Sage act software

Industry: Staffing and Recruiting. I really like the layout and tab system for quickly navigating to relevant data and files attached to the case you are working on. Was the first CRM I learned to use and it has only gotten better with age. I had a little difficulty figuring out how to get the datasets i needed to query properly but that wasn't a problem with their platform, it was a lack of knowledge. I love Act! I run my single jobs, AR, AP, reporting, generate documents, calendar, follow up, email all through Act!

I have several users and the addons are endless. I began using Act! I have run my company's database with this software from start up and I have made it work through the years. In the earlier days I was able to automate functionality to stay ahead of trends and have robust productivity far a head of my competitors.

As the years have gone on and the product was sold and resold they have updated and brought general users more but have left lifelong users in the dust for profit. I feel that the company sold out for recurring subscriptions. I don't care that they want to go to subscription but I do care that I have my feet held to the fire because of it. Users like myself enabled their progress and continued success. The import and export functions were simple and the ability to create templates and reports that had dynamic functionality was impressive.

I could even create macros, easily build queries and set fields to launch other programs upon entry into that field. I love all the features that meet the needs of financial advisors. The customizable fields are beneficial and improve the overall use of the software. It has probably just as many features as other customer relations management programs but cost is substantially less. Very happy with my selection. The Act! The new Marketing Automation is an great way to send out Newsletters, etc.

Because we have at least 3 people involved in one transaction, the relationship tab helps us tie them together to the transaction. We can toggle back and forth easily without having to search another name. It's quick and efficient. With our customized fields, we can easily see years of history for a client on one page.

We have been frustrated over the years by the number of crashes and freezes. Occasionally an import will not import correctly and the data in put into the wrong fields. There are is no advanced level training for the eblasts and drip marketing. This is a robust software program. We have added many custom fields that allows us to track a lot of data really dig into for trends and statistics.

We love how history is captured a for all the activity we do for and with a client. We rely on the relationship tab heavily as multiple people are involved in a transaction.

We are really enjoying the new Marketing Automation. It has a lot of robust features that we are just beginning to tap into. We also like the groups feature. We have hundreds of groups that we can run reports and create statistics from. We can see how many groups a contact is part of which helpful as well.

I like the statistics ACT generates from drip marketing. Knowing what emails bounced back or who opted out helps us improve our data. When searching for a person, it doesn't give you the option of having similar names - the spelling must be exact.

It crashes when we are in the social updates tab. Customer Service: Often the techs are hard to understand. That is a big interruption to our workflow in the office. One thing I wish ACT would do is send to 2 emails at once. When sending out an eblast, it pulls from the email field. If there is more than one email address followed by a semicolon, it won't send to both.

It bounces back. We've been using it for more than 15 years and are excited when another new upgrade and improvement is made. Familiarity and loyalty! Industry: Marketing and Advertising. I have been using it non stop since the earliest versions - that should tell you that I am very satisfied with it. I have been using ACT for over 25 years and have seen lots of versions.

I like its flexibility and that I can put users into multiple groups, It would be impossible to design a program that did everything everybody wanted it to but ACT comes close.

I use it for sales, marketing, personal groups I coordinate, keeping track of some of my customers' customers. It can interact with Outlook and Google's calendar if you use either of those programs. I am a Premium member. The good side is that I always have the most up to date version.

The customer support is wonderful if you are a premium member. Whenever Microsoft Windows has an update a lot of my programs need some adjusting. I like the fact that it is cloud based so I can access it on my tablet or cell phone or any computer anywhere. At my office I use the offline version and simply update the sync to the cloud. I have it set to update overnight also. One of the features I like best is the history. It is great to be able to look back to meetings, calls etc to see what I said, did etc.

The library of forms is very useful also - create a form, letter - whatever - and you have a pre printed template you can utilize for multiple clients or for just one. It holds tons of contacts also.

The group function sort of does that but not like I need it to. Most of my clients fall into more than one category. Act has become a valuable database of information for our teams, storing all manner of customer and company information that we can utilise for various means.

It is a valuable asset for us and will no doubt continue to be in the future. There are multiple benefits to using Act as reported by our users. The Act database allows for a large quantity of information to be stored, meaning we were able to decommission several other systems holding various bits of customer data by merging it into Act.

