Integrated biz suite

EVERY COMPANY, regardless of its size, must maintain good relationships with customers, suppliers, and partners; adhere to consistent and lawful accounting practices; and, typically, manage both online stores and brick-and-mortar warehouses.

The Oracle and NetLedger partnership was the first to release a comprehensive and integrated hosted ebusiness suite, Oracle SBS (Small Business Suite). Others are following in that space, including Accpac with its eCRM suite, and Microsoft, which has pulled together Great Plains, Navision, and Solomon applications in the ERP space.

Oracle and NetLedger's initial release of Oracle SBS addressed most e-business requirements for small companies, providing a comprehensive and integrated mix of hosted applications, including general ledger, accounts payable and receivable, payroll, inventory management, and an online store.

Now the partnership is offering a more full-featured suite for midsize companies. NetLedger NetSuite 8.0 goes a step beyond Oracle SBS, providing back-office and front-office capabilities in separate CRM and accounting applications, dubbed NetLedger NetCRM and NetLedger Advanced Accounting, respectively. We found NetSuite so easy to use and well-integrated that we awarded it our highest rating of Deploy.

Customers can subscribe to NetCRM only, Advanced Accounting only, or to both. The combined, NetSuite package starts at $4,800 per year, covering a limited number of users and transactions, and can be extended for additional fees.

For customers with many users and high transaction volumes, there is an enterprise edition of NetSuite, which costs a hefty $45,000 per year and requires a stiff $25,000 setup fee.

NetLedger NetCRM provides comprehensive CRM features such as marketing campaigns, customer support, SFA, and a knowledge base that provides a searchable repository for customers or company reps. NetLedger Advanced Accounting adds much-needed features including the ability to manage multiple shipping and billing addresses, track product inventory from multiple warehouses, use electronic fund transfers for direct deposit of employees' wages or to pay bills, and sell products in foreign currencies.

Retail companies will appreciate the automatic calculation of UPS shipping fees for online or sales-rep-managed orders, and the automatic insertion of tracking information in related documents and e-mails.

In comparison to SBS, the new suite also offers more sophisticated customization capabilities that customers can take advantage of without hiring a programmer. In addition, you can add JavaScript code at specific points to further extend customization.

NetSuite has a number of predefined user roles -- administrator, sales manager, and support rep, for example -- that you can modify to fit your company structure. The role-driven screen layout can be easily personalized by changing field names and content in each form.