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Martial art schools are businesses. Some are nonprofit, some are small businesses, and some are small corporations with multiple locations in a city or cities. Any size business has certain operational tasks that must be competed. Software may be used to ease the burden of many of these tasks, but for small businesses, some useful software may be prohibitively expensive. There is help for small, and even large, businesses though the use of free, advertising-supported applications and online services. For larger business, most of these applications have paid versions that offer more capacity or more features. Here are a few of the better free online services as of 8/7/07.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

CRM software helps track contacts for the purpose converting them into students; it is a vital component of any school’s strategy.

Highrise

Highrise is a simple CRM web service that does not offer a lot of extras, but it does a good job of tracking contacts. The free plan is limited to two users and 250 contacts.

You enter customer contact information directly using your Web browser or by importing existing contact data. Then then you create new tasks, set deadlines, assign tasks to categories, and bring together related contacts and tasks. When you log into Highrise, the dashboard displays recent activity and upcoming tasks. You can choose to have a daily task summary email sent at 6 a.m. to remind you of what you need to accomplish that day.

FreeCRM.com

FreeCRM.com offers more sophisticated online CRM services than Highrise, but it requires more time to set up and learn. It allows easier tracking of potential sales and lets you determine if your sales performance is on track compared to budget. A large variety of user preferences let you tailor it to your business environment. There is no limit on the number of users, but the free version has a maximum of 10 MB of data storage.

Web and E-mail Hosting

Highrise

Microsoft's Office Live Basics lets a small business establish an online presence by providing a domain name, a Web site, and a few dozen e-mail accounts. It helps small businesses easily establish and manage a professional Web site, but established Web sites cannot uploaded to the free Basics service. The free Basics provides a domain name you select along with Web site storage that can hold up to 500MB of data and email management for up to 25 accounts with 2GB of storage each.

Comodo

Standard email offers little privacy but there applications that perform the electronic equivalent of sealing and registering a letter. A security certificate, such as a digital ID, that is attached to the email message, verifies that the email originated with the sender and has not been altered along its route. A digital ID identifies a specific email address and is usually issued by a trusted authority. To communicate using secure email, just send an email with your digital ID attached. The recipient of the email must also have a digital ID and an email client with S/MIME to support encrypted communications

Comodo offers a digital ID that is free for one year of personal use. The digital ID is accepted by most email clients, including Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express, and is simple to setup.

Small Business Accounting

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007

Microsoft Office Accounting Express 2007 is a basic accounting program that will help businesses to move from manual to automated bookkeeping. Express is a free version of Office Accounting Professional 2007. It offers fewer accounting features and reports than Professional and is single-user only. It is designed to appeal to users who are familiar with Microsoft Office applications, such as Word and Excel. The Express download is 200MB, so you need a broadband Internet connection.

Express also lets you sell products online more easily, thanks to its links to eBay and PayPal sales tools. It also simplifies access to services for credit card processing and online banking. However, Express lacks the inventory and sales order capabilities offered by the Professional version.

TurboCash

For those with programming experience or access to someone who does, TruboCash is an application that lets you tailor it to fit your specific needs. It is a capable, open-source business accounting application that comes with source code. A number of third-party plug-ins enhance its capabilities, but most of them are not open-source and require payment.

E-Commerce Web Site Analytics

HitTail Basic

You can modify your e-commerce site to improve its exposure in search engine results and expose your products and services to more prospective buyers if you analyze the site and its visitors. HitTail Basic lets you see where your current Web site visitors come from, and then monitors the results after you make changes to your pages.

HitTail Basic is an easy to use, free service for smaller Web sites with less than 100,000 visitors per month. It collects information about the search phrases used by your visitors. First, you sign up for an account on its Web site. Then you add a bit of JavaScript code provided by HitTail to each of your Web pages. When you log in to your account, you will see HitTail's findings along with suggestions about underperforming search terms so you can create new Web content to emphasize these words.

E-Commerce Shopping Cart

AgoraCart

If you offer more than one product or service for sale on your e-commerce site, you will need a shopping cart to organize and display your products, and accumulate items in an order until the shopper is ready to check out and pay for the purchase. AgoraCart is a flexible and highly capable free shopping cart that you can easily set up after you install it on your Web server.

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