The integration of business data is a serious and long-standing issue for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). Typically, an SMB needs a CRM, an operations management system specific to their business model, a set of financial ledgers, an invoicing system, and potentially a service management system. Add in your public web site, and a customer self-service portal, and you begin to wonder if you are in the IT business, not your actual business.

When these are all separate systems, the clerical effort, and loss of data quality, associated with trying to keep data in the multiple systems in sync is both costly and inefficient. Operating a business based on these 'islands of information' is not an option in today's challenging business climate.

Yet trying to buy an integrated system that covers all these bases, matches the specifics of your business model, and is still affordable, if often an impossible task. And even when you can find such a system, migrating to a fully integrated system from today's multiple applications can be a difficult and risky process.

With Info At Hand, our approach has been to create a Customer Relationship and Business Management System (CRBM) - a system with a CRM at the core, with integrated operations management, service management and invoicing features, and optional integration with a customer portal and the market-leading QuickBooks accounting system.

We took this approach for several reasons, the three most important being:

• The lack of any real market need for yet another accounting system;
• The dominant QuickBooks market share in our customer segment (1-200 employees);
• An easier migration to Info At Hand from whatever the client is running today, when Info At Hand does not include an integrated accounting system. We believe that requiring a client to change both their front- and back-office systems at the same time with a NetSuite-like solution is unwise.

Info At Hand Finance is an optional module for Info At Hand that can link the key financial data within Info At Hand with a QuickBooks implementation. The key features of Info At Hand Finance include:

• Info At Hand FInance continually synchronizes Account, Product Catalog, Invoice & Payment data within Info At Hand with the QuickBooks Accounting system from Intuit Inc.;

• The synchronization is accomplished via the QuickBooks RDS server, at intervals defined by the Info At Hand administration scheduler. The RDS server is free, and provides a SOAP-based web-services interface with which Info At Hand Finance communicates.

• Info At Hand Finance is compatible with Info At Hand 5.0, and later revisions;

• Info At Hand Finance is compatible with both conventional QuickBooks software (2006 generation or later, Pro and higher versions), and the QuickBooks Online service.

lnfo At Hand Finance is a separately-priced add-on for Info At Hand - contact us for details. Info At Hand Finance will be available in January 2007.

Note: QuickBooks is a registered trademark of Intuit Inc.