Sage Act! 2010 review

Large companies can pay tens of thousands of pounds a month for customer relationship management (CRM), and they do it gladly. With good CRM you can completely eliminate the wasted effort of chasing prospects that aren’t ready to buy. With consistency and attention to detail, you can identify real leads and concentrate your resources on them.

Good CRM, however, is time-consuming and potentially expensive. How can you track each and every contact with every customer? Sage Act! is CRM software for small businesses. If you buy the single-user licence it costs only £213, for which you get pretty much everything you need to run your business.

Records are stored in an SQL database. For each contact you can attach notes, a contact history, files (such as letters you’ve exchanged), call records and, new in this version, details of that person’s online presence, such as their Facebook or LinkedIn profile. This provides vital context. Contacts can be organised by company or in ad hoc groups, such as project groups.

This version includes closer integration with Microsoft Outlook. Act! adds a toolbar to Outlook that allows you to attach emails to contacts in Act! with a single mouse click.

As well as recording your communications with a client, the program lets you register sales opportunities and then, by changing their status, track them through the sales process. As you change the status of the opportunity (for instance, from ‘Negotiation’ to ‘Commitment to Buy’) the value that Act! places on the opportunity rises. Using one of the program’s many reports, you can see a list of your opportunities sorted by value – a great way of working out where to concentrate resources.

Our only complaint with Act! regards the interface. It’s cluttered and confused, and it’ll take a while before you can quickly get the most out of your precious data.