No more Small Business Financials

I remember when I first heard about Microsoft Small Business Financials (SBF).  I think the unofficial name was something like Great Plains Basic.  This was before it actually came out with the name Small Business Manager.  Ah, how Microsoft loves to change product names.  But I digress. 

We had many prospects at the time that were just not ready to invest in a product like GP.  Nor did they really need GP, it was overkill for them.  I thought SBF was an amazing idea and was really excited about it.  And it worked great, even seemed to include some things that I wished GP had, like exporting reports to Excel and autocomplete (before GP had autocomplete).

Now, many years later, I am not sure what to think.  In many cases it was just as difficult to sell SBF as it was to sell the full GP product.  Many GP partners did not choose to sell SBF because the numbers just weren’t there.  And in some cases it was difficult for customers to accept that the implementation would cost more than the software.  I don’t have any official numbers, but I don’t think that many licenses of SBF were sold. 

From what I saw, most customers were happy and satisfied with the software.  We had a few that used it with very few issues or complaints.  And we had a few that upgraded to GP, which I think was the real idea all along.

Well, no more Small Business Financials.  It will not be sold anymore after the end of this year.  Support for version 9.0 will continue until January 11, 2011 and exisitng customers will have the option to move to Dynamics GP at a very nice discount.  Very interestingly, while all these announcements have been made a while ago, the Microsoft SBF website does not show any changes.  It even still has links on how to buy SBF and getting financing for it.