Customer Reviews

QuickBooks: Customer Manager - New Version

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I have used ACT! and Qbooks for years. I needed an upgrade to ACT! but received very poor reviews for ACT! 6.0. Intuit always gives a quality product so I bought This Customer Manager.

The advertising makes it sound so powerful but I cannot find much to do with it. It is like Intuit sold a shell they were developing to recapture development costs.

Its kind of funny in a sick sort of way .. but I can't find much functionality in this product at all. It really doesn't do anything except list your customers and... nothing!

We are using Customer Manager, to build out customer database. We all submit customer contacts names, titles, phone numbers, and e-mail address. We have not experienced any of the bugs the other have mentioned. One thing is Intuit provides automatic update to the software in the same fashion as it does for Quickbooks. Meaning, as corrections are made you get them uploaded.

I periodically take my copy of the database file, and update our Quickbooks file.

Like Quickbooks only 5 users can share one database "file". But Unlike Quicbooks, the database file called the "depot.file" is a community file which each user syncs and updates to in order to get the other community memember additions; one at a time.

You can also use Customer Manager to set-up To-do's and set assignments and for other users. It track of open and closed jobs, set deadlines, provide alerts etc.

You can customize the data your keep by adding fields to track customer by.

You can also group what you are managing, just not customers. You can group by customer, vendor, supplier, employee, etc.

For the price it worth exploring.

[...]
But the really major problem is that it now hoses my computer any time I launch the software. I have uninstalled and reinstalled. The problem gets worse and worse. At this point, I have not used Customer Manager in over a month because of the lock-ups, yet I still have data tied up in there that I can't even get to. I've tried three times just today to launch Customer Manager to get ONE customer record I need, and I've had to power down my computer just to get out of the lock up. It is a horrible program. I can't believe Quickbooks would put their name on something this bad.

And wouldn't it figure that my problems started approximately 75 days after I bought it, just outside the 60-day money back guarantee offer from Quickbooks.

Wow.... The promotional literature for this product was great. I bought it and spent hours setting up my data and was all set to use it. Turns out it can't even perform the most basic functions of customer management - a mail merge or labels! There is a really cool feature that let's you e-mail directly from the database but turns out you can only e-mail one customer at a time. This may have been good for the stone ages but not for someone who needs to maximize time. Something as simple as a meeting confirmation to 10 people is very painful. I also spent 1 1/2 hours on the phone with support and a $75 charge for them to tell me that they don't support these features. Scary. Maybe by about version 5 they'll consult with real customer managers first.

Yikes! I'm a lover of Intuit's other software, so was exceited to use this program. I've been using the product for about 4 days and have already run across 3 HUGE errors--the product experienced a write error to my database file and locked me out of the entire program! That's right, I tried to re-launch the program and it gave a cryptic Java error message and dumped out.

Ok, so that's a hard issue. But they didn't even catch the small ones...try to delete more then one customer group at a time, and it only deletes the first one. The most basic of testing would have caught this...

I'm a software developer, for whatever that's worth, so I know not to come down too hard to early on new products. But this one's insane. I'm going to try and get my money back.

The feature which allows one to sync between different running versions of Customer Manager is cumbersome and full of bugs. The software uses a 'sync depot' to share information. Each copy of Customer Manager shares any changes it made with the 'sync depot.' Each other version then receives any changes from the sync depot and sends its own changes back to the sync depot. Each sync must be initated manually, and it is a bit slow. Customer contact information often get corrupted via this sync depot, usually resulting in Customer Manager crashing. According to Intuit Customer Service, they are still working out the bugs in the sync system, and a new release won't be out until next year.

Customer Manager also allows you to keep track of 'projects.' However, it would be nice if these projects were imported from Quickbooks' Jobs list. Instead, one is left with double the work of typing project information.

There are many other quirks with this particular software, but they are too many to list here.

The idea behind this software has a lot of potential (i.e. sharing information with Quicbooks). However, it seems more like a beta release, and the programmers at Intuit have a lot more work ahead of them. I would steer clear of this one for now.

The product is available with a coupon for $20 off from Office Depot, but they don't see since it says discontinued. Could that be because it is filled with problems that need to be worked out including that it didn't work past 12/31/20043??? Sounds like the old y2k problems except it isn't 2000 anymore!

This product has great potential but nothing more.

It's basic to say the least and while the project management and notes-keeping capabilities are useful if you don't want something at the other end of the scale like Act! or Maximizer, it's probably going to serve your needs if you're running an even moderately busy business.

I bought Customer Manager because I found everything else I tried (see above) to be overkill and frankly cumbersome. Customer Manager seemed to be (from the product information on Intuit's site) exactly what I was looking for, a lightweight contacts database with the awesome bonus of synchronising with Quickbooks.

The reality is that the database leaves much to be desired as far as organising contacts and my version of Quickbooks Pro 2003 does NOT synchronise with it because it's the Canadian version. Intuit's Web Site still does not specify that only the US versions of Quickbooks are compatible and I have never even had the courtesy of a reply from Intuit about it, despite three very polite requests for an update.

I have been using Customer Manager by Quickbooks for over a year. It keeps your projects, customers, all files in other software that you need to attach to the Customer Manager Project file (my main reason for getting this product) and many other details that are handy, in a easy to use interface. Its easy to look at, flows well and is intuitive. The only reason I did not give it a five star, is that I cannot sync with a phone, or some other type of portable device other than a laptop for taking with me on the field.

Have used this product for over a year now and it is absolutely the worst program I have ever used. Very slow to load, at least 1-2 minutes. Offers lot's of different options, which could be useful, if it didn't take so long to get to the information. The word Bug is not strong enough for this program. All form and no function. After I bought the program and tried to load it in another computer, the disk indicates it was a trail version...another 2 hours on the phone with customer service. Intuit definitely lost it on this one.