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CNP Integrations is the premier US partner/VAR of Info At Hand.
info@hand CRM and CRBM Solution
CNP Integrations offers the info@hand Customer Relationship Business Management CRBM solutions to empower small to mid-sized businesses with powerful web based tools for managing and operating their business. CRBM will be essential for those who want to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace. This innovative CRBM tool suite puts an organization's core business information in the hands of those authorized to have it - anytime, anywhere. An integrated web-based application, this comprehensive customer centric business management system will revolutionize information access throughout your business, and deliver these key business benefits:
 
- Increased Sales Effectiveness: The most productive lead sources and sales staff are clearly identified on graphical charts.
- Greater Sales Reach: Use the email marketing capabilities to execute and measure new promotional campaigns.
- Reduced Administrative Costs: Information is only typed in once - CRM, product catalog, proposals, invoicing, customer service, project and resource management - all share the same data.
- Improved Efficiency: Everyone in the business knows right away where to find information, without wasting time looking for it.
- Happier Customers (and better customer retention!): Dealing with employees who now know more about them and what’s going on in their account.
- Better Management: Sales pipelines that are much better understood provide clear visibility of any business upturn or downturn well before it represents an opportunity or risk for the business.
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A Comparsion between Info At Hand 5.2
and SugarCRM
A Comparison between Info At Hand 5.3
and SugarCRM
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Because info@hand is web based, all its benefits are available to every company employee (subject to access permissions you control) whether they are in the office, at home, or on the road. info@hand supports both full-sized PC browsers, and handheld devices such as BlackBerry, Palm or Windows Mobile, and Internet security may be handled either via VPN, or SSL.
While many young companies are not yet ISO and quality oriented, the bottom line is that a high quality, customer oriented approach has proven to be a winner time after time. info@hand provides the necessary tools to start a young company on the right road. It also creates enormous gains in efficiency and organization in a more mature business. 
Features -
info@hand Release 5.2: September '07
- Mail merge capability - using an RTF template file;
- Automatic phone number formatting, to ensure smooth IP telephony operation;
- Support for info@hand PBX 1.0, Customer Portal 2.0, and eStore 1.0;
- Line item level discounts, and absolute discount amounts (as well as existing percentage discounts);
- Assemblies can include discount lines;
- Enhanced Group Inbox capability, with support for directing incoming email to standard and custom folders (such as Customer Support) within Group Inbox, plus auto-create of Cases via email;
- New 'Test Mode' for data imports - instead of importing data, returns import CSV file with annotations on duplicates or other data quality issues;
- Quote approvals option if gross profit percentage is lower than threshold value;
- Create or add to campaign target lists using reports on Contacts and Leads.
info@hand Customer Portal 2.0: September '07
- Customer self-registration for Marketing Events;
- Customers can examine their Invoice and Payment history, and compare account balance with their own records;
- Incorporates info@hand eStore 1.0.
info@hand eStore 1.0: September '07
- Links info@hand product catalogue items into online e-commerce offering built using VirtueMart, within the info@hand Customer Portal framework;
- Accepts customer orders and payments, and enters resulting invoices and payments into info@hand.
info@hand PBX 1.0: September '07
- Integrates info@hand with the Trixbox Pro telephony application platform, based on Asterisk Open Source PBX software.
- Firefox plugin supporting click to dial and customer recognition popup for incoming calls. Internet Explorer plugin to follow
Customer Relationship Management:
Info At Hand provides integrated management of corporate information on customer accounts and contacts, sales leads and opportunities, plus activities including calls, meetings, emails, notes and assigned tasks. Automatic email notifications may optionally be sent to advise users of new contacts, cases, or tasks assigned to them.
The process of selling goods and services to your customers comes down to a series of steps that look something like this:
- Acquiring and tracking leads;
- Qualifying them as real opportunities;
- Quantifying those opportunities, and setting an expected closing date for them;
- Aggregating all opportunities together into a sales pipeline to see the big picture; and
- Closing the opportunities as sales.