We have found pricing to be competitive on a per-licence basis which suits us as a small team working within a non-profit organisation. On the technical side, updates and hotfixes are provided regularly and it is relatively easy to install these during periods of downtime. The UI is easy to navigate, with clearly labelled menus and an in-built help area. We have found it somewhat difficult to integrate Act with our current systems and have resorted to manually exporting CSVs with information to import into our systems.

We have also had to purchase add-ins to enable certain features such as opportunities tracking, but Act plays well with these add-ons, so this is not too much of an issue for us. Perhaps in future, updates could be made to the UI to make it look a little less dated and bring it up to clean, modern, standards. Act allows us to manage a vast database of over 85, contacts and 15, companies, as well as over , Table records between the two, with ease.

Any information we need to find or update with these records is as easy as it gets, and makes our customer service team's jobs a relative breeze. There are hiccups here and there, especially with newer features to the program, but there's never been any issues that interrupt work or cause data loss, and the tech support available is very handy at resolving any issues we might have.

Everything in a Contact or Company record's layout can be customized, moved around, hidden on a per-user basis, and otherwise manipulated however your organization needs it to be. My company makes heavy use of this feature, having multiple team-based layouts that present the most important data to those teams prominently.

We also greatly enjoy the software's ability to perform advanced queries on the data that can be saved and re-run with a single click to provide accurate reports and drill down to specific needs in moments. There are quite a few features that feel incomplete or at least not fully integrated. For example, the software comes with the ability to create and Mail Merge templated emails that imports information like a contact's name, and the Smart Tasks feature allows you to automatically perform certain tasks including sending an email to a contact, yet for some reason you can't do both - that is, you can't set a Smart Task to perform a Mail Merge to a templated email and send the result, meaning that the automated emails cannot contain information personal to the contact such as their name.

Started using Act about 25 years ago. Have added contacts since and used most of the features. Over time the use of certain features such as mass mailings to customer lists have faded, and now occasionally by e-mail. Over time I have come to value how I can locate someone that was a customer years ago, and have a complete record of a transaction, conversation or specific subject we were involved in.

You have to learn to use for nearly every phone conversation or piece of correspondence. If you do, you will always be able to revert back to a contact, and who said what when. What correspondence was involved etc.

To say nothing about scheduling appointments, and being reminded of birthdays and other important events. Act is the backbone of my business and personal contact information. Invaluable and used every day. I have used over may revisions and Company changes. Sometimes the customer service is better than others. Presently the Customer Service is Excellent. If you are a first time user or considering starting to use it I would recommend you take a course on using it as many of the features are not apparent unless someone shows them to you.

A great tool to keep track of what everyone on your team is doing and as they move on a record of what they did and who was involved. A great tool that I rely on daily. Happy to spread the word.

Many features that I never use, but see how others would. Don't like having to use MS Outlook for e-mail. Would like to access completely by phone, but my database is too big. I have been using ACT's since and this year I turned 74 and I'm still selling with the very best of them.

I sell power supplies to industry and without ACT there is no way I could compete in the world of sales today without ACT, I put everything and anything that helps me sell more in a very competitive field including emails, quotes, power supply spec, and notes. I see so many people who will not invest in this program or database if they did their sales would be much higher nobody can remember everything but ACT does. In all the years I have used at never a problem of any kind I do keep it on three computers as the backup just in case there's a crash of one of my computers.

I backup my database 2 to 3 times a week making sure I have everything when I need it. The thing I like most about ACT when I go to sales meetings I have all my information right in front of me on my laptop and so many people don't. So when I am questioned about any customer I can look in my notes and have the answers I need, without ACT my sales numbers would be much lower. Thanks ACT.

I see so many salespeople who won't invest in ACT who sales numbers could be so much better I tell them about ACT but they don't seem to want to invest in their future and their future sales that could be so much better. I cannot find one thing wrong with ACT I have been using it approximately 20 years and never had a problem I cannot say this about other database programs I have had to use when I worked for other companies. Some of them were super complicated took hours of work just to get your data in whereas using ACT it was a breeze putting data in and saving data of all kinds.

Industry: Management Consulting. I have used Act personally and for my business almost since its inception. Full disclosure: I have written 7 books on the product as well as the training videos for lynda. For the money, you can't beat Act. Act has all the power of the "bigger" players without the expensive price point.

