Need inexpensive database to track clients, vendors and automatically email/fax invoices and correspondence.?

Question

Have contacts consisting of service providers and prospective clients. Need to assign prospective clients to a particular service provider. Then, need to be able see views/reports sorted by providers, provder's city/state, etc. Then, need to be able to easily send out invoices or Status Reports to the Service Providers. For example:
Have 100 consultants (service providers). Periodically, I get people who need consulting. I match them up with consultants. I charge consultants a small fee for the referral. So, I need to easily track the relationships and be able to send correspondence to the consultants - either an invoice or a "referral activity" report showing them who they've been assigned. Correspondence will need to be via email, fax or mail.

Answer 1

Try ACT!, you can buy at any office store for a couple hundred bucks. The networking features tend to be a little buggy but other than that it works great.

Answer 2

Try Mysql or Postgresql on linux. All three are free and very robust. May develop the application in java. That's also free.

Answer 3

MySQL - http://www.mysql.com/

Its free and open source software (free as in beer or speech). Most programming languages have the ability to speak with it, but you can also download a basic front end for it from the same site.