Another Day in Sales - Another Day of Differentiating Bookkeeping Software from Business Management Software. There is just no comparison between bookkeeping software and business management software, yet I describe the difference between the two most of the day sometimes. At least it seems like it. If you are rekeying sales orders or sales data then you have bookkeeping software. If your sales people enter quotes and sales orders and your accounting people generate invoices with a few clicks then you have business management software. If you have inventory in a spreadsheet then you have bookkeeping software. If your sales people can commit inventory to a sales order, or your operations staff can see inventory at every step of the purchase, sales and fulfillment cycle, then you have business management software. If you export a list of leads from one system and customers from another and then merge them together, de-dupe and import into another system to send a newsletter, then you have the marketing equivalent of a bookkeeping software. If you can setup a marketing campaign with the associated newsletter or promotional template and marry it with a group of leads, customers, prospects, vendors, partners, etc., without any overlap and put the whole campaign together in under an hour and shoot it off to 10,000 people then you have business management software. If you write service requests on post it notes and handle customer service in an off-hand, ad-hoc manner then you have bookkeeping software and probably not a lot else. If you can take an online order, or an online lead, or an online support case and have then automatically update the system and notify the right actors in your company then you have business management software. If you are constantly doing journal entries to repair the books then you have bookkeeping software. If you rarely do JEs then you have business management software. If analysis means taking spreadsheets home over the weekend and trying to fit a square peg into a round hole then you have bookkeeping software. If you have a dashboard that display sales trends, inventory turnover this quarter versus the same quarter last year, top items sold this month, your important tasks, events and phone calls, the number of escalated support cases, the hits per web page, etc., etc. then you have business management software. And if you have all of the red above then you have an excellent business management software. But what is it worth, business management software? It's going to cost you more than a whole bunch of one note software that performs some narrow function. Of course if your time has little value then by all means take the low road and buy a cart full of box software off the shelf. If your business has access to volunteers who work for free and bring their own coffee then by all means put together a constellation of point software solutions and have at it. And if you are happy where things are in your business and you don't expect a lot of growth, then what you have might work fine. I am not trying to talk anyone out of business management software. But you have to be willing to make some important decisions before you undertake an integrated software suite. It's going to cost more, take more time to implement and learn; but in the end you are going to have a business where each hour worked, yours or your employee's, has added value, meaning that it is not just reworking the data over and over again, but adding more value. Business management software is not a decision to take lightly. It means that you are in the game seriously - for the long run. Well, are you? | 
