Ofuz: All-In-One Contacts Management and Invoicing

Ofuz is an “all in one” business suite that provides a range of integrated tools to help you manage your business throughout the entire sales cycle: from contact management to task management and invoicing. Somewhat unusually for such an app, Ofuz is open source; you can download the source code here.

Once logged in, you’re presented with a screen with five tabs at the top: Dashboard, Contacts, Tasks, Projects and Invoices. Getting underway with the app’s contact management features is fast, as you can import/sync contacts from a variety of sources: Facebook, Gmail, vCard and CSV (although, perhaps surprisingly given the app’s target audience, there’s no direct LinkedIn sync). Contacts can be tagged, and you can add notes. Handily, you can use the app’s built-in web forms feature to create forms to capture leads directly from your website, and you can also CC or BCC a special email address to automatically add contacts to your account when you email them.

While the Contacts area of the app feels pretty well put together, I was less impressed with the rest of it. It’s not particularly intuitive in use (it’s not obvious how you’re supposed to import timesheets, for example), and I found the task management and invoicing sections to be fairly rudimentary compared with dedicated tools like Freshbooks and Basecamp. Also, it’s worth noting that Ofuz is still in beta, and while the product mostly works as advertised, it could certainly do with some additional polish; some of the copy reads a little oddly and some links lead to 404 errors, for example.

Overall, Ofuz is an interesting idea; it’s useful to have all the tools a business might need related to customer management and invoicing in one place. I like the fact that it’s open source, as it will be possible to adapt the product to your company’s needs: for example, the company provides a plug-in architecture to make customizations easy to manage. It should also mean that if the company decides to discontinue ofuz.com or radically change the app, you’d still be able to use the tool. However, I think I’d rather stick with more polished, dedicated apps for handling my contact management, project management and invoicing.

There are three hosted plans available: a limited free plan that should be enough to figure out whether the app is suitable for your company, and two paid plans come in at $24 and $99 per month, depending on the number of contacts and emails you’d like to manage. You can migrate between plans as you wish.

Have you tried Ofuz? Let us know what you think of it in the comments.

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