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What Business Software Runs Your Office?
bardkerbie asks: "I work as a webmaster and sysadmin for a small computer services shop (4 employees including the owner). We're to a point in the growth of our business where we need a system for tracking work orders as they come in and out of the shop, specifically inventory used and time spent. We use Quickbooks Pro 2006 for our accounting and payroll software. I've played around with a number of issue-tracking and CRM suites, including Bugzilla, Eventum, SugarCRM and vTiger, but all seem like they lack one critical piece to handle the workload we have. What do you use for tracking the work you do? Is it something you wrote yourself? Is there an open-source project that works well, or is there a Quickbooks plug-in we can purchase?"
I run a business about the same size as yours. We're all Mac, so the programs we use most for officy things are Quickbooks Pro, Filemaker Pro, Pages, Keynote and Microsoft Excel. We use Microsoft Word only for printing shipping labels. We're planning to dump Excel when Apple releases its new spreadsheet software. At that time we'll probably update our label templates and move them to Pages so we can dump Word, too.
As a small shop you have the freedom to do things right from the start and not be locked into some legacy system someone put together in the 70's or 80's.
My advice to you is to code your own software and have it as a web service that you run from a beater server in the office. That way as long as there are browsers you'll never be locked in to one vendor, and as your business grows and you have to travel more you can access what you need on the road.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
One of Zero is a better than average ticketing system we've been trying out for the last several months for tracking issues/work requests and small project. Open source, easy to setup, LAMP base. I have a few issues with the current reporting options (they just aren't good enough for generating something simple to use for invoice creation), but it's been the best we've found for our small shop. There is supposed to be a completely new version sometime soon that is a rewrite from scratch and promises all sortsa nifty features . . .we'll see.
Oh, and my small office runs business software, not vice versa...Skynet has yet to take control.
Seriously? You know Macs have had programs for that for about, um, twenty-some years?
Now you're scaring me. Let's say you're pretty good and you code the thing in just 30 business days. Let's also say your time is "only" worth $320/day. You're going to take that $10K investment in a critical system and stick it on a "beater"? If you go this route, please at least take backups like HOURLY and have a second server standing by when the beater craps out.
Trac might be worth checking out, although I don't think it will handle inventory and time spent. Maybe it does - I'm just an end user on one project (bug reporting and feature requests) - what do I know?
Our shop is a little bigger than ours. I had the same problem when deciding what to use. I finally went with a combination of sql-ledger and vtiger and it's actually working out quite well. Of course since there are two main apps there is some redundancy but not too bad. The tiger is for standard sales use and monitoring sales persons progress plus our website is setup to run off of it's products dynamically displaying info and pics of products that meet a certain criteria plus generating invoices the salesmen can work with. sql-ledger comes in to handle true accounting level type of transactions and history. vtiger at some point is supposed to support postgres at which point I intent to at least partially integrate the two at least on the inventory level to reduce redundancy, but it's certainly tolerable at the current level it's at. No different that using QB plus some other type of CRM software plus I get a lot more functionality. I have vtiger and our main site setup with phpthumb so our sales manger can quickly market products on hold or reduced for clearance plus vtiger mass marketing integration is good. Not the greatest, but they have much planned so it'll only get better.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
The title of the parent post is right, not the name in the link. I even reviewed the stupid thing. Go me.
Oh, and one of the advantage of it being a simple LAMP base is there's no reason you couldn't gen your own reports out of the data in the DB in whatever your favorite scripting language is (or you could learn their template format and add to the existing reports and submit back. Go you.).
http://bestpractical.com/rt
It was what my previous employer used. It has lots of features, and is quite easy to use and setup.
In all seriousness though, we employ females for most tasks.
The spring 2007 release of Mandriva came with Open Source Compiere that is a combined Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management product. If you look it up in Google you will find lots of info. Wikipedia has an article on it, and several discussions are going on whether it is going to fork into private and open source versions. I looked at it, it appeared to have promise, but did not need it immediately so have not done a deep dive. I liked the fact that it could work with any database you want (including Postgresql, my favorite) but cannot speak to its complete functionality.
I don't think anybody could recommend a product such as that for you, serious investigation is needed. But, I would give Compiere a look and maybe it will be the closest thing to what you need.
I'm also in a small shop with four people, we do general network planning and setup for local companies. Personally, I've been investigating the viability of TinyERP for the job. I'd imagine that a lot of the replies received will mention the same packages as in this recent slashdot article. http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/11/21 25226
I certainly won't cry dupe because I was looking for more discussion on the issue!
This question is nice timing for me, too. I'm looking for inventory control systems right now. My wife is about to open a new shoe shop (see http://www.lillifoot.co.uk/). So, not really the same as computer services, but there are many other things in common. I really need something to help track orders from suppliers, current inventory levels, and sales to work out when we need more stock.
_ packages. I'm looking for something I can install on a Linux server, and not pay too much. I initially tried Openbravo, but the performance was atrocious. I'm currently giving TinyERP a whirl (which seems OK, but I'm unsure about integrating the POS terminals with the inventory).
