What is business software and where did it come from?

Busi­ness own­ers are often con­fused by the term “busi­ness soft­ware” or “busi­ness management soft­ware,” so here is a brief his­tory of how busi­ness soft­ware came to be, what it is today, how it can help your business.

At the core of every busi­ness has always been its gen­eral ledger. As you prob­a­bly know, entries used to be recorded by hand before 1961 when the first large-scale com­put­er­ized account­ing sys­tem was intro­duced by IBM. This sys­tem was called 9Pac, and it was one of the first sys­tems to track the sales of every sales­per­son in a company.

In 1973, SAP (founded by 5 IBM engi­neers) intro­duced an enterprise-wide sys­tem that was capable of automat­ing finan­cial trans­ac­tions and sup­port­ing exec­u­tive deci­sion making.

In 1984, Intuit intro­duced a com­put­er­ized com­put­ing pro­gram for per­sonal finance, called Quicken. Dur­ing the 1980’s sev­eral project man­age­ment plat­forms were released, each of which could cost upwards of $500,000.

In 1994, Intuit released Quick­Books for small busi­ness own­ers who had lit­tle expe­ri­ence with account­ing. These new sys­tems allowed accoun­tants and busi­ness own­ers to become more pro­duc­tive and efficient.

The early 90’s also saw the rise of ERP (Enter­prise Resource Plan­ning) sys­tems like SAP and Oracle that were meant to inte­grate busi­ness’ processes through­out every func­tional area. ERP sys­tems ini­tially focused on back office func­tions but as the inter­net gained pop­u­lar­ity and software plat­forms became more com­plex, the sys­tems began to include front-facing func­tions such as CRM and e-commerce.

To this day, ERP sys­tems are incred­i­bly expen­sive and often require instal­la­tion of hard­ware on site, full-time IT staffs to main­tain them, and long train­ing peri­ods to get you and your employees up to speed. These issues have made tra­di­tional ERPs unsuit­able for SMBs—even though many of them could really ben­e­fit from hav­ing sim­i­lar (albeit sim­pler, less clunky) tools available to them.

In 2012, here at Know­ify, we decided to step up to the chal­lenge of deliv­er­ing ERP-like power in a pack­age designed for small and medium-sized busi­nesses. We ded­i­cated our­selves to develop­ing sim­pli­fied, user-friendly appli­ca­tions that serve nearly all the major busi­ness functions at an afford­able price.

For us, busi­ness soft­ware is any soft­ware that can per­form busi­ness func­tions accu­rately and increase employee pro­duc­tiv­ity and effi­ciency. Sim­ply put, busi­ness man­age­ment software include the essen­tial tools to run your entire busi­ness. Know­ify can man­age all facets of your busi­ness: from invoic­ing and billing, to con­tracts, projects and CRM. Try Knowify’s busi­ness soft­ware for 14 days today and see how know­ing your busi­ness bet­ter can help you grow it.

For more information on Knowify, send us an email at support@knowify.com!