Does anyone know of a good program for keeping track of customers/clients? Preferably something free or very inexpensive.

I've been trying to play with this one, but it's not really working for me (I seem to only be able to get to the client-side of it - which is unnecessary - and not the administrative side). It really doesn't have to be web-based either.

I'm sure a basic spreadsheet could accomplish the task, but it doesn't scale well in this instance.

Any suggestions?

Bento (from Filemaker) seems like a super nice little personal database app (and polished front end) on the Mac that can easily tackle this. I'm going to be picking it up more than likely for a number of different purposes. Wish I had it a few years ago when I was reaching the limits of Excel's spreadsheet length.

Looks really nice, but I can't afford a Mac

You might want to go the whole hog and use a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, take a look at Sugar CRM.

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/community/sugarcrm-community.html

For those that don't know, CRM is a system that not only acts as a contacts database for your customers, but also tracks and manages your interactions with them.

Coding CRM systems (onyx.com in particular) has been my day job for most of the last 10 years.

I'd be willing to look into that, but that software seems a little intimidating on the installation side. And is it free or not? It's hard to tell...

It is one of those bits of open source where you can choose whether it is free or not. If you just use the basic stuff and run it yourself then it is free.

If you want some of the other more advanced stuff you pay, if you want them to host it for you you pay.

Gotcha. I've downloaded the appropriate files and installed it. It's clearly more polished than CitrusDB, but it's going to take me a while to figure out how to use it. I certainly don't need the more advanced stuff.

I've only actually ever played with the demo of SugarCRM, but played with it long enough to see that it is well thought out and implemented.

I guess I should be recommending Onyx to you instead, but that would be overkill and very expensive... (oh and it only works on IE)