Cheap QuickBooks Customer Manager v2.03 (Software) (Windows XP, Windows 2000) Price

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Customer Reviews of QuickBooks Customer Manager v2.03

Just what I needed for my one-man business
This product has gotten a lot of bad press here on Amazon, apparently due to several years of buggy releases. I took a chance hoping that the recent flurry of patches had cleaned things up (v2 came out summer 2005, and by Feb 2006 is on R3). CM v2.03 seems quite stable to me, after two weeks of daily use. I've imported my QuickBooks and Outlook names without a hitch. Since I use QB only occasionally, it's not a problem to have to start it up once in a while to sync with CM. I don't find that a big deal. You can create Groups, which is how you organize all your names. Names can belong to multiple groups. Go into the Names panel, select your group type, and only those names appear. So, despite a previous very negative review, it's a breeze to manage names. I have over 2000 names in my db, and haven't had any issues. This is not a replacement for a major-duty CRM product, by any stretch. It fills a need for folks such as myself who need a way to organize our customer data. Is it perfect? Hardly. I must fire off a product enhancement email at least once a day (Just click the "Help/Make a Suggestion..." drop down). There is also a thriving Intuit-sponsored user forum online. <
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>For my purposes, this thing is great, and I just felt I had to add some positive energy to counterbalance the negativity. Now, when a customer calls, I quickly call up their data, and it's all there on my screen: what we discussed last, what projects I have for them, any related contact info, appointments... It's great. <
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>They offer a 60 day refund, so it looks like they are trying to make a good faith effort at this point. Too bad they brought it out not ready for prime time. It looks ready now, and is only likely to get better.

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Good Start, not ready for prime time.
While this program is a good start for a simple CRM it still has a long way to go. <
>It has two major flaws and several minor ones that I have found so far. The first major flaw is that it's data is not being shared real time with Quickbooks. I suppose they did this so that it can be used standalone, but who would really do that? If you're going to use a standalone product wouldn't you go out and find something else? The real reason you're using this product is because it's Quickbooks and you want tight integration with your Quickbooks DB. <
>The second major flaw is that it won't sync it's tasks with MS Outlook. This is HUGE for me. I use a PDA that keeps all of my tasks and it's where I enter all my new tasks while on the road (Which is 90% of the time). So if I wanted to use this application, I'd have to keep 2 separate task lists. Not a viable option. Their KB says that there is no way to sync tasks with MS Outlook, but many other products are out there that do. <
>It advertises itself as being this great interface between your Quickbooks and Outlook but it just doesn't hold up. <
>The minor flaws I've found so far (and I've just been using the app for 1 day) are: <
>1. Outlook emails are supposed to show up in your CM records, but they don't (at least for me). I have searched their KB for an answer to this. <
>2. If you select a record on your homepage under "recent names" and select remove, it actually deletes the entire record and doesn't just remove it from the "recent names" list. This ends up giving you a huge unmanageable list of items that you just don't use because you can't clean up the list (like you can with Windows start button recently used programs list"). <
>3. Even though I followed the instructions that were given for syncing Quickbooks with Customer Manager without manually opening QB it doesn't work. I have to open it up every time manually every time I sync. <
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>I think the application has a lot of potential, but needs a good bit of work before it becomes a viable option for most in the Small Business world. <
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