Do you want to determine just who your best customers are? The ones that buy most often or spend the most? You see the key to this information is in your accounting system. It is a commonly held belief that a customer relationship management system will generate a return on investment (ROI). Fact is CRM systems for ’service oriented’ companies can be useful. However, if you truly want to increase your profits and market your product or service in the most cost-effective way you need to segment your customer base on their previous buying history.

Your accounts system has all the information you need! And it doesn’t matter if you are a start-up running an entry level accounts package like Sage Instant or a very large enterprise running Line 500 or SAP. If you want to extract information for the purposes of segmenting and marketing to your customers then you need to be mining data from your accounting system.