Creative Manager Inc., provider of Creative Manager Pro software, has announced version 8.5 of its flagship product, Creative Manager Pro, to be released in early October. As always with Creative Manager Inc.'s products, no installation or conversion are necessary, and all updates are at no cost to users of Creative Project Manager and Creative Manager Pro.

    "We're close to our clients - we understand their business and we feel their pain," boasts Ron Ause, Creative Manager's director of marketing. "When our right-brained creative friends tell us that they need better left-brain tools to manage their business, We Listen! When our clients say that they need something, we're there!"

    Creative Manager Pro continues to invest, adding new features that work with Apple's latest Tiger Mac OS X and future Leopard Unix-based Operating System and Microsoft Windows. Creative Manager Pro goes beyond costing to offer full Project Management, CRM, Digital Asset Management, billing and accounting, and Extranet capabilities. Creative Manager Pro is a full-featured, intuitive system which makes project and ad agency management a breeze.

Some highlights of the new release include:
    - The ability to cut financial reports by company, office, department, AE, Project, etc. will be greatly simplified.
    - Like its smaller single-user cousins, Creative Manager Pro will enable the user to drill down from every number in the financials to the transaction list below it, with a further drill down to the actual transaction (PO, Vendor invoice, client invoice ,etc.) This is no small feat for enterprise level software.
    - Complete support for multi-company and multi project financial statement formats is being added.
    - User definable financial reporting columns.
    - Allocation of overhead (by hours, by billings, and by labor costs) will be expanded to include new options.
    - Every report will be viewed on screen with options to send the report to Excel format or to PDF format.
    - Flash based company financial budgets by client, department, and company wide.

    "Understanding and living life in a creative business is not as simple as it seems. Yet most programmers think that they can simply do some research and offer a program for sale. As simple as it sounds, listening to our clients is what we do best," said Ause.

    When asked about the new upgrade, Ause said, "Our Auto-Updater allows us to deploy updates to our hosted sites, and even to our clients' servers at any time. Have you ever had a software issue that took only a couple of hours to fix? This attention to detail, and the fact that our competitors take months (even years) to get to their list, has caught the attention of industry, and has helped us grow through word-of-mouth. Like last month's update, this update is also based on user input. Because 'We're Always Listening,'" Ause said.

    Creative Manager Pro supports Customer Relationship Management, Document Management, Shared Calendaring, Accounting and much more. Because it is web-based, there is nothing to install and it can be set up in a very short time. It works with both PC and Macintosh from any location over any connection. It may also be installed locally on the client's own servers. All options include training and support to ensure that clients are up and running quickly.

Among the many features of Creative Manager Pro:
    - Manage Contacts and Leads
    - Manage and Balance the Books
    - Create Project Schedules, Calendars and Manage Tasks
    - Extranet capabilities
    - Take your contacts and calendar on the road with iCal, AddressBook & Outlook
    - Graphically view your firm's metrics - manage your firm by the numbers.
    - Approve Timesheets, Purchasing, Billing and Budgets
    - Charting of important industry metrics and firm statistics
    - Review and Approve Artwork Online
    - Store and Manage Digital Assets
    - Free client and vendor access to streamline workflow.
    - Quick startup/import from Clients & Profits, Adman and other systems
    - Full-featured CRM (Client Relationship Management)
    - Manage media with an interface with Strata