Business Appointment Manager (BAM) Frequently Asked Questions

BAM integrates more of your necessary—but time-consuming—tasks into one program. You and your staff only need to learn one program to do all these tasks.

BAM is built on SQL Server, Microsoft’s most powerful, reliable and secure database. Others are built on Access, or on a homegrown database.

Clear and complete appointment power—and subsequent business management knowledge—is the BAM trademark.

Every scheduling chore that now takes you three or four administrative minutes—and add up to hours—can suddenly take you 15 to 20 seconds. And they’ll add up to a few minutes! Imagine getting those big-picture overviews that take you ten minutes of study, in two or three mouse clicks.

See appointments in the grand scale, or drill down to see the details on any customer, provider, appointment, or even specific resources. Change calendar views to single days, weeks, or a month. In BAM Appointment Forms, you choose what to fill in on the three carefully developed tabs full of appointment-relevant info—plus a tab of 25 fields you completely customize.

No. Amazingly fast and easy, in fact.

BAM uses Windows-standard conventions that make it easy for a computer-acquainted person to use and customize BAM programs. Its interface is intuitive and its wording is clear. Setting up your first appointment is just “look, see, do.” Reports are self-explanatory.

BAM’s Help files are context-sensitive to each individual screen and are extremely detailed and clearly written. If you’re adding a New Item and ask for Help, the Help screen explains every field in the New Item form. Help while viewing an Invoices List explains all the columns in that list and tells you how to filter, etc.

To speed your work in every screen and function, BAM relentlessly exploits Windows features and shortcuts.

You can get almost every function in many ways: click BAM icons, active labels, drop-down menus or toolbars. Or use more than 35 keyboard shortcuts.

In BAM, the right-click mouse functions have been thoroughly engineered to present your most frequent and likely needs in that screen or Form.

BAM Reports and Forms highlight names of customers, providers, invoice numbers, dates—even categories and types—so you can drill down to your original data to see all the details, more information, or even autodial or e-mail someone.

Every BAM functional area has its own Lists and Reports constantly visible and clickable. A separate Reports section consolidates all Reports to speed managerial and administrative work, say at tax time.

Used thoroughly, BAM will help you grow. BAM’s underlying technology supports all the customers, contacts, employees, appointments, items, resources, invoices, etc., that you will ever need.

More important: as you grow, your business needs will evolve in ways no one can foresee. BAM offers you fields you may not need to fill in for two years, plus customizable fields you can morph to fit your customers’ changing business needs, or new reporting requirements.

While fully ready to use as-is, BAM offers years of customizations to help you flex with the future.

BAM’s eight major forms have a tab that opens 25 Custom Fields, in addition to two to five tabs of optional data. There are 10 Custom Text fields, 5 Custom Number fields, 5 Custom Check Boxes, and 5 Custom Dates for each form.

Label Custom Fields with whatever names fit your business. Show or hide them. You can even format Text and Number fields to accept only specific formats, e.g., telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, file path, or a Social Security Number, money, percentages, or other patterns.

BAM helps you track prospects and convert them to customers. It has customizable forms to generate Quotes for new deals. Track progress on customer projects to ensure satisfaction. Schedule reminders to follow up on providers’ duties. Click on a phone number to auto-dial it. Trigger e-mails in BAM and log their records.

BAM Contact Forms give you four tabs of carefully designed contact management data fields you can fill in — plus a tab with another 25 fields you can customize.

And to start things off fast, a BAM wizard rapidly imports all the contacts and customers you already have in Microsoft Outlook—so you can finally start marketing to them efficiently. And you’ll have a record of each “touch.”

BAM stores Microsoft Word letter templates (with mail merge) you create for repeated use, such as in prospecting, satisfaction checks, collections, and inactive customer re-contact.

BAM auto-sums chargeable appointment times, services, and inventory items into invoices you can print or email. Varying staff rates and item prices are automatically calculated.

You can adapt Invoice Forms to your company’s needs. Follow up each Invoice to see its current Status in Reports and Lists. Project your income based on services delivered. Even export detailed financial data to Microsoft Office Accounting.

Yes! BAM handles your inventory needs for items you sell, include, or just use in the office. You can specify items into types, categories, and toggle taxable and commissionable. It tracks cost and price, SKU numbers, quantity on-hand, and a reorder point you specify. Plus another 25 fields per item that you can customize.

Yes! BAM includes 23 standard—and highly modifiable—reports covering Appointments, Customers, Accounts, Items Sales and Operations. Include/exclude fields, sort, filter and tailor them to fit your business, your differing needs as you wear different hats, or other people’s needs. Additionally, you can create and save innumerable Custom Reports.

