Thanks for the replies everyone.
Quickbooks would be great. If they were reporting for financial reasons. Unfortunately, they are reporting on client interests.
This is for a battered women's shelter. Internally they have to keep very detailed records on their clients. That's the user-friendly data entry and idiot-proof maintenance I was talking about. Then they have reporting, which is a massive headache. And it's not financial reporting, either. That would be relatively easy. It's things like number of admissions, client services, counseling, follow-up, etc.. In addition to the public and private philanthropic groups there are the local, state and federal agencies, each of which requires slightly different data on an agency-specific form. Everyone wants to know what their donations and grants are doing.
They see an average of 300 clients a month with an average daily occupancy of around 150. Each one of those clients currently generates a handwritten contact page. Every contact for that client generates another entry on that page. Each entry has between 7 and 20 categories that are scored or tracked. From these entries the shelter has weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, and on-demand reports they have to generate. They have a staff of volunteers that do nothing but shuffle paper, tallying entries and generating the reports. We are trying to automate that so they can track, sort, and report using a single database. Oh, almost forgot to say, the reporting requirements change. A lot. The software needs to be flexible enough that you can custom design output based on combinations of data points.
Think something on the order of a client tracking and billing package for an attorney's office, but customizeable for data labels and field descriptions, with the ability to sort nine ways from Thursday, and able to handle custom field positions or to scan forms and designate custom fields for printing reports.
Brad