- Original Poster
- #1
So, I've been running a small electronics engineering company for around 15 years. Main activities being AC-DC power supply repair / refurbishment and also a bit of electronics design work.
As typical with most small companies, we started off with a very basic administration system using Microsoft Office suite. Than as time went on and things got more complex we moved onto a Sage ACT! system which is a fairly basic database / CRM back end which has functionality to do quotes / invoicing, customer reports etc and also interfaces with Outlook to provide email history to enquiries.
Our fundamental needs are booking repair jobs in to our lab, creating job sheets, quoting, invoicing and dispatching items back out via courier. The invoices are then manually input into our accounts / financial package which is Xero. We employ 12 staff and turnover between £500k - £1m
The accounts / financial side works OK but the Sage ACT system feels clunky and is slow and cumbersome. I'm really struggling to find any commercial off the shelf software that fits with what we do in our organisation. Everything either seems far too complex (and usually expensive) or just doesn't have the right feature set.
Can anybody give any insight on what companies typically do at this stage? Should we bite the bullet and invest in custom software, if so what programming language and who to do it? What sort of budget would we be looking at? Alternatively, what commercial stuff is out there that is suitable for a business our size and doesn't cost the Earth?
As typical with most small companies, we started off with a very basic administration system using Microsoft Office suite. Than as time went on and things got more complex we moved onto a Sage ACT! system which is a fairly basic database / CRM back end which has functionality to do quotes / invoicing, customer reports etc and also interfaces with Outlook to provide email history to enquiries.
Our fundamental needs are booking repair jobs in to our lab, creating job sheets, quoting, invoicing and dispatching items back out via courier. The invoices are then manually input into our accounts / financial package which is Xero. We employ 12 staff and turnover between £500k - £1m
The accounts / financial side works OK but the Sage ACT system feels clunky and is slow and cumbersome. I'm really struggling to find any commercial off the shelf software that fits with what we do in our organisation. Everything either seems far too complex (and usually expensive) or just doesn't have the right feature set.
Can anybody give any insight on what companies typically do at this stage? Should we bite the bullet and invest in custom software, if so what programming language and who to do it? What sort of budget would we be looking at? Alternatively, what commercial stuff is out there that is suitable for a business our size and doesn't cost the Earth?
