Mavance, LLC

In this post, I will cover some of the options you have for managing the money flow and your relationships. The two main systems I am covering are:

• Accounting/General Ledger Software
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

Accounting/General Ledger Software
This is the software you run your business on. The technology alternatives to ledgers are vast. You can simply add entries to Quickbooks on your laptop/desktop on the low end to having a shareable online portal via Netsuite. Let’s take a look at the options out there and some pros/cons of each method:Desktop Products:

• Quickbooks - The de Facto standard for both businesses and accountants.
• Peachtree - Quickbooks is a better option..
• Excel, OpenOffice, NeoOffice (Mac OS X), iWorks’ Numbers (Mac OS X) - A very manual process but a possible solution if you’re launching on a shoe string.

Software as a Service (SaaS)/hosted products:

• Netsuite - Netsuite is an expensive proposition for many companies. It is a very complex system due to the feature richness.
• NetBooks - Netbooks is less expensive solution than Netsuite. It is definitely a product/service to watch
• Quickbooks Online - Quickbooks provides some good solutions for small business for the price. Intuit, the maker of the Quickbooks software/services, is making a huge push to move its customers to online solutions

Overall Pros/Cons of Accounting/General Ledger Software:

Desktop Pros:

• Great usability compared to SaaS
• Application response time is generally better than SaaS.
• Generally a more secure - your data is with you.

Desktop Cons:

• More difficult to share information with other parties like your accountant or partner.
• You are responsible for backups (of your managed services/IT person..)

SaaS Pros:

• Easy to share information
• Easy to extend services with online partners of the service offering
• Backups are someone else’s problem.
• Upgrades are someone else’s problem.

SaaS Cons:

• You must trust your provider. Your data is in their hands. You must know how they protect it and back it up.
• Application performance may be impacted by a number of factors. Then again, if you do have a problem, is it with them, your Internet provider, their Internet provider, a transit network, your computer? You get the idea…

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software
CRMs are critical for organizing your sales process and customer touch points. I’ll go into more detail about CRMs in another post. As you will see from a survey of some of choices, it is a VERY crowded field. The trend, with the exception of Rave CRM, is to move this interaction online as a hosted service or as a client-server interaction for company networks.Desktop products:

• Goldmine - A client/server solution that may work well for small businesses and those who are accustomed to being attached to their corporate network on a regular basis.
• Rave CRM - A newer product - I’ve seen some good writeups on it.
• ACT! - This product has been around for almost two decades. It’s a great product but the trend moving to online services.

SaaS/Hosted:

• ConcursiveSuite - Concursive is both an Open Source/community support product and a pay/enterprise version. Without getting into the technical details between this, SugarCRM and vTiger, it’s a great product. It may be worthwhile trying it, for get this, free for five user for a year.
• SugarCRM - Like Concursive, SugarCRM has multiple versions available. You can host your own or subscribe (minimum of 5 users) to either Sugar’s Professional or Enterprise editions. Sugar provides the differences between the pay editions on this page.
• Netsuite - In my opinion, Netsuite’s CRM capabilities are good but not as great as Sugar or Consursive. However, it’s integrated so that you see a single view of all customers. In other words, you don’t have to enter information in your ledger and then add another customer record in Netsuite. The unified view is very valuable in my mind.
• 37Signal’s Highrise - 37Signals makes software that’s easy for people to use. The usability rivals desktop products in some cases. However, Highrise simplicity takes away some functionality found in other hosted/SaaS product.
• heap - You may have never heard of WBP System’s heap. I stumbled across it ~ 6 mos ago when going through my own analysis of products. It, like 37Signals Highrise, is a very simple product to use. It’s **VERY** cheap at only $9/user/month and has what amounts to unlimited storage at that price. WBP provides widgets for both Vista and Mac OS X and email workflow processing. That’s cool! I’d recommend taking a look at it if you need something simple.
• SalesForce.com - SalesFoce.com is a pioneer in this space. The only problem, it’s like Frankenstein. It’s so patched together that I’m not a big fan of it. Netsuite is a much better (and cleaner) approach though SalesForce.com does have some great addons..

Overall Pros/Cons of CRM Software:

Desktop Pros:

• Same as above - Great usability compared to SaaS, Application response time is generally better than SaaS, Generally a more secure - your data is with you.

Desktop Cons:

• Same as above - More difficult to share information with other parties like your accountant or partner, You are responsible for backups (of your managed services/IT person..)
• Miss out on features and innovation occurring on the Web. There’s a larger community behind both SugarCRM and SalesForce.com.

SaaS Pros:

• Same as above- Easy to share information, Easy to extend services with online partners of the service offering, Backups are someone else’s problem, upgrades are someone else’s problem.
• Innovation - the pro of the software con previously noted.

SaaS Cons:

• Same as above - You must trust your provider. Your data is in their hands. You must know how they protect it and back it up and possible application performance

Host Your Own:

• Concursive (Registration on site required for download of community edition) - You can use open source or a corporate supported, professional edition. Requirements: A compatible OS (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X or Sun Solaris) a J2EE stack and Postgreq DB (other databases are being developed but this is the reference database..)
• SugarCRM - To host SugarCRM, you need Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP Stack) by default but other OSs, including Windows and Mac OS X, work. If you need Oracle support then you must buy the Enterprise edition.
• vTiger - vTiger utilizes a standard LAMP stack.

Pros/Cons of Hosting it Yourself

Pros:

• Could be cheaper decided on one of the three options above - Concursive, SugarCRM or vTiger
• You control your data.
• You get the benefits of innovation on the Net/communities in a controlled environment.

Cons:

• For a small number of users, hosting it yourself may be more expensive. You must do a break even analysis of your internal hosting costs.
• You are responsible for administration including backups and upgrades.

My Decision
I am a big fan of both SugarCRM and Concursive. However, I am more interested in having a single view of my customers. As noted above, if I have a customer record in QuickBooks and a customer record in SugarCRM then I must synchronize the data manually. Netsuite has solved this problem. This is the main reason I chose Netsuite. Sure, it’s expensive but I know myself well enough to know I would be annoyed sync’ing data between the two systems.I did not include OpenBravo in this writeup. OpenBravo is a full blown ERP/CRM in the similar vein as Netsuite. However, it’s a consultants come in type situation and hosting is not readily available at last check.If you are a medium/large sized business with an IT department or budget for managed services then I would seriously look into OpenBravo. I think it’s a smart idea.I’m interested in hearing your comments on this post. Inevitably, I missed a product (or 20…)