Small Business Tools

I’ve been working on filling a few holes in our day-to-day operations, and trying to find the most elegant solutions. I wanted to share a couple of them here in the hopes that they would help out people in similar situations. The business we run is a very small design and marketing agency, but the tools I’ve found apply to any small business that bills for services and needs to manage sales contacts. I’m looking for comments and suggestions!

Billings

Billings is invoicing software for OS X. I have tried out Billable, as well as online solutions such as GetMyTime, but found this to be an ideal solution. GetMyTime was originally ideal because everyone who was billing time through my company could log their time on the web and I could import it into Quickbooks and create invoices. But Quickbooks stopped working with GetMyTime when they implemented their own online time tracking, which I didn’t like very much. Anyway, about Billings.

Billings provides a very useful interface, slightly more complex than Billable, but also more powerful. I define a workflow, starting with a client, then a project, and then time slips that can be active or completed. I have a small timer in my toolbar and a floating window that can be set to any active slip. I can punch in and out on a job as I do work, and each job can have an individual rate set. Billings can create very spiffy looking, customized invoices and estimates and track payments. I need to work with my accountant to make sure that my expense tracking and billables work hand in hand in the end (in Quickbooks), but I’m relatively enamored with the above mentioned features of Billings, so I plan to make it work.

You can run multiple (registered) copies of Billings and export slips to one central copy for invoicing.

Heap CRM

I’ve been working with a combination of Google Apps and Backpack but recently discovered Heap (referral link). It’s a great, inexpensive CRM tool that allows me to track leads, calendars and notes with my employees. You can subscribe to messages through RSS, calendars through iCal format, and it’s free until March. After that the price is set at $9 for the first user and $5 per additional user.

There is also a Heap Widget available for OS X.

Wordpress

Wordpress is an invaluable tool for my business. It provides our portfolio, our blog, and great search engine placement with very little SEO effort. It’s so hackable and configurable that I can very easily make it do just about anything I need. I can even set up collaboration tools on our intranet in just a few minutes.

I like to create “journals” that allow for publication of client notes and comments from other employees, giving each employee access to publish notes and use Ultimate Tag Warrior tags and Wordpress categories to organize them. This can be accomplished with a default install of wordpress and a little password protection.