[Closed] Software to run a business

You're asking for a lot.

You need to have a proper budget in mind, whilst you don't state one "and we’re willing to pay within reason" doesn't sound enough to me.

I think you'd be looking at £500 a month for that at a guess for 12 licenses, plus set-up, training costs and more if you want it branded up for you.

You'll struggle to get all that functionality together off the shelf I suspect - so you'll be in for bespoke development = requirements/functioanlity specs, manageing the developers, ongoing support and development...£££

I'd treat it as different projects:
CRM/heldesk/Portal - if that's for logging support calls
Field team management
Ordering/Warehouse management
Finance

but plan what needs integration with other elements and make sure you build that into your requirements spec when you talk to providers.

Also depends whether you're willing to change your business processes to fit the software solution or the other way around. The first is a lot cheaper for a small company but can be very disruptive.

All in one I think you will be lucky. I would split into two, running the business, and financial. Take a look at freshdesk/service and all their other offerings. Really good systems and should do all your customer portal/helpdesk/crm etc.
Then something like sage for the financial side?

Don't know much about this one but netsuite might be worth a look.

Not sure about all of the requirements but have a look at Clarity from Touch Systems. May do what you need.

First question I'd ask is: "What's your actual budget?"

One person's 'that seems within reason' is another's 'HOWMUCH!!!!'

Even fairly 'vanilla' fully featured tciketing systems are a few hundred pounds a year per user so you coudl be looking at £5-£6k to get a seat per employee with no customisation.

Salesforce can meet all your requirements, but judging by the way you’ve phrased your budget, I suspect what you’re willing to pay, and what they charge will differ by several zeroes per month.

Disclaimer: I work for one of the global IT SIs as a Salesforce architect.

Thanks for the responses.

It seems that, as I suspected, there is nothing that will do everything without spending quite a bit. Budget is a few grand a year. Looked at lots of stuff including Salesforce which looks amazing, but is a huge investment.

Cheers for the ideas, I’ll look into the suggestions.

What does your business do and what are you good/not good at?

There are plenty of off the shelf tools that charge a per-user fee that you can stitch together with something like zapier a few hours work to remove a lot of repetitive tasks.

We are ~60 people and our “office” SaaS budget is somewhere around $150/head/month covering basics including IDE licenses, help desk, crm, HR, finance, recruitment and sales. The last two are particularly pricey.

Take a look at Brightpearl. I’ve not used it for about 7 or 8 yrs, but I think it might actually do everything you mentioned to some basic degree back then and probably has been enhanced since...

Also depends whether you’re willing to change your business processes to fit the software solution or the other way around. The first is a lot cheaper for a small company but can be very disruptive.

If you're small and you do agile bespoke products/services on top of the standard stuff, option one will kill your flexibility/cost effectiveness. There will be a lot of 'computer says no' in your future in this scenario.

Thanks again.

We do computer/IT support with field engineers and some big, some small customers.

We are organised and are good at responding quickly and getting people out to site, but it Can be quite a time consuming process organising everyone.

Not so good at organising our data and history of jobs since we have grown a bit. It’s not terrible but we have a few systems that aren’t really linked.

Intercom.io or Zendesk + Xero combined will prob do the majority of what you want. If you need a dedicated CRM through in something cheap like Capsule. Need automation - check out Zapier.

Lots of systems will do what you ask, the ones I know of are IT industry specific though. Connectwise, Autotask, harmony, kaseya and many more. Costs will vary from about £20 to £70 per month.

We just got a great deal on kaseya BMS and they own it glue too, which we use.

Salesforce is shite. It's such a behemoth and awkward to do anything in out side the norm. It'll also swallow obscene amounts of money to get working how you want.

I'd look to see if there were two systems that would cover your requirements that you could live with and then see if there was a API available that would easily allow you to connect them.

nixie
Salesforce is shite

Really? What’s your qualification and experience for saying that?

You know Salesforce is a brand, yes? With products covering CRM, customer service, field support, systems integration, big data, cloud compute, and many others?

Like any enterprise software, there are good implementations and bad implementations.

Our IT sorry company sounds similar in profile to yours. I’m happy to ask them what they use - friendly chaps they are and I’m sure they’d be happy to let me know.

Autotask would cover your requirements pretty well, but I think it might be beyond your budget.
RM.

Hi,
You have a wide range of requirements, so to get a good fit I advise you contact the Software Advisory Service. It is a free service and they match your needs with a huge database of suppliers and come up with the top 5 to 10 matches. I am a retired group IT Manager and have used these many times to either sense check my selections or help with initial selections. They were always on the mark and it is a FREE service.

I would second the advice to avoid Salesforce. We are currently extracting ourselves from a £1m/yr commitment and we've been through three sets of Salesforce consultants.

Our mistake has been to use it outside of the sales role; we've added customer services, support ticketing, marketing, contract management, invoicing and a customer portal - the parts just don't play well together and cost ramps up once the account manager thinks you're hooked.

These days individual SaaS packages from different suppliers are designed to play nice together so there's no need for a Salesforce (or Oracle or Microsoft or IBM) based monolith.

Dynamics 365 is another Microsoft offering.

I would suggest Microsoft Action Pack at £350 a year for a stack load of Windows OS and servers, developer tools, plus cloud benefits inc Azure credits and 365 E3 licences including Exchange (not Salesforce or Dynamics though, unless you sell licences for them). However Microsoft are killing Internal Use Rights licences next year, effectively ending the cheap way to get licences for Windows / MS stuff (though was always for small/micro business and around 5 to 10 seats for most things included). If I read it right, you can't use it to run your business any more, which was what it was designed for while being a partner product (i.e. you're supposed to be selling stuff for them). Though you can still use it for R&D which is confusing (can I still keep my Windows licences to develop stuff on, and keep Visual Studio? I guess I lose 365 and Exchange though which is a big hit).

Deadkenny, I read that MS reversed their decision to scrap internal use licenses after negative feedback from partners.

OP, if you’ve been using in house solutions so far, I would be very careful about jumping for an all singing all dancing PSA tool. Connectwise and autotask are broadly similar but can be complex and cumbersome to implement and manage. Perhaps try a simpler system initially, or look for a solution that will satisfy 2 or 3 or your requirements. Then once you’ve seen the potential, consider moving to something more complete. Just my experience.

For reference, we use solarwinds n-central RMM, ITGlue, Xero and are about to implement kaseya BMS as our help desk management. Here’s a link and you can get a pre recorded live demo which gives a good overview of what it can do. https://www.kaseya.com/get-started/bms-demo/

Deadkenny, I read that MS reversed their decision to scrap internal use licenses after negative feedback from partners.

Hope so, and not surprised about negative feedback given so many use it for cheap licences. Popular with contractor businesses like mine. Though I think that's why they wanted to scrap it as they're not getting sales out of it as intended and we're getting cheap software 😁