Small Business Manager Updated

The latest version of Small Business Manager, software to help small businesses track their finances and business processes, features better integration with Office and tighter fiscal control.

Introduced in late 2001, Small Business Manager (SBM) helps small businesses manage their finances, track inventory, and manage business processes, such as purchasing, sales, and payroll. Designed for businesses with 25 or fewer employees and less than US$5 million in annual revenues, but starting at nearly US$1,000 for a single-user license, SBM is significantly more expensive than other more popular small business accounting products, such as Intuit’s QuickBooks. Thus, Microsoft must convince small businesses that SBM offers enough extra functionality to justify its price tag.

With this goal in mind, SBM 7.0, released in Dec. 2002, has concentrated its improvements in the following areas:

Integration with other Microsoft products. One area in which Microsoft has a natural advantage is its ability to integrate SBM with other Microsoft products, particularly Office. For example, in SBM 7.0, new wizards help customers import data from SBM into an Excel spreadsheet for manipulation and analysis, and let them create letter-writing templates in Word (e.g., form letters to notify customers of overdue invoices).