Was wondering if anyone has any thoughts on the ... best bang for the buck... in the world of manufacturing software to run a business. Our current system seems mighty expensive and we'd like to explore different software.

What we have works well enough, but the annual maintenace fee is crazy money. We need to keep up with the maintenance fee otherwise if we need to upgrade we'd basically have to buy in for the entire package again. My gut tells me that this older system is way overpriced. The thing that keeps us on the hook is the roughly 20 years of history we have in the system and the unliklihood that we can easily transfer any of our old data into a new system. Also we all know how to use this set-up and would need to learn a new one if we switch.

I did a search and Quickbooks by intuit for small businesses and a version for medium businesses looks like it'd do the trick and it appears it'd be less than 1/10 the cost of what we pay for maintenance on or current system. A "top ten" list of business management software packages put them at number 1.

Anyone out there ever use it or have a system they're really liking a lot?

We're at a point where we need to upgrade our servers and some of the computers here and figured it'd be as good a time as any to take the leap if we think something else would do the trick and save us some cabbage.

We pay about almost 11,000 a year for maintenance on an outdated system. This is due in part to our servers and computers being old versions of windows (I'm told.) It looked like we could get the Quickbooks for medium size business with all the bells and whistles for about 900 and if I recall correctly it was about 50 a year for maintenance upgrades? Don't know how many seats the 900 gets you though either.

Anyway...
Thought I'd throw this out there and see if anybody has any input.

Thanks,
Bob