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Here’s a small business ERP that’s easy to set up, use and afford. This is small business ERP that’s perfect for small businesses of 1 – 100 people.

Latest Review: salesorder.com

www.salesorder.com

by Chris Walsh 11/11/2010

Small business ERP like you’ve never seen it before, this truly is ‘Service as a Service’.

Oasis in the desert…

If ‘big brand’ names like NetSuite, Quickbooks, ZOHO or Salesforce are your thing then this vendor isn’t for you. The team at salesorder.com don’t have the ambition to be the next big thing in on demand services for small businesses. This is arguably one of the best, if not the best ERP company I have come across on the web when it comes to taking the time and often the pain to really understand prospects and their businesses.

Not only does this team understand the technology they so meticulously design and build, but everyone I met on my recent visit to their UK HQ really knows how to apply it to streamline business process and reduce the drudgery associated with accounting. This is a friendly, no-nonsense, straight talking outfit every small business should have on their team.

Within two minutes of signing up for their 14 day trial, I became impatient as I didn’t get immediate access to their small business ERP. Behind the scenes the SO! (salesorder.com) team scrutinize every trial application, the purpose being (as I later discovered) to check the credentials of the applicant, but also protect their systems from mischief makers and time wasters. Time is precious at salesorder.com, throughout my stay everyone in the organisation regardless of their role was talking to or about customers.

Sign of overload? Definitely not, this is an organisation that lives up to it’s name ‘order’. This is a well oiled swiss watch with an obsession for getting things right first time and done quickly for their prospects and customers.

First impressions – The technology

Logging in to the service for the first time, I was immediately prompted to review the ‘Getting Started’ content. The library of video material focused on getting users up and running is rich, crisp and concise.

User training – 8 minutes. why aren’t all ERP systems like this?

A short video presented by Milly the omnipresent director of customer services succinctly guided me through the five simple principles I needed to grasp to do just about anything in salesorder.com. And this is one of the magical differentiators of the service – everything in salesorder.com works the same way.

Every screen in the salesorder.com small business ERP, whether it be a sales or purchasing document, customer record, payment or a product or service is represented by a Document. Documents live in Lists, Lists are located in the Explorer, every Document has it’s own unique set of menu actions and you can attach as many events,notes, uploaded documents or media, and hyperlinks to every Document in the system as you need. That’s really all the average business user needs to know to start using the service in anger.

Isaac O’Bannon the Editor of the leading US accountancy magazine – CPA Technology Adviser said “salesorder.com quickly feels comfortable” in his recent review of SaaS systems. (On a side note – salesorder.com scored higher across the board than the Industry giant Intuit’s Quickbooks Online).

Lead to Cash, Ecommerce and B2B Customer Portals

Salesorder.com has comprehensive features to manage the entire business life cycle from Lead to Cash. The whole Engineering development road map is customer driven and the current focus for the team is B2B and B2C online commerce. “We are fixated on streamlining the journey from Lead to Cash to make it really easy for small businesses to track and measure everything that happens on this journey” said Rob Taylor CTO. “Everything we do must improve this journey otherwise our customers won’t thrive and neither will we”. “We work hand in hand with our customers, to really understand their pain points and design solutions that fit”. “We’re lucky to have a lot of ‘dream’ customers, who are willing to spend quality time explaining their best practises to us, which in turn gives us crystal clear guidance for what we should build and how we should build it”.

Any cart?

This certainly is the case when it comes to the latest addition of the ecommerce integration ‘connector’. Rather than build a new cart and tightly integrate it with the salesorder.com platform, the company decided to become a ‘good citizen’ in the shopping cart vendor community and work with a group of partners to create a ‘universal connector’ that will enable developers to interface a third party cart to salesorder.com in a matter of days. As the ecommerce integration solution was still in the pre-market launch phase during my visit, details about what was going to be released when were still under wraps – however I heard the names Magento, Prestashop, 3D cart mentioned a lot in my brief visit.

Refinements to the Customer Portal

However what I did find out was the company is currently refining it’s customer portal feature to allow salesorder.com’s customer’s customers to log in and look up inventory details, their specific pricing and place orders. As many customers told me this is a much needed addition to the current Customer Portal feature which allows Customers to login, review and approve sales quotes and orders, account history and pay invoices.

Well rounded feature set and remarkable value for money

Small business ERP means a lot of things to different people and whilst salesorder.com doesn’t have the sometimes overwhelming abundance of features like it’s mid market focused counterparts, NetSuite and SAP Business ByDesign, salesorder.com epitomizes the ‘baseline’ requirements of features needed by small businesses, regardless of what combination of products and services they sell on or offline. However given the price tag of an average of $34.50 (£22.50) per month per user, salesorder.com represents unprecedented value for money, if you take in to consideration the quality and responsiveness of the support that presently comes free with the system.

Support

Every business should have an edge and whilst salesorder.com’s UI doesn’t seem to use the latest ‘state of the art’ techniques found in some web applications, the system is incredibly easy to learn and use. What truly distances salesorder.com from others is the quality and care of the service they afford to their prospects and customers. “Sympathy, knowledge and patience are the essential ingredients of attracting and retaining customers – we know if we can make people care about us, they will tell others. That’s good for us, good for our customers and good for our bottom line” Co-founder Milly told me when we sat together with her customer services team. “Everyone who has to work, wants to work with people they respect and like, and that’s exactly what we’re about, I really don’t mind spending as much time as it takes helping someone I actually like as we both get a good feeling out of it when we solve a problem”.

Milly let me participate in calls with two salesorder.com customers at random who shared with me their stories of how rapidly they had migrated from their previous systems with very little help from Milly’s team. “Our system is an essential part of the nervous system of our business, if we have problems I actually look forward to talking with the SO! team as I know them all on a first name basis but better still I know they will fix me before they fix the system” Rebecca the Operations manager at Interstream told me whilst Milly unraveled an issue caused by the wrong currency being applied to a transaction in Interstream’s system.

In the two hours I spent with the Customer Services team I observed a happy band who really do delight and take pride in what they do. Job satisfaction goes hand in hand with customer satisfaction at salesorder.com.

Summing up…..

The word boutique immediately springs to mind when I try and position this remarkable team and their technology in the industry. These folks are definitely on to something in their mission to bring harmony to small business processes and indeed the relationship they have with their customers. The price point and the feature set seems about right and this together with the ‘white glove’ customer services is a model we just don’t see enough in the ERP or SaaS industries.

There is something really special and remarkable going on here and I have a strong sense salesorder.com might just turn out to be best small business ERP on the planet.

“Probably the best small business ERP on the planet”