PTO Manager is a great value. You'd need several other products to duplicate the various features of it. I'm not sure if you're looking at the Volunteer Builder component, Finance Manager, or both.
I've used Volunteer Builder (VB) for a couple of years now. Prior to that, to communicate with my volunteers and track their hours, I was using a combination of an Excel spreadsheet (with frequent use of advanced features such as mail merging), Yahoo! groups, Outlook Express, and an offsite backup service. All this was relatively inexpensive, and it worked, but it was more time consuming and prone to error than VB. Also, I'm a pretty advanced Excel user--when I tried to train my successor at one school on how to use my Excel sheet, she just couldn't get it. VB is much easier for someone who's not real computer literate to figure out. Also, with a large school, sending out emails to the whole volunteer list was an issue because my ISP limited the number of emails I could send out at one time. I was constantly breaking my list up into smaller groups and sending multiple copies of the same email to get to everyone. And with some services, like Earthlink, people had controls in place where they kept blocking our emails. Now, all PTA related correspondence goes through the VB system with a standard email address, so there's one address for people to mark as "safe" no matter which PTA person is actually sending it. All the data is current, so when a chairperson needs someone to bake, for example, I don't have to keep emailing them updated lists of volunteers--they can just go into VB themselves and send a note out to all the people in there at the moment who have offered to bake.
Tracking volunteer hours is required in our district. The VB system of entering them in took roughly the same amount of time that I was taking in my Excel system, but the VB system is more accurate (for reasons too detailed to go into here). We're just now getting ready to start using VB in a way where volunteers and visitors sign in on a computer at school, which will eliminate the need for us to manually count the hours. Comparable sign in systems alone run for twice the price of VB.
Also, everything is web based, so if someone's computer goes down, you haven't lost access to your data. Or, worse, if their hard drive crashes and they haven't backed up, you might lose your data completely--that's not a concern with VB.
The web access/no backups required feature was the single most important reason we switched to the Finance Manager piece of PTO Manager. We had a situation a couple of years ago where the Treasurer's computer crashed and burned, and she had no backups. It took her months to recreate the data, and we had no finance info at all during that time--which created huge problems.
The other advantage of Finance Manager is consistency. One year you'll have a Treasurer who owns Quicken, so they do everything on Quicken. Next year you'll have someone who just uses Excel. Then the next Treasurer wants to use Money. You have to get used to new formats and it takes a long time to get everything transitioned and set up in the new year. Or you'll use an unlicensed out of date copy of something that keeps getting handed down from year to year, then when there's a problem with the software, the company won't support it and you're out of luck. With Finance Manager, you'll always have the latest version of the software, the records/reports are in a consistent format from year to year, and you have easy access to competent (and patient) support people.
One of my biggest gripes is the PTOManager name. I live in the middle of PTA land, and getting people to look at anything with the dreaded PTO letters in it is, uh, challenging to say the least.
