Forum Moderators: travelin cat
I have the customer database on the website, which has all of the information and I duplicate some of that to a big Excel spreadsheet. I use Mail.app with MailTemplates to respond to email and my Partner uses QuickBooks for accounting.
It has been working so far, but is certainly not the best situation. I have been considering moving all of my customer data into OSX AddressBook, as it syncs with my Palm and there are tools to sends group emails, etc. The other option would be to move to something like FileMaker. But I don't know if I am ready for that yet.
What do you use? How many customers? What would you do if starting from scratch?
BZ
I use FileMaker for almost everything related to my little agency. We promote hundreds of web sites and manage a few thousands contacts. The database is hosted with FileMaker Unlimited so anyone with the proper autorizations can consult or update it from a regular browser.
For most of the system we used free or cheap templates to start from. Our strong point is customizing and integrating them, wich I did myself. The cost of having someone else doing it for you can rise pretty fast.
We focused on automating repetitive tasks with the tools we use. They happend to be vital time savers. I have not tried anything else since 92, so I cant say much about other solutions.
There are plenty of premade solutions out there, ranging from free to about 300 $ a licence. Did you have a look?
Jamesa.... what programs are you using? I like open source stuff (website built with it) but for something like this, I have not found good solutions.
BZ
Me too, which is why I rolled my own. But my main point is if you're not finding "OS X" software, try some searches for "Unix" or "Linux" software. I did a quick search on Google and one of the first results ran on XP, 2000 and Linux. If you're just searching for OS X software you might have missed that one, but you *can* run most Linux apps on OS X. May expand the universe a bit.
