Small Business CRM

[PerfectNotes-Kathy]

Please have a look at our offering - designed and supported here in Melbourne, with smaller Australian businesses in mind, but still with lots of flexibility.

There is also an explanation of some of the potential issues you may have that a CRM solution can help to fix or avoid.

Kathy

[soliddata]

Originally Posted by Ken Wood

I have been away from the forums for a while and have only just seen this post. It might be relevant in the context of this discussion to mention that we have developed a tight integration between SugarCRM and MYOB.

Hey Ken, that sounds very interesting. We use SugarCRM Community Edition, and I wonder can we create new customers and recurring invoices in MYOB directly from Sugar?

Kevin

[Ken Wood]

Originally Posted by soliddata

Hey Ken, that sounds very interesting. We use SugarCRM Community Edition, and I wonder can we create new customers and recurring invoices in MYOB directly from Sugar?
Kevin

Hi Kevin,

Yes, the types of records that we can create in MYOB from SugarCRM include customers, projects/jobs, items, invoices, payments & credit memos.

The shopping cart integration means that new customers and sales that come in through your website automatically go into SugarCRM and on to MYOB from there.

We don't yet have recurring invoices, simply because no clients have asked for it yet.

We do already have support for recurring payments against a single invoice, i.e. the "lay by" type of model where customers would pay something off with installments. It should be trivially easy to extend this to generate recurring invoices and, if you have the customer's credit card details on file, automatically charge the card to pay the invoice on the due date.

We'll be adding recurring invoices in the next couple of months for our own use, or sooner if one of our clients wants it before then.

We're also working on something which I think will be close to the hearts of many SMB owners: automated collections. As invoices approach their due date for payment and if they remain unpaid beyond it, the system will automatically send the customer an escalating series of prompts to make payment: reminder email(s), statement, links they can click on to make payment by credit card, SMS message(s), to-dos to prompt your accounts staff to call the customer and finally, if you choose, hand off to external debt collection services.

In the SMB arena, all of us seem to have challenges getting our invoices paid on time, so we think this feature will be popular.

Cheers,
Ken

[soliddata]

Thanks Ken,

The key question I had, which doesn't seem to be answered on your very long landing page, is whether it works for Community Edition of Sugar?

Thanks

Kevin

[Ken Wood]

Nope, Sugar Professional only.

Adding functionality to Sugar CE is much harder than it is for Sugar Pro. CE lacks the Module Builder and heap of other capabilities that our developers use heavily. Plus we had almost zero demand from our clients for CE when we offered it.

So about 18 months ago we decided that it made no sense to keep supporting both versions and dropped CE to focus on Pro.

Cheers,
Ken

[haljordan5]

Does SugarsCRM have Project Management, billing, and timesheet tracking? if not are there any other CRM web apps that include these?

[haljordan5]

does anyone have any suggestions besides Sugars?

[haljordan5]

can anyone suggest any integrated web apps that do project management, billing, and CRM?

[soliddata]

Originally Posted by haljordan5

can anyone suggest any integrated web apps that do project management, billing, and CRM?

I am now using Zoho - it has a huge range of applications - and free for 1-3 users.

Kevin

[rendersmart.com.au]

I know your looking for a free solution. So feel free to be anoyed that I can't offer one. I'v tried many and been frustrated with underdevelopment, lack of support or apps written by coders and not business people. If the software is too difficult to use noone will use it properly and it will become a dust collector.

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensi...anagement/4035

I'v recently started using a very basic backend CRM for our website which is joomla CMS. The product cost about 300bucks for one off fee which great simple administration and security for users, contact and lead management, project & task management, quoting etc. I love that its built into our site as our staff feel like its our system. Don't get me wrong, at the end of the day it required joomla CMS so i'm not saying its an easier solution. But for us, its basic and works to suit our small business. Our jobs are more tasks than projects, so these turn over alot quicker than a typical project would. If we turn over a job in a single day, we can't afford to spend an hour or two filling out forms etc etc throughout that day but we do need jobs to follow a process and have tracking & reporting.

I'm not saying this is the solution for you. This is simply me, a small business owner using a CRM and my thoughts.

Many thanks.