North 40 Systems — Office Tools Professional 2009

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From the Oct. 2008 Review of Practice Management Systems

Office Tools Pro 2009 has both workstation and server installation options and now supports a SQL database. Designed for small firms, it can be extended to growing firms that desire centralized practice management. It’s a full-feature package with an easy-to-navigate interface that should not require a lot of extended support or training costs.

Ease of Use/Flexibility - 5 Stars
Office Tools Pro 2009, building on the familiar interface of previous years, has updated the look without removing the easy “feel” of the dashboard. Rarely can a software package give you [nearly] everything in one screen and keep it well organized. Office Tools Pro provides staff monitoring, contact review and a task-based main window. Users can select from Contacts, Notes, Task lists, Scheduling, Projects, Time Keeping, Billing and Document Management. Contacts are extremely easy to maintain in a single screen. Mouse-over pop-ups help guide the user for field definitions. Firms can define their service types, assign common services to their clients, and print mailing lists and reports based on those services.

Project Management provides simple linking to budgeting, percent complete, tax estimates, and the complete staffing/time-keeping/invoicing workflow. The majority of commonly needed actions are available in the main screen, significantly reducing the need to memorize menu trees or shortcut commands. As a flexible software package, labels for fields can be customized, automated Account Numbering can be defined, and changes to Office Tools Pro contacts can be pushed to an associated QuickBooks file. Numerous options are available for customizing user interaction with the product, including defining actions the software should take for notification and alerting.

Scalability/Stability - 4.5 Stars
Simplified for firms that may be small or require high productivity (low administration overhead), setup time required is minimal. New for the 2009 edition is complete support for a SQL backend, removing past concerns about security and maintenance of MS Access database files. Only on rare occasion after editing will a screen need to be refreshed to see calculated change. Several refresh methods are provided. Stability has not been a noted problem in the past, and the recent modifications for their new interface continue to appear reliable.

Productivity Tools/Features - 4.5 Stars
Going through each of the primary screens, the consolidated view reduces the effect that tools are hidden, nested or difficult to use. The screen is split in half with tasks for maintaining client data and managing projects on top, and staff management showing existing tasks and priorities on the bottom. The staff management feature provides at-a-glance views of the outstanding tasks assigned, the expected hours to complete and scheduling details. Deadlines from projects appear in this screen, which may be useful to see if a staff member is falling behind, or if assignments are not evenly distributed and thus creating a backlog of work going unattended.