Readers will realise the Business Solutions supplement, highlight of the month though it is, is written a little in advance. So whereas you're reading at the end of January, at this end of the word processor that month is only half-way through. And I've broken most of my new year's resolutions - midweek wine with dinner was supposed to be out (hah!) and visits to the gym, well, they were supposed to have happened by now.

In business there are other resolutions to make. These will often involve practices that should have been adhered to in the first place - this year I'm going to take the receipts out of my pocket more regularly, this year I'm going to do my accounts every week, and this year I'm going to be more organised. On the organisation side there's a lot of software and indeed hardware out there to help.

· Organisers: software
At the most basic level, all office suites have some sort of PIM (personal information manager) application built in. Microsoft Outlook is far and away the market leader and includes email as well as contacts, task lists and calendaring functions. You can get more sophistication by putting a customer relationship system such as ACT from Sage over the top of this, but if you are new to electronic organising it can be worth sticking with the basics first. Microsoft Works also has a calendar, albeit a more basic one, and Lotus Smartsuite costs only £19.99 and has a perfectly workable organiser that even looks like a Filofax on screen.

Other independent companies also offer organiser systems. Isbister (www.isbister.com) makes Time and Chaos, offering an appealing visual guide to your appointments and contacts, and SmartAddress (www.sa2k.com) likewise organises contacts in a clear and satisfying manner.

Watch out for the multiple diary syndrome, however. Many accounting systems have basic scheduling and, of course, they contain contact details for customers. Keeping these synchronised with other diaries you might have on your system through organisers can be a pain. It is worth asking your supplier whether the contacts and scheduling can be shared across applications.

· Organisers: hardware
Hand-held computers tend to end up getting used as glorified organisers, which is of course an excellent way to spend your £399 or however much you plan to cough up. The good news is that they come increasingly with other functions and excellent organiser software. Palm has its own proprietary organiser software, which you can either use or bypass in favour of an easy link with Microsoft Outlook, Lotus Notes or whichever system you prefer. PocketPC-compatible systems, such as the Compaq iPaq and offerings from Toshiba, arrive with a licensed copy of Outlook XP. This doesn't actually require Windows XP to work, but people with low-spec computers will need to consider upgrading if they want to use it - what the packaging forgets to tell you is that if you have an older copy of Outlook on your system it'll probably work with that.

The principle is simple: you enter the information, you set up your hand-held computer's software and it takes all the contact, scheduling, email and whichever other information you want it to have from your computer. Depending on how much storage you have, you can carry Word and Excel files around in your pocket as well as music, e-books and games. Businesspeople might be more interested in getting tailored systems together to organise their activities. Jack Panayi is a partner with Soccertutor (www.soccertutor.com), which has developed an application for the PocketPC platform. Coaches can take a hand-held computer into their sessions and use them to track the attendance and progress of each player. "Administrators will be able to use it as an online event manager to organise courses," he explains.

Essentially the coach ticks off the players on an electronic list, enters information about them as the session progresses then plugs it into the main computer afterwards and the player profiles are updated automatically; the administrator then knows the exact status of each player in almost real time. A version for Smartphone is currently under development - which the market has yet to demand but which, Payani believes, will be an important hardware platform in future.

· Databases
Soccertutor is arguably an interesting case because it uses what looks like an organiser, but the company has written a database application to power the very specific tasks it wants to perform.

This is the same as the approach taken by developer Muddyboots, which produces a system called CropWalker for agronomists. Richard Palmer is an agronomist who heads a consultancy called Farm Vision (www.farmvision.com). His job involves visiting farms and advising on growing conditions and also on tracking the crops - everything, in the current supermarket climate, must be absolutely traceable to where it came from.

He has used CropWalker, a database Muddyboots wrote in Visual Basic, for five years, and was suitably chuffed when the Pocket CropWalker system, which takes information into a PocketPC and downloads it on to the computer when the user returns to the office, emerged. "I had been writing everything down on paper and then typing it in," he confirms. "Now it happens automatically and the system sends an email to my farmer customer. Ideally he'll be using CropWalker as well, so it's automatically in the right format." If not, the system sends a PDF through Microsoft Outlook.

Databases don't need to be that specialised of course, and they don't need to cost a fortune. Microsoft Access, part of the professional version of the Office suite, which costs £474 from Amazon or £279.99 for Access alone, can be tweaked by someone with the appropriate skills into the right tool for your business and it has several templates built in.

Filemaker Pro is stronger on templates for different businesses, costs £225.99 and will work on Windows or the Mac. Lotus has the Approach database in its ludicrously priced Smartsuite set of products, and Corel's WordPerfect Office also has a database.

Microsoft will be the preferred option for people wanting to transfer their databases to other people's computers, and you are more likely to find someone with skills in developing for the more popular databases than the lesser ones.

Nobody is suggesting that every business will need to have a system tailored for its exclusive use, nor that every niche market will need its own software application. Organisations will certainly benefit from simple sharing of schedules, and the use of PDAs in their most basic form can be a productive layer on top of that. But it is worth noting that once you are into organising your work using IT, there is often a great deal that can be achieved beyond standard diary and address book systems.

An answer to their prayers

Not all organisations are there for profit, which is why sometimes someone takes a sideways look at their system and uses only the bits they want. Goldmine, for example, is a sales and marketing system that specialises in contact management and group scheduling, with a view to making an affordable customer relationship management system. It is perhaps a surprise, then, to find The Boiler Room, a Christian group in Reading, using it.

"We'd been trying to organise ways to keep us in touch with the people who come to pray here," says prayer room manager Peter Ward. "There were large groups with whom we wanted to maintain contact, and we don't have a typical church building - we're separated out into different rooms."

It was this diversity of location, even within the same building, that made the organisation look further than the standard Microsoft Office packages. Although Outlook can be networked, it was simpler to install something like Goldmine, which by default is set up to take information from a single database for multiple users.

"We could have used Outlook, but we'd have had to use Microsoft Exchange," says Ward - and in this five-strong charity there wasn't the time to learn how.

Indeed, the only gripe with the Goldmine system is that it isn't as intuitive as a lot of software these days. "You definitely have to learn it - it doesn't feel natural," says Ward. And he is aware that he is only touching the surface of what can be done with it: "We don't use the scheduling at all. Again, we just haven't got the time to learn how to do it."

Nevertheless, as a means of putting visitors into groups on a central database and getting all the staff access to the records as flexibly as possible, Ward is pleased with the results.

Help panel

Personal, portable and in your pocket
PDA: Personal digital assistant, or hand-held computer.
PDF: Portable document format made using Adobe Acrobat. The reader is free from www.adobe.com and the idea is that files in this format will be readable by any computer.
PIM: Personal information manager - diary and contact book software.
PocketPC: The Windows system for PDAs, which competes with Palm.
Smartphone: In this context it means Microsoft's Smartphone system currently working on Orange's SPV model and other mobile phones. It can also mean any intelligent telephone.