Affordable Customer Management Tools

Accounting software may tally up your financial results, but effective customer relationship management can make those bottom-line numbers bigger by helping you convert prospects into customers and sell more to existing customers. Now, Intuit's QuickBooks Customer Manager and Surado Solutions' Smart Contact Manager Pro 4 packages offer small businesses various CRM tools that previously were available exclusively in sophisticated, expensive financial management systems intended for larger businesses.

Intuit's new program works in tandem with its popular QuickBooks bookkeeping program. The preproduction $80 QuickBooks Customer Manager version I tried out offers basic CRM functions and acts as a central clearinghouse for tracking interactions with a small business's customers. Customer Manager automatically draws in data created by recent versions of QuickBooks and Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express, and displays the information conveniently on a single desktop. You can also track customer e-mail and documents to keep communications from falling through the cracks.

This program will be most useful to the QuickBooks user whose business has a selling cycle longer than a day or two or whose business delivers goods or services on a project basis and requires customer approvals or interaction. However, if you sell standard products on a one-off basis to most of your customers, you probably won't benefit sufficiently to justify adding this extra layer of management to your day-to-day business procedures.

More Firepower

If you need more advanced customer management capabilities than Intuit's product offers, you'll find them in Surado's Smart Contact Manager Pro software--though its setup isn't as automated.

The $180 shipping application comes with nearly 160 built-in reports covering everything from marketing and sales information to detailed price quotes. You can customize reports using Crystal Decisions' Crystal Reports Writer, but that third-party program isn't included in the Smart Contact Manager Pro 4 package.

SCM Pro reaches beyond basic CRM by throwing in a host of useful capabilities such as an electronic version of an employee in/out board and a knowledge database that allows you to share company policies and procedures with employees or inform them of solutions to problems.

This software is particularly well suited to those users in the financial services sector, as it includes a selection of industry-specific templates for mortgage lending, insurance (both life and property, and casualty), and real estate.

Unfortunately, getting data created by other programs into SCM Pro isn't easy. The program supports Outlook files, but pulling in accounting data is more difficult. In most cases you'll have to export the data you need into CSV (comma-separated values) format, then import it into SCM Pro, unless it's already in natively supported files such as those created by Microsoft Excel or dBASE IV.

Though QuickBooks Customer Manager may stick too close to the basics, its straightforward setup delivers the right approach for the majority of QuickBooks users who think they can benefit from CRM. Larger businesses that want more powerful software should consider Surado Smart Contact Manager Pro.

Surado Solutions Smart Contact Manager Pro 4

Robust, small-business CRM.
Price when reviewed: $180
Current prices (if available)