Thanks for the tip, Tony. I subscribed to an ACT newsletter, but it seems to be mostly about add-ons that you can buy.

Hey guys,

I will probably be getting ACT in the next week or so. Maybe we can set up a pretend booking business with it and share ideas on how we can best use it.

Thanks,
Richard

Here's a bit of advice for those of you who may purchase ACT. Think very carefully about your database setup. You can customize the tables within ACT for your own needs. You should do your best to get this right before you put any data into the system. I've added a number of custom fields to the contact database that I use in some of my reports and mailings.

One limitation that I didn't particularly care for: You cannot do a mail merge using both the contact and opportunity databases. The contact database is where you store client information - the opportunity database is where you store information about your sales pipeline. I wanted to create a series of custom performance agreements that would pull information from both the contact and opportunity datbases. My idea was that with a click of a button I would be able to produce a performance agreement that didn't need to be manually modified. The software didn't let me do this. I even got on the phone with their tech support and they confirmed that I wouldn't be able to do this. The result is that I set up my performance agreements with the fields from the contact database. I do the mail merge into my word processor and manually update the information about the performance. It's not that big a deal, but it's just a feature I thought ACT should have.

I'm surprised ACT doesn't allow you to do this. I have done this with my Goldmine program and it saves a lot of time.

Before taking the word of the tech support guy as final, you might want to Google the ACT forums. You might find a solution there.

Best,
James

I use Act for Customer Management, Quickbooks for Accounting, and Microsoft Word for mailing. I export a "look-up" to do my mail-merges. I do this for one reason. I use Word for mail because it is a word processor. Act is a customer contact solution. Use each program for what it was designed to do (it does the other stuff poorly). I also use a $70 program that shares information between Act and Quickbooks. And it all interfaces with Outlook. Only have to enter the information once.

It takes some time, but the payoffs are well worth it. And it's not perfect, but it's the best I've come up with, to date.

Try http://www.magicbase.biz

I have the original version and while it has a few glitches, it works well for me. I'm sure the newer versions are much better. It's designed for magicians.

I also tried magicbase. I found it too inflexible for my needs.