Online service eliminates islands of data.
When NetBooks launched last fall I passed on talking with the company’s CEO. After all, over the past few years we’ve seen many new online services promise the world. Since many failed, I was often glad I waited a few months before writing about them. NetBooks CEO Ridgley Evers and I exchanged e-mails, and he said mine was a smart approach and that we’d talk after NetBooks had a track record.
Now NetBooks has both a track record and a new announcement: it is adding Point of Sale and Web store support to its suite of services, all using the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. If you think NetBooks is just online accounting, let Evers try to convince you otherwise.
“Bookkeeping is just a rear view mirror,” he says. “NetBooks really takes the concept underneath SAP or NetSuite to be a complete management system. We do CRM, sales order workflow, production, inventory management, outbound marketing, and, yes, bookkeeping. We basically do an awful lot of what you need to do to run a business.”
Evers gave a quote that I may steal, because it’s a great reason for small businesses to work with SaaS vendors: “SAP nailed it in 1990. If data is in two places, one of them is wrong.”
Big companies have been able to link users across the globe to single data sets since the early mainframe days. Small businesses, and even medium ones, couldn’t afford the technology for secure remote access to a centralized data and application server installation. But today, using the Internet and SaaS, even the smallest businesses can have a single data location for a few dollars per month.
Actually, more than a few dollars. The entry level plan for NetBooks starts at $200 per month for five users, plus three others like your bookkeeping, accountant and marketing coach.
Marketing coach? Yes, because NetBooks does complete CRM from the first e-mail sent to a prospective customer (via Vertical Response) to the point they buy, you ship, you invoice, they pay, you deposit, and use that money for payroll (via PayCycle). All these work processes go through NetBooks. Evers claims, and I’m inclined to agree, that no one else offers such a complete set of company management tools for anywhere near this low a price.
The new Point of Sale and Web store works bi-directionally with your sales catalog and inventory. Said Evers, “No matter what you’re selling or how, we’ll handle the process.”
Evers has run his own small businesses since 1967 and was employee number 36 or so at Intuit when that company’s only product was Quicken. Acknowledged as one of the primary forces behind QuickBooks (the business version of Quicken accounting that has become the leader in the small business market), Evers knows small business accounting as well. He said he waited for someone to fill the gaps in the marketplace between QuickBooks for small businesses and NetSuite for huge ones, but no one did.
Like most private company executives, Evers won’t say how much the company sells or how many customers it has. He does guarantee that the company is profitable and its investors are happy.
Of course, your job isn’t to make NetBooks investors happy, your job is to run your business. If your work flow processes look like many small businesses, you’re one lost Post-It note or garbled spreadsheet from disappointing customers and losing business.
Growing up and following best practices for business processes isn’t easy, but it is necessary. Companies that don’t “grow up” in their internal processes don’t grow and often wither away and die. If you’re happy at the size you are now and don’t want to grow, that’s fine. Many small businesses are happy where they are.
If you do want to grow, you need better processes than you have now. “We support lots of different modes of production for different businesses,” Evers says. “But we put into place best practices to fit the production modes. We say if you do it this way, it will be right.”
Complete business management software doesn’t lend itself to a 15 day free trial like a drawing program, but NetBooks offers personal online demonstrations. It also has plenty of information online to help answer your questions and get you to sign up for that demo.