Another very quick tool is BAM’s spreadsheet-like Lists—15 of them throughout BAM’s Appointments, Clients, Sales, and Business programs. Each List is filterable and sortable by many factors. And you can rearrange their columns as you like.

Maybe you’re not. Count all the hours you spent last year, and will spend next year. How inflexible and time-consuming is changing appointments in that book? Since your competitors will automate, why use a book that limits your number of staff, gross income, and keeps your invoicing a manual process?

Just seeing that book tells customers you’re out of date and inefficient. It opens doors to their disputing your records. And no book can autodial customers or create reports. It can’t change views to the full month, and it can’t show you just Joe’s or Sue’s schedules.

Wouldn’t you rather focus your efforts on getting more customers and serving them better?

Outlook, without Microsoft Exchange Server, tracks one person’s appointments. You cannot instantly see your staff’s schedules side-by-side. It doesn’t tell the boss what everyone is doing. BAM’s Appointment Form has three pages of data you can fill in (if you need to), plus a page of 25 Custom Fields. Outlook doesn’t tell your staff if the people she needs for the deal she just closed are available when the client is. And if you find Outlook’s reporting, invoicing, and inventory management functions, let us know!

Yes—and pay many times the initial cost of BAM. Then add Exchange’s hardware needs, plus the costs of ongoing maintenance and support. No one buys Exchange just to manage appointments. If you already have Exchange, you know it doesn’t contain the tools to manage all the business-focused tasks that BAM does—like invoicing and reporting and...and...and... Exchange is a useful broad-based e-mail communication tool for any businesses that can afford it, but it solves no problems unique to appointment-based businesses, which BAM does.

If your appointment software is more than one year old, it probably handles less than half of what BAM does. And it’s not built on tools as advanced and reliable as Microsoft SQL Server and .NET 2.0.

Contrast the thoroughness of BAM’s Appointment functions to those in your current solution.

Then look at all the other daily tasks BAM does for you. Your current software probably requires hours of manually calculating complex invoices with differing staff pay rates, item prices, mileage, third-party line-items, etc. BAM calculates these automatically once they’re properly entered.

The engineering and software development professionals who developed BAM have previously won five Microsoft awards in four years for business software excellence. Their software products won over business partners such as Intuit, IBM and Compaq. This earlier product was featured on a CNN Town Meeting. Microsoft acquired that product and still markets it worldwide.

Yes, because BAM is built on Microsoft’s latest database, SQL Server 2005 (SQL Express included). Competing products are built on the older Microsoft database called Access, or on a little-known database. SQL Server delivers better stability and flexibility for growth.

BAM is also built upon Microsoft .NET Framwork 2.0, which enables developers to rely upon proven software tools, rather than continually reinvent new code.

BAM works with on-premise or Web-hosted Microsoft SQL Server platforms as well as in-the-cloud database services like Microsoft SQL Azure.

You can allow your users secure access to BAM over the Internet, using Virtual Private Network. Using SQL Server and .Net technologies, BAM is designed to tolerate intermittent communications errors typical of the Internet and wireless networking. This allows your remote staff to view and change their appointments in real time and use all BAM features and programs.

Alternatively, you can publish individual appointments—or all staff appointments—to Google Calendars, where you control with whom your calendar is shared and what information others can see. But only BAM keeps all the customer details, does the invoicing, reporting, staff management, and all your other daily functions.

Yes. Reports and lists can be saved in Microsoft Excel and PDF format. BAM also imports contact data from Microsoft Outlook and exports data to Microsoft Office Accounting. And you can publish people’s schedules to Google Calendar.

System integrators can use the BAM software development kit to access and manipulate BAM data, or to create custom plug-ins to extend its functionality.

If you've purchased your computer within the last two years, you probably already have everything you need to run BAM. Click here for more information.

BMS offers a free, no obligation, 30-day trial period that lets you get to know BAM thoroughly. Click here to get your free trial software.

BAM is licensed on a per-computer basis. Per-computer licensing means a valid license must be obtained for each computer that runs the software. For example, if you want to install BAM and run it on three computers, you will need to buy three licenses, one for each computer.

Your cost for a single PC license (one copy of BAM) is $995. If you plan to run BAM on multiple computers for your business, you will need multiple licenses. Visit our online store for the latest pricing information. There you can place an order and pay for it with a credit card. Once we receive your online order you will receive via e-mail a product key to unlock the 30-day evaluation software you currently have installed on your machine and turn it into a permanent use license. Volume discounts are available for large volume purchases. Please contact BMS at (800) 450-4230 or (714) 661-5954 for volume pricing.

When you purchase a BAM license, you can use the licensed software version as long as you like. Unlike ASP, hosted, or managed services, you don’t pay any subscription or a monthly fee to use BAM.