As newer features are added the existing ones remain relatively stable so that an existing user can upgrade without being hit by a huge learning curve. That said, new users of ANY software product, and specifically CRM software, need to realize that training is essential if they want to unleash the full power of Act. And, like with any other software, support and training is not free - especially if your Act version is several years old.

Try calling Microsoft the next time you need help with a spreadsheet or can't get Outlook to send your email and you will see exactly what I mean. However, all Act Premium subscriptions do include free technical support.

I urge readers to take some of the reviews with a grain of salt. For example, Act is absolutely the easiest product out there when it comes to a mail merge.

Try doing this in Salesforce and compare the number of keystrokes it takes to complete a merge. Another reviewer complains that you can't merge to over "50 contacts;" that restriction is meant to keep you spam-compliant and can easily be overcome by using the built in Act E-marketing Tool. Another reviewer complained that it took "days" to download the software; again, this is simply not the norm and one has to wonder what kind of security settings might have been blocking the ability to download software.

Perfect fit for mid-sized businesses. Great price point. Only truly hybrid solution that allows you to use Act both on your desktop and in a hosted environment. ACT is a great software product that allows you to integrate your database and track your clients. ACT is worth the price and worth the training to get educated on it. Unfortunately you need to spend some time figuring out the details, but once you do, it is off to the races and you will love the system every day.

I have considered Microsoft Exchange's distribution lists and such, but am not sure how to teach these users how to easily create and modify them. They abhor technology as a whole, though they do realize they must deal with it. I agree that ACT! However, the latest release v It's perhaps also only fair to say that a lot of the problems ACT! Certified Consultant to help them get started. In my experience, a willing and IT-experienced support person causes many problems with the implementation and 'training' of ACT!.

Odom, some companies such as real estate companies and Gyms have software specifically designed for these purposes for their trade. You might look into them, some are really nice but you dont hear much about them because they are industry specific. What industry are they, perhaps I have run across one.

It powers our entire business. As to Salesforce dot com, i guess i will look into them, but i have just met way too many loons through salesforce dot com, and who use salesforce dot com.

So, thank you for the tip I worked for a company for a short time that specialized in banking software. They catered to smaller banks across the nation. Check out this software, it is relatively inexpensive and is meant to take care of client needs and cover a wide variety of small bank solutions. So i was unable to locate how Salesforce dot com would allow my client to print labels and the likes without figuring out a secondary solution to interact with salesforce.

They were using Act before i started working for them, but i think it is overkill for what they need. As i am looking at all of these solutions, i am considering the following solution:. Really, all they have is a list of clients, the client contact information, and that is it. They then just search, sort, print, and use the lists for e-mail distribution lists. So, what they need is a very simple program.

I understand that the solutions out here are going to be a lot more robust than their needs, but i am trying to keep this as KISS as possible.

In addition to keeping things simple, it should offer them more speed as it would be a lightweight application. Well in that case, the answer is pretty simple. An access database will do that just fine and it would not take too long to create.

It would be very simple to implement and customization would be a cinch! If it got too big it could be converted to a sql database. If you are not versed in access databases you could always outsource the project. A simple feature not worth listing on the feature comparison I just hate the price tag.

We dropped CRM 4. For your reference, if you do a trial here is the instructions for a mailing list To create mailing labels using MS Word follow the directions below:. Javier - In my humble opinion based on many years experience I would strongly recommend that you:. We maintained an Access database for years, until last year. It had several thousand customers in it, name, title, address, company name, contact numbers, and then a couple of custom fields for if we send them a calendar or diary or both at Christmas.

It was on one system, had duplicate contacts with slight spelling errors, out-of-date contacts, etc. I replaced this with Outlook. I created a Public Folder of Contacts. Added two custom fields for the diary and calendar and created some custom views for the one user that creates the mailing lists.

Now the sales guys can access the contacts as needed, and remove any out of date ones. We currently have contacts in this list. We had an ACT! Only a few people knew how to use it and its behavior was often odd, to say the least. I exported the names to a text file, imported it into Access, created two forms and a report to print the labels. It's simple, cost us next to nothing and is way more reliable than what we had and anyone can print our labels.

A couple of simple queries eliminate bad or nonexistant zip codes. Not sure why you need to buy a program for such basic requirements. With all your contacts in one database, and graphic reports, you can quickly analyze data trends and prioritize your focus. Many parts of Sage ACT! The bottom line, Sage ACT! Pro takes reduces the administrative stuff so you can turn your Contacts into Contracts.

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