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 - Waste of Time and EffortAll of the negative reviews are true. Every last one. I wish to heaven I had been allowed to research this product before it was foist upon me but I wasn't. Now they're mad but at least I'm not to blame because they chose it without asking me and when I did object that it hadn't been tested they just said the asking price was good so we'd have to make it work. Lesson Number One: You get what you pay for. I don't know how people ever got to use the more advanced features of this product because we NEVER got past trying to get a decent mailing list out of this thing. There is no way to get anything done in this program without creating a separate project in MS Excel or Word. I may as well have used Word & Excel and typed out each name, address, phone number, email address and transaction for all this has helped me. It would have been faster and more accurate. Since we are a church we have a master mailing list and then several subcategories such as donors, ushers, chaplains, class leaders. The best thing I can say about this program is that the interface for filtering groups works very well. However one HUGE problem is that you cannot go into the master list and assign people to groups. You have to go into each individual record and assign each person to groups. I didn't find this out until after we had imported over 800 records. It took a month and three Volunteers to assign people to the groups they belonged to. The initial syncs and group setups went well (if you call wasting a month going well). Any sync we did after the first two resulted in half the names in QuickBooks being changed from our format of "last name of first". That's right I said half. Some of the names got changed, some of them didn't. Even the slightest change in spacing resulted in duplicate entries in Customer Manager, despite using their very tedious feature that allows you to keep records or merge them during a sync. And their duplicate names feature of searching through your entire long list is equally tedious, time consuming and completely unworkable. Mapping was useless. Customer Manager circumvented us every time. It took me over two months to put all the QuickBooks records back the way they were. Worse, I thought I had done the sync wrong until we called support and they told us that this is KNOWN BUG that may or may not be fixed with the next release. They also said they have had many complaints about the groups issue and it's something that the developers are working on but "you know, it's hard to develop new features". I finally gave up and told the boss people that I will not be using this product again. PERIOD. I showed them the reviews from Amazon and from another site and they finally agreed that they had been hasty in selecting this product and will allow me to be in on the review process for our next database software. Meantime I have wasted nearly SIX MONTHS working with this software and it very nearly made me want to trash QuickBooks along with it. Even though QuickBooks is a solid accounting program and works decently, I'm not convinced it's the best program for us because there is other software out there specifically tailored to church management. Not to mention, my experience with Intuit Customer support over this has not been good. Bottom line: Customer Manager has been the bane of my existence for the last six months and nothing on God's Green Earth could convince me to ever use it again. If you're a church person researching this, look at other products first. Rating:  - Limited but has some use. This is not a sophisticated program. However it's cheap. I use it and like it because it is an improvement over QuickBooks customer management functionality. If you are aware of its limitations you won't be disappointed. Rating:  - Works for us.I run a multi million dollar home building business and Quickbooks Customer Manager works great for us. We are able keep all our customers' info in one place. We also use it for our service operations and scheduling appointments. It keeps a great history of what we have done at each customers home. This is a relatively new program and I think it will get better with time as they provide new versions. It is a little simplistic and could use some fine tuning, but all in all we use it with success. Rating: - Amazon does not have a 0 star rating.I have used Quicken & Quickbooks products since the early 90's. I have purchased several add on products during that time. Quicken & Quickbooks started out as great products but have declined greatly in the last few years. They also offer extra cost products on many of their "upgrades" which were included in earlier products for free. Customer Manager is a different issue. I started out with version 1. Description on box seemed to offer a usefull product. However, the program was so limited that it made more work than it eliminated. Like a fool I bought V2 when it came out because the concept seemed good & many improvements were promised. I was wrong. It has more bugs, hardly any real improvements than V1. The feature for sending e-mails is worse than useless. It takes several steps to put it into history and often doesn't work at all. You can see from all the other reviews that there are lots of other issues as well. I have experienced them as well. Rating: - Do not buy!The price is good, but I guess you get what you pay for. It works fine for a while then it screws up and you can't use it anymore. You click on it and it gives you this garbage and it won't open. I had to uninstall and reinstall. Inuit was helpful, but it didn't solve the problem. I don't understand how a big company can make such crap. We have no problems with quickbooks, but customer manager is just a waste of our time and computer space.
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