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Ugly Mug Coffee (uglymugcoffee.com), of Memphis, Tennessee is a growing and fun-loving coffee company founded in 1998. While they love their coffee, they are very serious about their business.

Over two years ago Tim Burleson, co-owner and CTO of Ugly Mug, went looking for a business and operations management system to help support the company's growth. He also wanted to move their operations away from manual systems such as spreadsheets so they could better manage their customers, products and the overall flow of orders.

After examining the software market for a year, Tim, who has a background in software development, didn't see a small-business package powerful enough for them. So, he decided to have a package custom built.

After they had already started this process, he found the ACCTivate! website and discovered that a powerful small-business package does exist after all. He dropped the custom software development, purchased ACCTivate! and went live in February 2005.

Tim concluded that ACCTivate! is not only more powerful than the system they were about to build, but it is less expensive overall as well. He said, "we're in the coffee business, not the software development and support business." He added that it is also much easier to have the professional staff at ACCTivate! support, release updates and enhance the software as well.

Last year, Ugly Mug launched Elvis Coffee (elviscoffee.com), a line of Elvis-themed products that has been shipped to every state, 15 countries and can even be purchased at Graceland. With the help of ACCTivate!, this brand has turned into the largest non-music venture licensed by Elvis Presley Enterprises. "We couldn't have done ElvisCoffee.com without ACCTivate!," is the conclusion Tim made.

This strong statement is a clear indication of the productivity and organization gains that can be earned from successfully running ACCTivate!.

During the holidays last year, the Elvis Coffee website received 4,000 orders in five days. These orders were imported into ACCTivate! through the web order import module and processed without a glitch. An average non-holiday week usually sees between 50 and 200 orders. During this busy week, Ugly Mug was able to handle over 20 times the shipping volume of a typical busy week and they attribute it to productivity gains from ACCTivate!.

One of these productivity gains is the ability to process orders faster than before. Tim also notes, "barcoding in ACCTivate! saves us an hour per day." Ugly Mug has modified their order picking sheets (through Crystal Reports) to include the order number both in human-readable letters and barcode as well.

After the order is picked and ready to ship, the order number is scanned into the shipping computer and through the shipping workstation interface module all of the shipping information is populated instantly in their shipping software. Saving an hour per day calculates into real savings in the long run. Week after week this can add up to hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars saved per year.

ACCTivate! has allowed Ugly Mug to gain control of their business so they can manage everything from inventory to a precise cost of goods sold. Before ACCTivate!, their business processes were very manual with spreadsheets and printouts.

Now, with ACCTivate! they track their inventory, review customer performance and calculate cost of goods sold at a very granular level. They even calculate their coffee cost in a given bag to a fraction of a pound, for example.

Ugly Mug Coffee is a small business on the rise. They made a decision to invest in their company when they chose ACCTivate! and that is an investment that is paying off. Cheers!