It’s very easy to buy software today – gone are the times when you needed to go out and buy a disk and install something.  Now you go online looking for a CRM system and, within minutes, you are using one on a free trial, and it works on your desktop, laptop, tablet, phone – anywhere you need it.   This ease of access has a couple of effects: first, it’s easy to sign up for something without fully understanding the functionality on offer and, second, there are a lot of people after your monthly subscription, so there is a variable quality of product on offer.   In short, it’s a bit of a minefield.   Smaller businesses who are not willing or able to implement a modular enterprise system like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, or one of the larger Sage products, for example, are potentially left with numerous different solutions.  These may cover accounting, CRM, e-commerce, order-processing, inventory management, and other specialised business … [Read more...]