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We're looking at setting up a small business in the new year which will include sales and customer management requirements.
Any recommendations to look at for:
a) CMS (including booking system with web integration)
b) Sales and inventory processing
Although something 'point and click' would be nice from a simplicity point of view I come from a development background so a product that can be tweaked (i.e. OpenSource) would be an advantage.
Any suggestions / experiences?
It sounds like you are looking for quite a lot of functionality; not just an off-the-shelf system that you can play around with a bit yourself until it works.
Rachel
Marks spot.
A fair few packages use 'the cloud' to store the information and are US based. With the death of Safe Harbour use of these could cause legal problems in the future.
FileMaker has some off-the-shelf stuff that is customer produced and may be worth a trawl for information.
We use this https://www.odoo.com/ for our EPOS in a small shop. It's very configurable but the documentation isn't great. We're on the free plan. Not tried the web integration yet.
Could you not do this with a wordpress install and some plug-ins? woocommerce is working OK for our jewellery website.....
Zoho's modular approach would probably work for you, but beware the DPA implications as mentioned by sandwich.
Thanks for the suggestions.
I'l check out the above.. have also found [url= http://uk.bookingbug.com/ ]BookingBug[/url] which, on first glance, fulfils the booking/CMS side of things.
I appreciate something off-the-shelf will probably be two or more separate systems and may not match our requirements 100% (hence the preference for open source) but a bespoke solution is not necessarily cost-effective just yet unless I write it myself (at which point time becomes more of a factor).
We use Clarity, from touch systems.
They sell quite heavily into our trade (Signs and Print) but they do an offering for many other trades too.
Great software, not such great customer care, goodwill or attitude.
It's modular so you can get the bits you need and there is free trial with limited functionality.
It integrates with sage or quickbooks or you can invoice directly from the package.
It has transformed our business.
Change your requirement to fit the functionality of the product you like best.
Everyone things their business model is unique, no it's not.
Funnily enough I'm just looking into similar for a new business . Clarity looks like it may suit my needs.
Any idea on costs theDTs ? I'm assuming it's a monthly fee ?
I already have a Sage like licence so could be handy
Sage would do everything you want with their crm module, and the database links would let you geek a bit and create software to do other stuff pretty easily. Used to use access to create sage CRM stuff using odbc before I think FileMaker makes it pretty easy now.
We use Sage at work for CRM stuff and managing the sales pipeline, orders, etc.
We also use Omnify for managing production.