By having an automated system that remembers all your leads, can convert them into opportunities once qualified, can add them all up to show a sales pipeline, and can accumulate a history of account activities, your business gains three big improvements.
First - you can now see how business is shaping up over the next couple of months in a more tangible and quantifiable way than ever before. The sales pipeline is your distant early warning system - it shows you when business levels are falling off, or growing faster than anticipated. In a smaller business it is your best friend when it comes to business planning, giving you a more detailed and distant view into the future, helping you to make appropriate staffing and expenditure decisions.
Second - all your sales leads, opportunities, and account history are now formally recorded in a central system that the business owns. Your vulnerability to the sudden defection of sales personnel, is much reduced. If a sales person leaves the organization, you still have all the leads and opportunities the business paid to develop, and the account history needed to help a new sales person take over the account quickly and effectively.
Third - the sales person on an account is not the only person in the organization with access to details of activity history. Accounting and service personnel who have direct customer contact can now base their decisions about grey-area judgment calls in the account on hard information from the account history.
Some of the key CRM capabilities of Info At Hand include:
- Salesforce automation - including lead capture, and the promotion of leads to Opportunities;
- Opportunity tracking with sales stage and percentage likelihood;
- Sales pipeline tracking, with graphical charts that offer drill-down from the bar or segment of the chart to the data that underlies it;
- Definition of sales teams and territories, to manage information sharing, and track sales performance by territory;
- Sales forecasting, and comparison of forecasts to quotas and actuals, by team or by individual;
- Lead source analysis of sales and opportunities;
- Flexible reporting, to extract precisely the information you want to see;
- Corporate calendar management, for arranging calls and meetings; and
- Integrated Inbound and outbound Email, which is automatically added to account and contact history.
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Email Marketing:
Marketing campaigns may be conducted, with email templates for automatically customized emails, management of prospect lists, and tracking of campaign click-through rates.
A prospect list for a campaign may be assembled from a mixture of prospects plus pre-existing contacts and leads. You can also import lists of prospects (in either Comma Separated Values (CSV) or Tab Separated Values (TSV) formats). Target lists may also be exported to MS Word for letter mail campaigns.
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info@hand Finance (QuickBooks Synchronization Link)
The integration of business data is a serious and long-standing issue for small and mid-size businesses (SMBs). Typically, an SMB buys a CRM, an operations management system specific to their business model, an accounting system, an invoicing system, and potentially a service management system. Add in their public web site, and a customer self-service portal, and the average SMB starts to feel like they are in the IT business, not their real business.
For a business managed by multiple separate systems, the clerical effort and loss of data quality associated with trying to keep data in the multiple systems in sync is both costly and inefficient. Operating a business based on these 'islands of information' is not an option in today's challenging business climate.
Yet trying to buy an integrated system that covers all these bases, matches the specifics of your business model, and is still affordable, if often an impossible task. And even when such a system can be found, migrating to a fully integrated system from today's multiple applications can be a difficult and risky process.
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With info@hand, our approach is different. We created a Customer Relationship and Business Management System (CRBM) - a system with a CRM at the core, with integrated operations management, service management and order management features, plus integration with a customer portal and (optionally) the market-leading QuickBooks accounting system. We took this approach for several reasons, the three most important being:
- The lack of any real market need for yet another accounting system;
- The dominant QuickBooks market share in our customer segment (1-200 employees);
- An easier migration to info@hand from whatever the client is running today, when info@hand does not include an integrated accounting system. We believe that requiring a client to change both their front- and back-office systems at the same time with a NetSuite-like solution is unwise.
info@hand Finance is an optional module for info@hand that can link the key financial data within info@hand with a QuickBooks implementation. The key features of info@hand Finance include:
- info@hand Finance continually synchronizes Accounts, the Product Catalog (item list in QB), Invoice & Payment data, Opportunites (customer jobs in QB), currencies and taxes within info@hand with the QuickBooks Accounting system from Intuit Inc.;
- The synchronization is accomplished via the QuickBooks Web Connector (QBWC), at intervals controlled by QBWC. QBWC is free, and provides a SOAP-based web-services interface with which info@hand Finance communicates.
