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What Business Software Runs Your Office?

Posted by Cliff on from the common-apps-at-the-office dept.

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?"

15 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. What platform? by Reaperducer · · Score: 2, Informative

    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."
    1. Re:What platform? by sakdoctor · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I run a much smaller business and our office is running ubuntu. We have a server which was originally random cobbled together hardware but has been replaced by a proper server.
      The main applications are LAMP based and I wrote them myself originally, although they have been extended quite a bit since then.
      Any of the growing number of thin clients can access our database through the LAN.

      At the moment not having to pay for software licences, and being able to add new clients at the low cost of just a mobo, RAM, input devices and LCD screen IS a big deal for us, but later down the line this setup should have other advantages too.

  2. One or Zero by millisa · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  3. Dunno if you meant that as a slam... by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "I work...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. 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.
    Dunno if you meant that as a slam, but if these products/projects don't have the features to handle a generic 5-person job shop, WTF can they handle?
    1. Re:Dunno if you meant that as a slam... by jimicus · · Score: 3, Informative

      Well, speaking about CRM because I've been looking for something for some time... There doesn't seem to be any such thing as a generic shop. Or if there is, there's no such thing as a generic CRM system in the opensource world. I'll use vTiger as my example as it's the best solution I've seen.

      Someone always comes up with an idea which they'd like to follow through with but is somehow difficult with vTiger.

      Yes, I know there's the "it's open source, modify it yourself!" argument. I took one look at the vTiger code and ran away screaming.

      Don't get me wrong, I couldn't code something like that up myself - but even so, I think the standards the folk behind vTiger have for what they describe as a "stable" release are a little slack. Just to put it into context, I don't consider "stable" release to mean "most of the core features are there and stable but there's a whole lot of stuff (including the "upgrade from earlier version" function) which isn't particularly stable at all, is not specifically marked as being unstable so you may not know until it's too late and hasn't been disabled for the release.

      Further, I was particularly interested to note that the failure mode in much of vTiger (particularly if there's something even relatively minor amiss with the database) seems to be "return a completely blank page to the user's browser and don't log the issue".

  4. You're scaring me. by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 3, Insightful

    We use Microsoft Word only for printing shipping labels.


    Seriously? You know Macs have had programs for that for about, um, twenty-some years?

    Code your own software and have it as a web service that you run from a beater server in the office...


    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.
    1. Re:You're scaring me. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      I know a couple of very, very, very large companies that run significant pieces of internal software as Access databases or Excel workbooks stuffed with Macros.

      There is one place that uses Access for their primary customer relationship management and incident tracking system on a 10m+ gbp/year contract. The databased was pulled together by a regular member of staff, not a developer. It was written for Access 97 in 2005.

      Why? Because based on internal charging rules (designed to move margin around) getting an internal development group to do it would have made the bid unwinnable. So instead they settled on this solution. This kind of thing is more common than you think.

  5. Trac by maccallr · · Score: 3, Informative

    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?

    1. Re:Trac by fimbulvetr · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Unfortunately, trac is the epitome of one of those open source projects that evolves into something can do a little bit of everything, but nothing well.

      It's wiki, rev control, etc. are all good for specific things, but they all severely lack in certain areas.

  6. Try RT by francium+de+neobie · · Score: 2, Informative

    http://bestpractical.com/rt

    It was what my previous employer used. It has lots of features, and is quite easy to use and setup.

    1. Re:Try RT by fimbulvetr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Easy to use and and setup? Have you seen the dependency list? Have you installed it? Have you admin'd it? It's a nightmare to setup, it's an ongoing battle to keep it setup correctly (read: high maintenance) and it has so many weird and obtuse requirements you'll can really use the box it's setup on for anything else.

      Outside of that it's a good program, but it's anything but easy to setup.

  7. From someone in a similar boat... by EvilRyry · · Score: 2, Informative

    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!

  8. PSA Software by pjbus · · Score: 2, Informative

    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/

  9. allocPSA and GNU Enterprise by mrcgran · · Score: 2, Informative

    As someone else noted, you are looking for PSA systems. AllocPSA is a nice GPL PSA project.

    allocPSA: http://www.allocpsa.org/
    screenshots: http://sourceforge.net/project/screenshots.php?gro up_id=165183&ssid=57157

    GNU Enterprise is another: http://www.gnuenterprise.org/
    http://www.gnuenterprise.org/packages/

  10. Re:VTiger by richievtiger · · Score: 2, Informative

    Hi!
    I am Richie from vtiger.
    Yes, of late, the release has been very late by vtiger standards. This was done so that the quality issues are addressed. Earlier on, vtiger was more date-driven and hence had compromised on the quality and user-experiences. This time around, quality is the paramount factor in mind. Hence the extended time before we release.

    The last release was on 30/10/2006. It has been 7 months now since the last release. The new release is due this month and will be primarily a bug-fix release.

    Pertaining to the original discussion, I would agree with jimicus. Open Source is not a silver bullet. You will have to be very careful in what you want and how you would like to achieve the same. I would suggest Open Source since you will have multiple alternatives but at the same time, you have to be careful as to which horse you back even in the OS domain. Priorities change depending on the community response to the releases so what you want may or may not be in the next release.

    Try and build modular plugins/extensions so that you can replace them with anything new that comes in. This way you will be uptodate and not be hampered by progresses. You will not be able to do this with Commercial products though.

    Richie

    --
    To achieve all that is possible, we must attempt the impossible.