NetBooks® Introduces First-Ever Web-Based Business Management System for the True Small Business

Founder/CEO Ridgely Evers, ‘Visionary behind QuickBooks,’ Goes beyond Bookkeeping to Help Owners Manage the Entire Business

NetBooks® (www.netbooks.com) premieres its powerful, easy-to-use system for running an entire small business. The product comes to market after more than four years in development, and gives True Small Businesses (TSBs) a suite of capabilities previously available only to the enterprise, including sales management, customer relationship management, vendor relationship management, inventory and production management, shipping, bookkeeping, reporting, and more.

Delivered on-demand, the software leverages the near ubiquity of broadband to allow small business owners to manage the entire business without heavy investment in IT equipment and staff. In addition, NetBooks provides its customers with an unheard-of level of support for the TSB market.

“Small business is a vastly underserved market, because the software industry splits the world into two segments – enterprise and consumer,” said Ridgely Evers, NetBooks CEO and Founder, and himself a small business owner for more than 30 years. “But simply stripping features out of enterprise software and dropping the price doesn’t meet the needs of a small business. They need a solution that is tailored to their unique requirements: similar breadth of functionality, but affordably priced and optimized for ease of use. This is why we created NetBooks.”

The True Small Business Market

NetBooks addresses the specific needs of the TSB: the 5.1 million owner-operated, self-funded companies that employ half of US workers and account for the majority of new job formation. Today they must try to manage their businesses with a disjointed combination of bookkeeping software, spreadsheets, legal pads, sticky notes and paper files. This leads to costly errors, delays in responding to customers, and difficulty making good business decisions. With NetBooks, all of the key business information is stored and shared in one system, dramatically improving productivity, responsiveness and owner control.

“A single system for managing my whole business is something I hoped for,” said Paul Rosen, owner of Paromi Tea, www.paromi.com. “NetBooks assists in the many aspects of my business—from online orders to shipping to managing my manufacturing—so I can keep tabs on everything from wherever I am.”

Software as a Service

NetBooks uses an on-demand, or Software as a Service, delivery model. This means customers experience continuous, incremental software improvements that require no installation, and they never have to undergo painful upgrade cycles.

In addition, supporting one delivery platform (the web browser—Mac and Windows) and one version of the product (the latest release) means development effort is almost entirely focused on adding value to the product.

Finally, this model means that all customer data is protected in a highly secure hosting facility that features bank-grade security, redundant infrastructure and continuous data backup: a much safer environment for business-critical data than on a local hard drive.

“SaaS now allows millions of small businesses, without full-time IT departments or significant capital budgets, to utilize powerful software that was only available to large enterprises in the past,” according to Jeffrey M. Kaplan, Managing Director of THINKstrategies and Founder of the SaaS Showplace. “Today’s on-demand applications, such as NetBooks, are also packaged and priced to be easier to use and more economical to meet the specific needs of small business owners.”

Powerful Product, Partnerships

NetBooks is a completely integrated system for operating a business, including:
Sales management
Customer relationship management
Vendor relationship management
Production and inventory management
Fulfillment and shipping
Bookkeeping and reporting

NetBooks will also partner with best-of-breed providers to deliver added value to customers. At launch, the product will be fully integrated with PayCycle® for payroll, UPS™ for shipping and VerticalResponse® for email marketing. NetBooks’ commitment to deliver “software that runs your whole business” means that the product roadmap is full of additional functionality and opportunity for partnerships.

Software and Service

NetBooks is not only bringing complete business management software to the TSB market, but also backing it with an unprecedented level of hands-on support, including:
Dedicated concierges, each with at least 10 years of experience working with small businesses, to assist with the transition to NetBooks
Immediate access, directly within the product, to experienced support personnel
Unlimited support access at no additional charge

“QuickBooks has been singularly successful among software for the small business market by making one specific function—bookkeeping—easy to use. Now, the visionary behind QuickBooks has developed NetBooks: modern, on-demand software designed to help small business owners go beyond keeping the books to running the entire business,” said Tom Proulx, NetBooks board member, co-founder of Intuit, and 1992 Inc. magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year. “NetBooks brings the kind of capabilities previously reserved for big companies, from vendors like SAP and NetSuite, to the True Small Business.”

Affordable Pricing, with a Unique Pricing Guarantee

NetBooks is priced at $200/month, or about what most business owners pay for their cell phones. This fee covers up to five users plus a bookkeeper and an accountant. Additional users cost just $20/month each. Support is included, along with all current and future product functionality (with the exception of optional fees for services provided by partners). Customers can choose between quarterly and annual billing options.

In what the company believes is a first for the on-demand software industry, NetBooks guarantees this price for the duration of the customer relationship. If NetBooks increases its pricing, existing customers continue to pay the old price. If NetBooks decreases its pricing, all customers automatically get the new, lower price.

Interested companies can learn more at www.netbooks.com and sign up for a live online demo.

About NetBooks

NetBooks’ mission is to revolutionize the way small businesses are managed. They do this by uniting technology, people, and partners into solutions that are as simple as possible, and as powerful as necessary, to run the whole business.

Using a Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery model, NetBooks addresses the long-standing need for a comprehensive, easy-to-use business management system for America’s 5.1 million True Small Businesses (owner-operated firms with fewer than 50 people). The privately held company, based in Rohnert Park, California, is funded by CMEA Ventures, Integral Capital, and select advisors. www.netbooks.com.
Contacts

AtomicPR for NetBooks
Martha Shaughnessy, 415-402-0230
martha {at} atomicpr(.)com