My sis has her own company and she needs a piece of software written for her.  I didn't know if any of you guys could do this so I thought I'd ask.  If it seems like a tall order, let me know and I will pass that info on to her.  She is local to York.  And if I get any comments like 'Is she hot?'  I will destroy you - besides, she is married...happily. 

Here is what I need the software to do. It would be similar to this website, but not nearly as advanced. http://www.salesforce.com/ (Co-op is money that is split between two partners. This is to manage those monies).

Co-op Advertising Dollars Management Software
Import accounting spread sheets
Customer account set up/profiles
Submit ads for approval to the dealers distributor
Monitor ad approval tracking process
Scan and save ads/upload ads
Email ads to someone
Email files/reports to someone
Save paperwork by dealer
Pull total reports for year/month by month comparison
Regional reports by geography and media spend for distributor to see
Sales reports/log in for sales reps to see what their dealers have left in their budgets
Calculate co-op budget by brand, by segment by year
Hosted online with log in and secure access
Dealer loginReports – capable of pulling multiple reports
Show graphs with portion of spends by medium
Distributor log in and review
Adjustments to co-op by distributor/edits with notes to dealer account
Ability to post message/postings to dealers from distributors – to send denials or credits for claims

If you think you can, I will pass her business info to you and you could set up a consultation or whatever.

The company I work for uses Salesforce -- I'll admit there is a LOT of crap going on in there that I don't even understand. I do know however that we have many people taht use it for various things and it basically is how we generate some of our leads.

I don't know if this info is helpful, but I'll say that Salesforce is ridiculously complex. I know you said that she doesn't need anything as advanced, but it really seems like a crapton of work to get all the pieces together. (I'm not a programmer :P)

I don't think that's what she had in mind.  She needs something customized to her business.  And she wouldn't have the first clue as to what to do with open source software.  And neither would I.

I am just saying that custom programming is expensive. I meant to go look and see which package fits her needs.

This doesn't sound like something anyone could build from scratch with any reasonable amount of time.  Although buying something custom always sounds good as you hope you are getting something that fits your needs exactly, it doesn't always work out that way.  I agree with Petch and she should entertain the idea of getting reps from MS as well as SAP (and maybe a few other companies) in to talk about their wares.  These are companies that have software packages that meet most, if not all, of her needs and have a whole world of computer nerds out there that can support it.

This is the type of stuff that SAP in particular thrives on.  Their US headquarters is in Newtown Square, PA (just outside King of Prussia).

Yeah, I sent her the info and link about the MS software.  I also pretty much told her that it would probably be best and cheaper to purchase an established software package. 

  Outsource, no really, Ive been making webpages and text conversion programs and general crap for a while on rentacoder.com, post the job there after defining what you want better and they will make something on the cheap.  Make sure they provide the source.  BTW microsoft outlook has a CRM addon that looks like it might fit the bill, old versions of ACT! would do, the later versions sorta jumped the shark.

  BTW, your sister really needs to define the project a bit more, I have no friggin idea what is requested from whats posted.  You need to define it a bit better to get a reasonable quote.

Also if she is gonna be selling it she will need to keep the team of programmers on staff so that they can provide Tech support.  There are bound to be bugs, enhancements, and new features that customers will want added.  Long gone is the era when you could make a piece of software and sell it for 3 years without updating it.  Nowadays people want continual upgrades (that don't cause more bugs) and more features every month.