small business software

[HM-PuFFNSTuFF]

i'm looking for some inexpensive software that can do order/inventory/accounting stuff. What have y'all used that you'd recommend?

[mjrpes]

MS Access. You can make it do whatever it is you want it to do.

[PhoeniX]

MS Access. You can make it do whatever it is you want it to do.

http://www.openoffice.org/product/base.html

[mjrpes]

Although I'm a bit biased to Access because I've been using it for the last five years with all sorts of things, OpenOffice Base has a long way to go to being a worthy competitor to Access, especially when it comes to creating reports.

After playing around with Base for a couple hours, I realized just how good a $150 investment Access is.

[Clauz]

You'd be amazed how much you can do with just Excel.

[R00k]

Yea, buy a copy of Office XP Professional and you can do what you want, only really limited to how much time you want to invest in it.

Of course, this isn't a solution for large numbers of users (or massive amounts of data), but it doesn't sound like you need to worry about that.

For inventory/tracking you can build an Access database that has everything you need, and can run reports off the data.

For accounting, Excel has TONS of financial formulas built into it. Hell, my company uses a modified version of Excel to do their enterprise-wide budgeting, and we have tens of thousands of people.
I personally think it's a shitty solution for so much data - even with the three-tiered architecture it uses - but it shows you what it's capable of.

[R00k]

Or depending on how much you're looking to spend, I can write you an application to do all your inventory tracking, either in Access or a VB app that runs on a SQL database. But you wouldn't have near the level of support you would from a commercial solution.

[Dave]

riddla's probably right. I would guess that dedicated SMB accounting packages are set up to help you do taxes and things like that