- info@hand Finance is compatible with info@hand 5.1, and later revisions;
- info@hand Finance is compatible with conventional QuickBooks software (2006 generation or later, Pro and higher versions). It does not currently support QuickBooks Online Edition (QBOE).
info@hand Finance is a separately-priced add-on for info@hand – with a one-time license fee of $995 US, and an annual support fee of $250 US. for On Premise deployment.
Features -
info@hand: Order Management
info@hand provides invaluable financial information as part of its unified approach to business management.
You can create and organize a product catalog, and then prepare customer quotes, sales orders and invoices from that catalog. Once sold, products may be tracked by serial number on service contracts, with their associated case history.
Payments may be received and allocated to open invoices, and receipts may be printed as PDF documents. Statements may be created and printed for partially paid invoices, or as full account statements.
The optional info@hand Finance module permits the catalog and accounts data, plus invoices and payments, to be synchronized with QuickBooks at regular intervals.
Purchase Orders may also be generated and emailed to suppliers, and outgoing payments may be tracked and alocated to purchase orders to derive an accounts payable balance.
An Acrobat PDF may be generated for any document (Quote, Invoice, Sales Order, etc..) - using the Create PDF button. Each document may also be automatically generated and emailed (as a PDF attachment) in a single action. Your company name and address details (as well as your company logo) on the PDF come from Company Information data entered in the administration screen. There is support for multiple company addresses plus the appending of standard terms and conditions, and there are two attractive layouts to choose from. PDFs support multi-byte character sets, and so character sets such as Thai and Japanese are supported.
Quotes:
The Quotes module manages the creation of customer quotations. Quotes are created by defining a quantity to be sold for each of a number of products or assemblies (complex products), and an account to which they are being quoted. Quotes may be managed and tracked through their life-cycle using the Quotes module.
Each quote has a Stage - which may be set to Draft, Negotiation, Delivered, On Hold, Confirmed, Closed Accepted, Closed Lost, or Closed Dead. As well, a quote has a Valid Until date, after which the prices quoted expire. Each quote has a contact, an account, and an address - for both bill to and ship to. For each quote the shipping provider, the currency and the terms must also be selected.
Each quote consists of one or more product groupings, and each product group may have one or more products in it. Each group has a name, and a stage.
Clicking on the subject for any Quote in the list view displays the detail information for that Quote.
The Quotes detail view illustrates the information captured by a quote within Info At Hand - complete with Bill To and Ship To addresses and contacts, multiple groups of line items, shipping provider, taxes payable, discounts and shipping costs (per group).
Invoices:
Invoices may be created by converting a Quote to an Invoice, by creating an Invoice from scratch in much the same way as described above for a Quote, or by generating the Invoice from a Sales Order. Invoices add a Due Date, which is automatically calculated using the terms selected. The Invoices list view highlights any overdue invoices, and an Open Invoices Report lets you track all outstanding invoices.
Quotes, Sales Orders, Invoices and Purchase Orders may all be customized by selecting the starting number for each, and by specifying a prefix to be used. For example - specifying a prefix of "TLR06-" and a starting number of 1000 will generate an initial Invoice number of TLR06-1000.
Payments, Receipts & Statements:
- Payments may be received and allocated to one or more invoices. Receipts may be generated and printed or emailed.
- Partially paid invoices may have a statement generated and printed or emailed.
- Account statements may be generated and printed or emailed. These statements may be created individually, or automatically for all accounts with a non-zero balance.
Sales Orders:
- If desired, Sales Orders may be created as an intermediate step between Quotes and Invoices. Packing Slips and Order Confirmations may be produced and emailed as PDFs.
- Sales Orders may be used to generate one or more Invoices.
Purchase Orders and Outgoing Payments:
- Purchase Orders may be created and automatically emailed to suppliers. The Purchase Orders list view highlights any overdue items, and an Open Purchase Orders Report lets you track all outstanding POs.
- Outgong Payments may be tracked and allocated to one or more Purchase Orders. Payment Advice notes may be generated and printed or emailed.
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Features 