While Filemaker has also made a run at small business with its $39 basic-level Bento database, Filemaker 11 is worth the extra $140. The Productivity Kit includes templates — ready-made database reports — to serve companies dealing in either goods or services. The Standard Edition Kit is aimed at sellers of goods, while the Service Edition includes templates for, well, services companies.

Filemaker 11 does ship with a raft of templates already, many suitable for the business user. But the company promises that the new kit’s free templates are “an integrated set of business tools and each module ties to the other, eliminating any need for duplicate fields, tables and data re-entry.”

The biggest advance in Filemaker 11 may well be its charting, and the Kit proposes to make that power ready to use, along with what the company calls “on-the-fly” reporting.

After a few days building and experimenting with the Bento database, it’s plain that the Filemaker advantages of customization are well worth its lift in cost. Starting with a set of templates that you can customize gives a small business room to grow and expand to new opportunities. Filemaker even includes a guide to database basics and one for working with Microsoft Office in the Productivity Kit.

Reports are the most obvious element missing from Bento, although that product does provide an Excel-like listing of the records in each database. Ready-made reports are the kind of solution a company would pay a consultant to create; it’s possible, with a good training resource like Lynda.com, to make these reporting templates go much further.

Filemaker says that its two editions of the Productivity Kit break out along these lines of business tasks:

Standard Edition (for companies selling goods):

• Manage contacts and suppliers
• Organize products and inventory
• Process sales orders
• Track projects and production
• Send targeted e-mails

Service Edition (for companies providing services):

• Track clients and vendor contacts
• Process service orders
• Organize information about service offerings
• Manage invoices and other key business data
• Send targeted e-mail campaigns

The kit also comes with a bonus e-mail marketing guide, one that Filemakers says included “valuable tips and tricks on creating customized email campaigns to market goods and services.” For that mission you need a means of delivery, and we’d recommend Constant Contact for your outreach.