QuickBooks Customer Manager 2.5

This product might have received a better review if I could have gotten
past the online registration screen.

I couldn't, because it only supports one monitor resolution (96 DPI), which doesn't match my monitor capability. Intuit is aware of this bug, but has no fix for it.

In my 20-odd years of doing software technical support, we had a name for this type of bug, and it was "showstopper". Reputable companies fixed these bugs before releasing product to customers.

It's interesting to note that Quickbooks itself doesn't suffer from this problem, indicating that Intuit knows how to support multiple resolutions, but, for some reason refuses to do it in Customer Manager.

Update
----------

Intuit has refunded the purchase price of this product. If and when they fix this bug,
we'll consider applying the refund toward the updated version.

I am in amazement that anyone could write a review AT ALL with anything positive to say about this product.

It MIGHT be decent software if you never try to synchronize it with QBooks or Outlook. But, that is what I needed, that is what they advertise, so I bought it. What a horrifying experience. If you look on-line (do a search for slow customer manager) you will see that there is no real fix. People with gigantic, powerful computers are brought to their knees with the slowness of this memory and processing hog. Try to drag and drop a piece of data, or attach an email to a customer's file, and you might as well go make coffee. Actually, you have enough time to fly to Brazil to pick your own beans.

Intuit support is only going to tell you that it is one of the "other files" that is corrupt, like your QuickBooks file - OH, don't have support on THAT product, well, you need to pay for this phone call. Never mind that the only program on your computer that doesn't work is Customer Manager. It hoses up EVERYTHING.

Intuit should be ashamed of this product and to be sure, as so many have said before me, it should be integrated into QuickBooks as a one piece solution.

By the way, the functionality of project tracking and linking data, emails and appointments, employees to their companies (contact association), & things of that sort are almost acceptable but the two huge problems are slowness, (beyond belief) and data transfers. Linking and finding data fields aren't even compatable with Quickbooks meaning, type in an address in QB and you won't be able to find it in QBCM, you'll have to type it again.

Do yourself a favor, use paper and pencil, it is faster and more efficient that QBCM. STAY AWAY!

I am editing to say, I am no computer idiot...I bought the software and spent 2 months trying to make it run right. It works with their stupid little sample database but when you sync a perfect QB database to it, and a perfect Outlook DB to it, adios amigo, you just bought a nightmare that simply WILL NOT END until you toss this in the trash.

I sent mine back to Intuit (after speaking to "tech support") for a refund. I am sorry I wasted so much time. If you are serious, this software ISN'T.

Well- I have been enjoying this product quite a lot. I effortlessly linked this to my quickbooks contacts. I had been saving them to excel then importing them to Outlook. Yeah, yeah I know there is probably an easier way, but it worked for me BUT...

then I needed to actually use this contact info... beyond just sending emails. So, it was a rather complicated mess of linking the contact to a task in order to keep track of who I sent what to and who needed to be contacted later and so on. It was a cumbersome mess!

I spent plenty of time looking for good customer relations management tools. There are some good ones out there, but they far more expensive and do a lot more than I will ever need. I am one person, not a big company. Then I thought, well what the heck, let's just see if there isn't something out there that would be compatible with QB since it also tells me what the customer bought (big spenders etc).

Here it is- QBCM and I like it mighty fine. I am also using it as my calendar. I have never really liked Outlooks calendar, but I think QBCM's is more user friendly. When looking at the home page, it gives a great multi-view of your appointments (mine include dog walking, cleaning etc.) It is not necessarily just for business.

I have used, or should say TRIED to use, this product though version 1.x, 2.x and now 2.5. When it works it is very useful. My trial of version 2.5 went very well so I purchased the upgrade. The day my purchased version was on the UPS truck I moved the balance of my customer data into the trial version. I went to look at the "Names" tab and had a big red "X" across the screen. Several calls to tech support later I found that the computer screen font resolution - actually the "DPI" setting **MUST** be 96 DPI or the software will corrupt the database. I have a high end notebook with a screen resolution of 1680x1050 and my DPI setting was set to 120 so the fonts and icons were more readable. I have about 60 programs running on the same computer that run fine at 120 DPI and there is NO REASON WHY I SHOULD HAVE TO CHANGE IT TO FIT THE SOFTWARE.

The result >> The database I had been loading and working with for about 25 days AND the balance of it I had just put it were trashed! It took me over 6 hours to reload, resysnc and cleanup the data in Outlook, QuickBooks and Customer Manager. Even after that Customer Manager stills trys to push what it thinks is customer info that it got from Outlook into QuickBooks - even though there is nothing in the records that would indicate it is customer data (no groups or categories even remotely flagged as "customer".)

One thing that should make you suspicious is that when you call QuickBooks tech support option >>> #1 <<< is for Customer manager support!

So... If you can get this SW to work for you it can be quite useful - even with all the *&%^ above I am going to try it one last time. Its amazing how a company who makes such good accounting software can still be putting out this SW with so many quirks in it.

Beware and Be careful if you use this software!

We received this and even reading the box it was not clear if it really supported networking. We called Intuit, finally, before installing (Intuit won't accept a return once their products are installed - you can't 'give back' the license as you can with adobe software, so no one else can ever license it either, but that's a separate annoyance). To our shock there is no way to share data files on a network. This makes the product useless in our case, or by anyone with more than one user. We returned it unopened for a refund. Intuit did make some vague statement that they were working on a better version. We hope so... as is, it's not ready for us to use.