Small services business? AffinityLive is the ERP system you’ve been waiting for

Australian enterprise software developer, Hiive Systems, has pushed its new web-based Professional Services Automation app  (think ERP system for services organisations), AffinityLive, into private beta.

Focussed on services organisations between 5-100 employees in size, AffinityLive is aiming to be a game-changer for smaller services organisations all over the world.

Let me explain.

While there are a bunch of excellent CRM, ERP and Accounting solutions out there, the main barrier to adoption has always been the complexity of setting them up, integrating them and managing them.

If you’re a large company you can probably find the budget to do this. If you’re a smaller organisation, the best solution has often been to ignore ERP/PSA solutions and marry spreadsheets with manual processes in order to keep costs down.

Enter AffinityLive.

AffinityLive is trying to make the benefits of enterprise grade ERP/PSA systems available to smaller services organisations.

It’s doing this by focusing on providing only the stuff those smaller services organisations actually need in order to minimise the complexity of setup, integration and administration and, better still, to minimise the costs too.

To put it in their words, the aim is to “provide the professional services sector with enterprise quality Professional Service Automation (PSA) at prices your average SME can easily afford”.

On top of that, the team has worked hard to build in integration with leading accounting software as well as CRM tools like Salesforce and Highrise and project management tools like Basecamp, so you still use best of breed point solutions and have them integrated through AffinityLive.

Below is a list of some of the features of AffinityLive:

1. (optional) A lightweight CRM/sales feature for those companies that are very relationship driven and don’t need a fully featured CRM product
2. Job tracking
3. Issues & support tracking
4. Timesheets & work logs
5. Contract/Retainer management,
6. Resource/staff Scheduling,
7. Document and correspondence management around work and
8. Productivity/Profitability reporting

That CRM module also does full, automated, email tracking no matter whether you’re using Exchange/Notes/Groupwise or Google Apps.

Speaking of Google Apps, you can read more about the work the AffinityLive team have done to get their app ready for the Google Apps marketplace, over on the official Google Australia blog.

As mentioned earlier, the site is in private beta and is looking for services organisations 5-100 seats in size to test drive the software. If that’s you and you’re keen, you can register your interest on the official AffinityLive site.