You might have heard of SAP systems. It’s a software application used by a substantial number of medium sized and major corporations all over the world. The prime use of the platform is to ‘wire’ the entire company together and allow hundreds and often thousands of employees to store, share and recall knowledge concerning the physical and financial processes of the firm. Significant organisations are lead by intelligent individuals who know the strategic benefits of this category of software, such as how it can give them insight into why issues are happening inside their company or where there might be opportunity for refinements.

This category of package is often known as ERP. It is very complicated, very expensive and can take along time to implement. An installation of ERP software is a significant investment but this doesn’t stop big companies investing in these systems.

Until this year software like this was not within reach or affordable for tiny organisations. As a result tiny organisations have not been aware of the significant benefits that ERP systems can deliver. Tiny companies have been hoodwinked by aggressive software such as Sage Software and Intuit that small business accounting software is the solution. These platforms most often have no functionality to permit their users to join together the whole organisation or do basic tasks such as customer relationship management.

The success of Web based CRM software from firms like Salesforce.com is a damning testimony of the small business accounting software companies misleading or misunderstanding the small business community.

It is for this reason that small business ERP companies similar to Salesorder.com have started to make great progress in the market. They sell saas which includes all of the major functionality a small business needs at very low cost. What is even more interesting is these platforms are easy to operate and can be delpoyed quickly.

Now ERP applications are no longer the privilege of substantial vendors.

My perspective is bookkeeping is really unnecessarily complex but after struggling with my bookkeeping problems for along period I found a very practical shortcut that I need to share with you. Most owners I know in small companies want to devote their time to getting customers and selling as opposed to doing accounting. All organisations have to pay special attention to their bookkeeping if they want to avoid problems.

I asked my bookkeeper for guidance and he convinced me I should use Sage Software which turned out to be a small business accounting software package. Without even looking at software I simply went ahead and purchased the lowest cost version I could find. This was definitely one of the worst mistakes I made as the software turned out to be really hard to understand and use. OK my first piece of advice is that whenever you see the words accounting software tread carefully as it definitely means the vendor is assuming you know a substantial amount about accounting.

I had to find a solution that worked for me so reluctantly I cleared my diary and allocated quality time to find an answer. The second piece of wisdom I want to share with you is my discovery of a really easy to use and free web application called salesorder.com.

This is definitely the easiest software I have ever used and what’s more it is internet based and therefore I can use it from anywhere I want to work. Better still and the third piece of guidance I want to tell you is that the people who work at salesorder.com are not just very knowledgeable of their software but they know a significant amount about the problems of managing a small enterprise and have taught me the accounting I need to know.