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We had this very same problem:thebln.com, The BLN | Why is there no integrated CRM, Accounts, Invoicing, Small Business Management System, SaaS or not?, Oct 2009
We seem to have solved it.
At the sailing school we needed:
- better tooling for picking up leads
- integration and import of email for CRM
- web based, so it can be used away from the office (in our case on the boat)
- low costs
- ease of use
- proposals and invoicing
That's pretty standard for any business I suppose, but for small
businesses there is a problem. The thing is that the packages that are
available are basically scaled down versions of enterprise solutions.
We
had a look at SugarCRM, the premier 'source available' package out
there. Sugar is not really open source, as the real program is a 'Pro'
version and the source is not freely accessible without a license.
The
irony is, that the availibility of the source code is not the problem,
it's the lack of features in the community edition. There is no proposals and invoicing in the community edition, that only comes with Sugar CRM Pro - for which the smallest licensing cost is USD360 per year per user with a minimum of 5 users. Now we would only have two or three users max, so that would be getting a little bit expensive.
After searching for two days (! amazing that CRM builders are so bad at making websites), it started to become obvious that this 'scaling' problem is a general one. The smallest licenses have less features and are more expensive per license. Either you end up with an invoicing system, or a CRM, but not both.
For an open source company this is especially harmful to business:
- most of the people who contribute are small companies
- most of the large clients are brought in by these small companies
If any of you build CRM or invoicing/billing packages: There is a niche for online, simple CRM and Invoicing software.
But this was solved right? Well, there is a package that ticks all the boxes for us:
It even has plugins for Outlook and our Joomla website. Very good going!
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