2012 Review of BizAutomation – BizAutomation.com

BizAutomation – BizAutomation.com
www.BizAutomation.com
408-786-5116

From the May 2012 review of SaaS Small Business Accounting Systems.

Best Fit: Small organizations who need a process-oriented business management tool with strong CRM and fundamental accounting processes in a single, integrated platform.

Strengths:

• Integration with Google Apps allows users to access familiar tools from within the application.
• Solid Customer Relationship Management (CRM) functionality, tightly integrated into the product.
• Built on the latest Microsoft .NET development tools, so it should scale well to Windows Azure and other cloud-based technologies in the future.
• Very capable feature set in many areas

Potential Limitations:

• No third party add-ons, and has less than 1,000 total users. Support for specialized industries may be limited.
• Highly regulated businesses (e.g. banks, insurance companies, healthcare entities) may need to do extra due diligence to ensure that the Company’s data center and operations comply with regulatory requirements.
• The product does not currently include audit trail functionality, and may require a more sophisticated end user to take advantage of the wide range of options.

BizAutomation is an integrated suite of web-based business management applications which are designed to provide a small to mid-sized organization with marketing, accounting, service management, project management, and customer relationship management. The marketing capabilities of the application are largely beyond the scope of this review, and are as substantial as any CRM product serving the small business market. The application’s portal has tight integration with Google Apps for Business, and will display a user’s Gmail and Google Calendar from a tab within the product.

Basic System Functions - 4.5 Stars

BizAutomation.com’s suite of applications is designed to replace existing manual systems for most, if not all, of a company’s processes. While this approach is employed in many global enterprise applications such as SAP R/3 and NetSuite, it requires users to think in terms of the flow of transactions through a process instead of thinking solely of the debits and credits on the balance sheet at the end of the period.

The hub of all activity in BizAutomation.com is the dashboard, which is fully customizable using a drag and drop interface. Each table or graph (also known as a “widget”) can be customized and link to data stored throughout the system, and many offer drill-down capabilities into the supporting details. Tabs for key segments of the product (Dashboard, Activities. E-mail, Relationships, Marketing, Orders, Accounting, Reports, Items, Documents, Cases, and Projects) are listed across the top of the screen. Each tab has list of subtopics and reports in a tree structure on the left hand side of the screen, with the subitem currently selected displayed in an active window which takes up most of the screen. The menu structure is fully customizable using a web-based menu structure, and users will most likely want to remove options from the menu which are not needed to make the user interface look less cluttered.

The Company reports that it offers customizations for a wide array of industries, including project management, multi-warehouse inventory, service and work order management, bills of materials, and fund accounting.

Core Accounting Capabilities - 4 Stars

The product includes a very limited number of accounting reports, although custom financial reports can be created using the financial reporting wizard. Custom reports can be created with a web-based report writer, and there are a number of tools for creating custom calculations, including automated commission reporting.

Sales taxes can be calculated using user-updated tables or by using the Company’s integration with the Avalara sales tax calculation engine. The product supports payroll data entry, although withholding calculations and tax compliance capabilities are not included.