You started your business with an idea, a concept, a product or a service that you believed in - then you went out and made it happen. You called on customers, built products, performed services and worked your tail off to make your customers happy. You hired associates, built factories and invested time and sweat, worked nights and weekends - because you knew you could do it better than your competitors. And it worked.

Maybe somewhere along the way you picked up a copy of QuickBooks or Peachtree Pro. It did the job and provided financials. But now you have a bunch of customers and inventory to manage, bills of material, cost accounting and production planning, then there's purchasing and vendor management - and these solutions just aren't cutting it any more.

Or just as likely you're the second or third generation and the business has been running "fine" for years. But you know that you have exceeded the capability of a patchwork system of unsupported old technology, independent database applications and spreadsheets.

Sure you have dedicated folks "managing" the books and that long time irreplaceable employee back in the shop juggling orders, ordering materials and trying to figure out what to make next. You know there's got to be a better way, but you're not dropping a hundred grand or more with one of the big guys hoping their rigid application can be bent into a useful tool.

Designed by a team that had worked with many large scale ERP systems, the xTuple suite of enterprise solutions is an open source, cross-platform, robust, scalable enterprise management system, which translates to the following: