tags and are not always very good.

 

I've used legrand (~£20k for a full 10 user version) but was unimpressed, looked at max.co.uk, but decided we'd develop in-house consolidated reporting systems of our own in the end.

Could always take a look at SugarCRM?

 

We looked into it in the past and it looked promising but like Rob we went in-house as well... Was a tad to complex for myself and others...