Wikipedia has a handy list of useful software at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ERP_software
I'd be really interested to hear about what people think these and other software packages which can help.
Joe
My business: Farstrider Studios.
Well, this is an opportunity for me to toot my own horn, so to speak. It sounds like what we offer might be a bit overkill for what you need right now but our software, Co-Log/Open might be something to look at when you want to start integrating portable (and fixed) bar code data collection terminals into your various system. Our products are designed for companies that want to track inventory and labor on shop floors, although it's really a data collection system toolkit. We use our own system internally for tracking our inventory and tracking RMAs. We use Quickbooks but haven't upgraded to a recent enough version to really try direct integration, though what I've looked at shows the integration will not be very difficult. Bar codes might be something to look at a little further down the line but systems are getting inexpensive enough that smaller and smaller businesses are taking advantage of them. And the nice thing is that our system has the capability to integrate into a variety of back end systems so you're never stuck.</shamelessplug>
Author of Enyo: Up and Running from O'Reilly Media
What you're looking for is a class of software called "professional services automation". There are several major software packages that are available (both hosted & on-premise). They all handle CRM, time & billing, service ticket tracking, project management, etc. Most integrate with Quickbooks for GL. Connectwise PSA - www.connectwise.com Autotask - www.autotask.com Tigerpaw - http://www.tigerpawsoftware.com/
She's very soft and cuddly.
Our office used to use goatse, but we ended up losing data. Personally, I lost my lunch.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
For an all in one, compiere or opentaps. Mantis for issue/request tracking.
Deleted
As someone else noted, you are looking for PSA systems. AllocPSA is a nice GPL PSA project.
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allocPSA: http://www.allocpsa.org/
screenshots: http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gr
GNU Enterprise is another: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/
http://www.gnuenterprise.org/packages/
No, it's not OS. But you can do virtually any data-crunching thing with it, and developing on it is insanely easy. For example, you can make changes to the way your system looks and functions without kicking users out. It's multi-platform. You can publish databases to the web (or just create simple 'guest-book' web forms that populate your primary databases) with just a couple of clicks. Imports / exports to spreadsheets, has fancy data-scraping tools (i.e. track packages via UPS, integrate GEO data from mapping sites, etc). The templates that come free with FMP are also very useful for many business functions (contact manager,invoicing system, inventory manager, etc.) , and you can learn how-to develop on FMP by modifying these solutions. I can't recommend it enough - we've used it for 9 years.
We've (citipacificmortgage.com) developed our own CRM software (swiftlead.com) that is highly customized for mortgage brokers (as well as used by lead providers and branch operations). Things like SugarCRM just aren't really suitable for how most mortgage companies operate. We use Trac and Subversion for our development, LAMP and WAMP to run our application on, google mail and calendar.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Vtiger is a SugarCRM fork which is IMHO further developed (Sugar seems to have stopped when it went commercial), and in 'further' I include the ability to integrate with practically the whole Office suite. We don't use half of that because we ditched MS Office for OpenOffice.org and, where possible, Open Source we can use instead - the aim is to abandon the Windows platform altogether. (note to Skype: get video to work on Linux).
:-).
Ledger SMB is a SQL Ledger fork which started out of frustrreation with unaddressed security issues in SQL Ledger but which has since moved to do a complete code overhaul (i.e. a large debugging session) and is heading for a 1.3 release with a much cleaner code base which will support APIs for integration. Just lurk on the mailing list and you'll see just how active this project is. IMHO a good sign if you're about to commit your business finance to it, but make sure you gave it firewalled. Not because you have to (code seems to be reasonably OK), but because you should (it's your money we're talking about).
Joomla is a CMS which allows you to knock up a website pretty quickly. Set up DB, instal template and off you go, especially if you use Joomla Cloner for backup. It takes a while to get used to, but CMS is the only way to go for an average size business.
There you go
Insert
Seriously. It comes with everything. Open Office, Tomboy Notes, The Gimp, Pidgin, Skype, Firefox. ....Sadly it doesn't come with Thunderbird by default, so that costs me approx. 5 minutes of grief per machine every time I set up a new one. I have to remove Evolution, sudo apt-get thunderbird ... You know the drill.
I also change the background for every machine, and lose the brown default theme as well. An additional 30 seconds per machine.
Other than that, a default Ubuntu install is almost perfect for an office machine in any department.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
We're writing our own.
In Soviet Russia the office runs you....oh wait
We're a little bigger then you are, but once you get to a certain number of employees most companies discover that tracking employee attendance and processing payroll becomes a huge burden for them.
So far we haven't found anything that even comes close to the capabilities of TimeTrex and the best thing is that it is open source.
We save thousands of dollars per year compared to going with the popular payroll outsourcing companies, plus we have some pretty unique needs, so we were able to customize it and eliminate any manual calculations and data entry. Its worked out great!
