Customer Reviews

QuickBooks Customer Manager 2.5

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(14)

 

 

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!

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.

If you have a small business, this is the tool for you. We simply needed to keep track of our customers. Name, address, phone number, date of birth, place of employment, and type of products we have sold to them. You can put them in catagories, you can print labels, and import from your other Quickbooks programs..if you use them. Very simple and easy to use. Great search feature too. This is just a basic way to keep track of your customers on the computer. Nothing fancy no bells and whistles. Basics that work.

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 just finished beta testing the 2.5 edition of QCM. I have used the product in version 1 and 2 and each time was very happy with it. I have a home business and also do consulting under my own name. QCM helps me a lot with an easy to use contact manager, and I love that I can sync it to Quickbooks.

I also have an online store, hosted by Yahoo!, and Yahoo! store manager has a neat quickbooks export option. Using that with QCM as well was very helpful in maintaining my customer base.

If you have a small business and need an easy to use yet feature filled contact manager and customer record database that also works well with quickbooks, then Quickbooks Customer Manager is a very good choice.

This program is very basic (limited reporting functionality, can't delete or change more than 1 record at a time, etc), but it's simplicity is a positive thing for me since I can fly through sales calls, record them and set times for new ones quicker than with Outlook. The central location of customer information and history of activity is straight forward and helpful.

I liked this program until it started to stall for up to 2 minutes when I opened it, and then would periodically freeze for no reason (at least, a reason unknown to me). It also made Outlook run painfully slow. Ok - to the point - I believe I have fixed that problem on my computer. After the fix described below, our Sales Manager and I haven't had any more of these problems. And now I love the program. So here is what I did:

I separated the database files from the program files and stored them in the following locations:

I installed the program as normal on my C drive (I wasn't successful using other partitioned drives) in this location:

C:\Program Files\Intuit\QuickBooks Customer Manager

I then moved the database files to the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\joesmith\Local Settings\Application Data\Intuit\QuickBooks Customer Manager\2.5

So inside my 2.5 folder, the database files I move consisted of:

The Backup folder (I believe this will be created once you use Customer Manager the first time, and it will get created in the folder where you database is stored)
The Templates folder
The database file(this has the file extension .qcm).

If you can't find the .qcm database file, you may have to run Customer Manager first to create one.

I'm on Windows XP.

(Just a note for anyone who needs it: the "joesmith" part of of the path above will be different for you - it will be whatever the title is for that user's folder)

I hope this solution may work for some others.

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.

Perhaps for a single user environment this may be good enough software. However, as soon as you add more users the synchronization process is awful. First you need to synchronize with Quickbooks, and then synchronize with the "depot" (i.e. other Customer Manager users). Many times data is garbled or duplicated during the synchronization process. We spend sometimes hours cleaning up the garbled/duplicated data. Why wouldn't Intuit integrate the Customer Manager program completely into Quickbooks and make it a truly multi-user program?

Another annoying problem: Users can only view e-mails that they saved into a Customer or Project folder if those were saved by themselves. That is, the program does not save the data into the database but rather save a link to the Outlook program of the user. One user cannot view e-mails saved by another users.

I bought 2 copies of Customer Manager for my office. It worked pretty well at first until you sync it. It messes up Quickbooks. Contacts had their own Quickbooks customer accounts. In so many words, double entry. Made tracking very difficult. It also screwed up Outlook when it was syncing with that too. I can't even uninstall it now. Save your money and just use the notes feature in Quickbooks to work on.

I have used this upgrade for about four months now. The biggest piece of junk ever. I had 2.0 and had problems. The customer service person talked me into upgrading to 2.5. Now my databases in both Quickbooks and customer manager are all messed up. They combine random people together or totally change a group of customers to list them by first name. How great when you have 25 Johns, etc. I use the calender for contacting customers when they are due for service. It has messed this up so bad that I am constantly missing names on my list and it tells me a customer is due for service when it isn't. At least with 2.0 it kept things more organized. I wish I would have stuck with that, and it was bad enough. It just gets worse with time.