I am looking for software to help run a small clothing company. Right now, I am using a series of Excel workbooks to handle sales orders, purchase orders, customers info, product info, and inventory. I use a personal finance app (Moneydance) to handle my accounting and also have a separate online shopping cart.

I am finding that a lot of my time is spent moving data from one place to another or trying to figure out how to run new reports or add data to the Excel workbooks.

I would really like one application that could run everything. It could be web-based or software for one computer. I have done some searching but have not found much more than things like Netsuite, which seems a little overwhelming and too expensive for me. Any ideas of what I could use?

By the way, I would really like the accounting to be able to download directly from my bank accounts, credit cards, etc if possible. It saves a lot of time.

Quickbooks is a very popular accounting software, yet I'm not quite sure if it's not too complex for your needs. But you should also check whether your shopping cart is integrated with it.

I think the easiest way ( for this scenario ) would be to create a db (access or mysql) to store all your information. Once you have it all entered in the db, you can update it as much as you need, and best of all is you can do everything you need to do with one db vs. many packages. By using a db, you can also have your 'shopping cart' linked to the db so it can be an all in one deal.

Otherwise, you will need more than one application. Crap like

http://www.invoicebyclick.com/

and some other useless crap.

Good Luck

A very interesting subject, which I would like to know more about, but cannot help sorry.
But just for interest I just read a book on the history of Google and they started up using Quicken and kept it for years. When Eric Schmidt joined he wanted to bring in a big time system from Oracle but Larry and Brin said no for a year or so as they were too tight to spend any money they did not need to !