Didn't start with phpbb, but unless you have something custom that you're familiar with hanging around it's probably the best place to start. I then added plugins to allow the creation of a status & assignee field to a topic, and ability to sort or filter by either (less than a day's work). Create a board for each client, set the main page to sort boards to show oldest open post assigned to logged in user at the top. What's nice about this system is that we get RSS feeds of open jobs, which is a feature I haven't seen anywhere else.
Part of the reason why we use those specific packages is because we also consider the issue of support and possible outsourcing of any adjustment, bespoke code or improvements.
:-).
It's all jolly well to pick any kind of package that promises the earth and/or has good starting motives, but you are trusting your business to this.
The packages I listed are the ones we felt it would be possible to either get paid support for if needed, or would offer us the ability to subcontract our needs if we couldn't meet them internally. In other words, we have maximum flexibility. We need it because the group I work with is international which means multiple nationalities, currencies, languages, legal frameworks and, above all, ability to integrate. The latter was the prime driver to go completely Open Source, it's much easier to get everything standardised across multiple systems.
As for desktops, I fully expect to end Q3 with thin, LTSP based Ubuntu or Kubuntu desktops, and maybe an Asterisk core to bring VoIP inhouse if we feel that Skype is no longer providing what we need (so far, so good, it's a backup option).
Going back to what I started with, this doesn't mean we wholly exclude new developments. The nice thing about a stable core is that you can experiment without blowing things up, and I'm always interested in new ideas (both as a mental exercise and to see if we can improve the way we operate or serve our customers). We just keep core business and 'nice to have' well separated
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It also seems somewhat stagnant. Last update is over a year ago?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
vTiger (and SugarCRM) - also written in PHP - both have Terrible performance. Absolutely terrible. I suppose that if you use this software with a database of less than 10,000 customers you might be ok. Searching for bugs actually times out (not a good sign). Something else of note: the SugarCRM developers can't code valid HTML. See for yourself - http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fww
LedgerSMB and SQL-Ledger are seriously some of the worst Perl I have ever seen in the last 10 years.
I wouldn't touch LedgerSMB/SQL-Ledger with a 10 foot pole.
Every Perl programmer worth his/her salt knows that any Perl program or module should begin with:
I looked through the source code and although I didn't see any obvious vulnerabilities (i.e. SQL Injection or Cross-Site-Scripting) there are literally hundreds (thousands?) of lines of (poorly coded) HTML scattered throughout the Perl source.
Conventions as old as Perl5 (October of 1994) are completely ignored (clear module hierarchy, stricture, code comments, POD documentation, full test suite, etc.) and will ultimately lead any business built on such shoddy code to peril (or ruin).
The Dieter Simader (coder) and DWS Systems Inc. (company) may have made headlines with this steaming pile back in 1992. However, looking at the source code, it bears a copyright date of 2006. Mr. Dieter Simader appears to have successfully sheltered himself from learning anything new for the last 13 years (and running). Great Job!
Shitty code like *THIS* gives Perl a bad name. I would rather they simply close the download site before another hapless would-be user falls into the trap that is SQL-Ledger/LedgerSMB.
SalesForce (http://www.salesforce.com/), NetSuite (http://www.netsuite.com/) and Oracle/Siebel CRM on Demand (http://www.crmondemand.com/ are all excellent (hosted and proprietary) tools.
Hi,
First, whatever you get, it won't do everything you need it to; You'll have to either adapt your company's workflow, or customize the software you choose.
Second, developing your own is tricky, since it involves lots (and I mean LOTS) of coding and testing cycles (read that as time and resources) and its a bit difficult to justify.
We're in a different situations: being in a corporation, we have our own CRM, which is sold externally, so for us its a matter of eating our own dog-food.
Even in this situation (having our own product), the CRM we use is still heavily customized for our own workflows and we have a dedicated team developing and testing customizations for our internal use.
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
I'm not saying there aren't other great Linux distros. I just happen to find Ubuntu very easy and fast for everything I need to do.
However: If a different Linux distro did the following I would switch right away:
A. Stay as easy to use, and require even less of the command line.
B. Allow me to just be root all the time. Or make it easier to be root in nautilus, at least.
C. Ditch the Brown.
D. Ditch Evolution for Thunderbird.
E. Make installing codecs even easier.
F. Ditto "restricted" drivers.
G. Allow me to keep some things bleeding edge (wine, emulators, etc.) in an easy way (without adding repositories, etc.)
H. Come with beryl and Avant Window Navigator on by default.
So show me the Distro that keeps the simplicity and stability of Ubuntu, but fixes those issues, and I'll switch tomorrow.
rhY
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Its pretty much how I would have designed a CRM - lightweight and very simple to use - generally a pleasure to use. Open-source php and an option of database vendors (mysql mssql etc). I'm no php coder but I still integrate some reporting and make some minor tweeks - it doesn't make enough sense to me for major changes though. http://www.mantisbt.org/ My only BIG want is for out-of-the-box integration with source control.
Sounds cool indeed. Mortgage refinancing