I suggest you look into a category of software called time & billing
software.  Expensive versions are used by service industry professionals
like cpa's, law firms, and consultants.  Basically, a good product manages
your schedule, helps track your labor investment (so you can track your
rates charged and adjust your profitability), and allows you to break a job
into tasks and then record the progress of each task.  This is necessary
because traditionally customers asked for detailed billing records.  What
you don't need is called job costing, which is the next level of complexity.
You can get by with more generic software usually categorized as project
management.  Either type should allow you to write proposals, then track
that the entire proposal is completed.  The time & billing type is
specifically geared to helping you get paid for work completed, rather than
wait until the whole project is done and signed off on, before you can
collect on your invoice.

Both types, time & billing or project management, have shareware level
products on the market.  I'm interested in tight integration with our other
software so I don't have much practical experience with low end products,
which typically lack integration capabilities.  I would search online
software repositories for the two categories I mentioned and see what hits
you generate.

To build your own knowledgebase, using your own experiences, might be
possible with a product like I talked about above.  More typically, service
businesses run an add-on module which issues trouble tickets that allow you
to describe the problem and the methods used to resolve it, in a searchable
format.  While these are expensive, you can define your own customer support
system using any of the configurable Contacts Managers like ACT! www.act.com
or Goldmine (from Frontrange inc.) www.goldmine.com which don't require any
programming skills to set up.  These don't do billing however, and you may
not like the resulting paperwork load.
For my money, these two are priced low enough to avoid the shareware
temptation.  However, if you're looking for additional savings, there are
shareware contact managers as well.

Tom Turak

-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Rubin [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Wednesday, September 25, 2002 7:46 AM

Thankyou for your suggestion, but I do not have an inventory or a POS, I am
not a retail company.  I just do computer repair.  Computer parts are way
too expensive here (right now one US Dollar is nearly 4 Reis!) to get into
parts sales (and software piracy is near 90% here, impossible to sell
anyway), I let my customers get the best deals where they can.  I just fix
them and put them together, strictly labour.  As I said in my previous post,
I need a solution to keep track of my customers, what I did, dates,
observations, equipment, programs installed, etc. with an option to search
and print out.  Something like Access, I guess, but I am not a programer nor
a dedicated user, just someone who has his A+ and fixes things.  The average
computer fixit person here is in his/her teens, the average equipment is
still a 1st generation Pentium, at 47 years and being from the U.S.A. gives
me a great advantage!  I have checked out Microsoft´s free Access templates
but I do not have the knowledge to adapt then to my use.  I would prefer a
comercial program with support.
Howard in Fortaleza, Brazil

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