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?"

Dunno if you meant that as a slam...

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

"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?

You're scaring me.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

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.

Re:Trac

[fimbulvetr]

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.