QuickBooks Customer Manager 2.5

Customer Rating:
Summary: Almost a 5 star product.
Comment: Customer manager is great for organizing your clients. Like it cause you can create notes and history files about each client, schedules, has a calender built in, syncs great with Quickbooks Pro. The merge contact features is also helpful. Managing client data couldn't be easier. Only draw back is we would like it to start up faster or have a smaller footprint on the system. So we could quickly add something without the whole program starting up. Maybe its wishful thinking. Overall a great product.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Found a fix for the slooooowness and crashes
Comment: This program is very basic (limited reporting functionality, can't delete or change more than 1 record at a time, etc), but it's simplicity is a positive thing for me since I can fly through sales calls, record them and set times for new ones quicker than with Outlook. The central location of customer information and history of activity is straight forward and helpful.

I liked this program until it started to stall for up to 2 minutes when I opened it, and then would periodically freeze for no reason (at least, a reason unknown to me). It also made Outlook run painfully slow. Ok - to the point - I believe I have fixed that problem on my computer. After the fix described below, our Sales Manager and I haven't had any more of these problems. And now I love the program. So here is what I did:

I separated the database files from the program files and stored them in the following locations:

I installed the program as normal on my C drive (I wasn't successful using other partitioned drives) in this location:

C:\Program Files\Intuit\QuickBooks Customer Manager

I then moved the database files to the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\joesmith\Local Settings\Application Data\Intuit\QuickBooks Customer Manager\2.5

So inside my 2.5 folder, the database files I move consisted of:

The Backup folder (I believe this will be created once you use Customer Manager the first time, and it will get created in the folder where you database is stored)
The Templates folder
The database file(this has the file extension .qcm).

If you can't find the .qcm database file, you may have to run Customer Manager first to create one.

I'm on Windows XP.

(Just a note for anyone who needs it: the "joesmith" part of of the path above will be different for you - it will be whatever the title is for that user's folder)

I hope this solution may work for some others.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Doesn't Work
Comment: Bought the product, installed the product,the program will not load. Called customer service, they said they don't know what's wrong, but would research the problem and call me back. That was two weeks ago. NO word from them. The product may work fine in most computers, but their customer service is not.

Customer Rating:
Summary: Shockingly Bad-Stay Away
Comment: I spent several years with the predecessor to this program only to have my database totally corrupted with no fix. Even when it works, it is painfully slow and crashes frequently. I tried the new version since I now have Vista. It is no better. Even if it promises to work with Outlook, it apparently doesn't work with Microsoft Outlook Exchange. Every time I try to sync it just crashes. There is no customer support unless you are willing to pay their ridiculous prices. I've got seven years of data in there but I am ready to abandon it and re-enter the data in another program. Stay away. Intuit should be ashamed of themselves.

Customer Rating:
Summary: great product for my needs
Comment: This product is exactly what I have needed. It is a smoothly functioning "grand central" for all the documents, Emails, financial information, addresses, etc. connected with all my projects. It works as advertised. It automatically saves entries when they are entered so I have not experienced data loss. The learning curve is easy. By the second day I had it doing everything I needed it to do.

It does this by creating hyperlinks with the information you enter. Do you need to access an Email, or invoice, or document? Just click and it is there. Talk about fast and efficient.

On top of all that, it integrates and sychronizes with Quickbooks Pro and Outlook, and it has a very pleasant interface. I couldn't have asked for more. I'm one of these people who is always looking for the best product to do the job. For me, this is it.