Review: Pearl Office business management

Not to be confused with the programming language, Pearl with an ‘a’ is an integrated suite of business management tools delivered as a web-based service. As such, the software involved is managed and maintained for you, and run on servers hosted by Rackspace UK. All you need is a browser.

What you can do with the software depends on the licence involved. A basic Pearl Office licence delivers a set of contact/customer management tools (effectively an online CRM system) plus others to manage the products your company needs to market and sell.

By using these tools, it’s possible to log phone calls, emails and other contact/customer activity, as well as generate quotes, invoices and purchase orders, run your own email marketing campaigns and so on. Up to 75,000 contacts and 20,000 products can be managed, with everything held in your own secure database, a copy of which can be downloaded for safekeeping.

Up to five users can access the Pearl Office software at the same time, with no user limits if you upgrade to Pearl Office Pro (£99/month ex Vat). The Pro version adds extra functionality, including enabling files to be attached to contact and product records, and invoices to be generated from call logs. It also adds support for public calendars, multiple departments and timesheet recording.

An accounting module is another optional add-on (£15/month ex Vat) that provides a fully integrated set of sales, purchase and nominal ledgers, along with stock control, bank account and Vat management. It’s also possible to design and run an ecommerce website using Pearl (from £50/month ex Vat), with customisable templates and an integrated content management system together with the usual online shopping cart facilities and payment gateway support.

Evaluating and testing this kind of integrated service is time-consuming and, if you’re interested, the company is happy to set you up with a dedicated trial of your own. For our purposes, Pearl gave us access to its permanently available demo system, which gave us a good idea of what you can expect. The interface has the usual web idiosyncrasies (lots of pop-up windows and no right mouse button menus), but it doesn’t take long to master and we found most of the tools easy to understand. That said, there’s a lot to get to grips with and training is recommended.

On the plus side, the tools required to run a small business are available and written to work together, integration being one of the key selling points. Response times were good and Rackspace has a proven availability record, but we’d recommend talking to the developers about your requirements and searching for references before signing up.

There are a few other caveats, too, most notably the lack of integration with other applications, such as Outlook, Word and Excel, although you can import and export contacts and other data. A payroll facility is also missing, but there is an Epos module (£15/month) for retail businesses and a Pearlmail module (£5 per user/month), which, as well as an integrated email client, allows you to track email conversations.

A backup ISP service will be required – start using Pearl to run your business and any loss of connectivity would be disastrous. This aside, it’s worth investigating further, especially if you work in a growing business, have limited time or IT expertise and simply want to get on with the job.