Chapter 12. Application Integration and Other Advanced Topics

"Thinking of your firm's current planning cycle, how important is each of the following goals? The top 3 answers were: 1. Improve integration between applications. 2. Reduce IT costs. 3. Use information technologies to improve innovation." – from a recent survey of small medium businesses.

You run a small business. You don't mess with fancy software that is overkill for the size of your business. However, you do leverage technology to keep costs down and, more importantly, to provide quicker and better service to your customers. Providing customized service at lightning speed is the name of your game. That is your strength. That is your unique value proposition. That is where the big boys cannot even begin to touch you. You are constantly looking for ways to provide customized service and ways to speed it up. In addition to GnuCash, you use a few other applications to run your business. However, you find that your team is often...