When does big really mean small? When you consider Big Business, a powerful new program from Automatic Software. Big Business is really a management tool for small businesses. It provides features for managing the four key business areas -- sales, marketing, inventory, and accounting -- in one integrated product. In short, Big Business includes almost all the software you need to run a small business, with the exception of a word processor and a spreadsheet program.
Good Relations
At the core of Big Business is a relational database constructed with ACI's 4D. The advantage of this underlying architecture is that information for Big Business' four main areas -- sales, marketing, inventory, and accounting -- is all interrelated, so you can readily see how activity in one area is likely to affect another.
Salespeople, for example, can generate quotes, process orders, transfer quotes to invoices, print invoices, and track back-ordered items for each customer. Marketing personnel can then use the order data generated by the sales department to create customer reports and target specific segments of a company's customer base (such as all customers with total purchases that exceeded $2,500 during a holiday season) with special mailings or follow-up calls.
Filled orders automatically effect inventory. Inventory handlers can create vendor records, generate purchase orders, track back orders, determine price markups, and create custom price lists that reflect the buying patterns of a specific subset of the customer base. And accounting personnel will find all the standard features of a dedicated accounting package: accounts receivable and payable, general journal, and full reporting capabilities for a wide variety of financial statements and charts.
Big Business is a client/server application, so you can set it up as a multiuser system running on an EtherTalk network. Depending on how you set up access privileges, a user working in one of Big Business' four main areas can have full access to the records and data generated by one or all of the other areas. In fact, Big Business is designed to serve as a workgroup application. It even has a notes feature that works like e-mail. You can create messages (stand-alone or attached to Big Business records), reminders, and schedules and send them to other users on the network. Messages can include attached documents you've created in other applications.
To manage your mail, you can set message priorities, create folders for notes you've sent and received, and use the QuickSearch function to find specific notes. An address book lets you send messages and copies to recipients with just a few mouse clicks.
What really impressed us about Big Business, in addition to its comprehensive feature set, was the program's interface. It's surprisingly clean and intuitive for a program that performs so many functions. To avoid cluttering the desktop with multiple windows, Big Business uses tabs to organize its data-entry areas, including ones for customers, items, vendors, and banking. That means users are working with one compact window at a time. A tool bar lets you move easily among the four main Big Business areas and access the tools available to each. The program also uses its own convenient drag-and-drop implementation. To schedule an automatic vendor payment, for example, you can simply drag the payment transaction from a list to a date in a calendar view.
At $999 for a two-user license, Big Business is pricey. But when you consider that it can handle the tasks of several separate applications, its price tag begins to seem more reasonable. As a 4D application, Big Business also has a hefty appetite for system resources. For optimal speed, you need at least a Power Mac with 16 MB of RAM and 40 MB of free hard-disk space. We found the program unacceptably sluggish on 68040 Macs.
Big Business' documentation is well-organized and -illustrated. Online help is also available, but the program doesn't support System 7.5 features such as AppleScript and Apple Guide. A Windows 95 version is in the works for introduction later this year.
The Bottom Line
What makes Big Business stand out among small-business applications is its ability to track the status of a transaction from beginning to end -- from initial sales contact and correspondence, to job quote, to final invoice and payment. It's an amazingly versatile program that can serve as a contact manager, inventory database, basic e-mail system, and accounting application. The program's well-integrated modules simplify and speed work flow and collaboration among various departments. Automatic Software plans to make Big Business even bigger by incorporating a variety of add-on features, such as point-of-sale-peripheral support and electronic banking.
Price: Two users, $999; ten users, $2,499 (list). Company: Automatic Software, Cupertino, CA; 408-725-7200. Reader Service: Circle #407.
A thoughtfully designed interface makes Big Business accessible and easy to navigate, despite the wide scope of its functions.
