Oracle and SAP have been offering ERP (enterprise resource planning) software for sometime now to help businesses manage operations, including billing, time sheets and more. But small businesses can’t afford some of these legacy solutions and are looking for a simpler, easy to use product in the cloud. Enter AffinityLive, a SaaS that essentially helps businesses manage all of their work and data in the cloud.
As founder Geoff McQueen tells me, many small businesses are using tools like Excel to manage data. AffinityLive basically manages all client work, from prospect through to payment, and everything in between in one integrated system.
The SaaS gives real-time forecasts of staff utilization and workload using a patent-pending algorithm, will automatically capture every email sent between a team and its clients, features a smart time sheet, manages billing and more. There’s also two-way sync of calendar entries, contacts and tasks with Google Apps, Microsoft Exchange and Office 365 and admins can approve time, create invoices and sync them automatically with Quickbooks, Xero and Saasu.
AffinityLive will also take a business’ existing data and forecast what future resourcing and revenue looks like for a business. The application, which starts at $49 per month, currently has around 1,000 users in beta.
McQueen says that one of the goals of AffinityLive is not to encourage users to “upgrade” from email and collaborate, or change the way they do work, but instead to help businesses get control over the chaos of how the managed their work, teams and operations.
“Lots of SaaS products today are doing one thing, and do it well,” Geoff says. “This is great for engineers who get to focus and iterate, but there’s a risk of focusing too much on what you want and not enough on solving the real customer problem. When you talk to businesses, they don’t want a dozen different tools doing things that don’t talk to each other – they want something that just works and lets them get on with the job.”
McQueen adds that monthly customer growth is up 30 percent, and usage has remained high and sticky, with more than two-thirds of users using the product every single day.
