There are certain tools your business should use that support its day to day management and growth.  Today, I share some of the tools that I use (and have previously used) to help keep my business on track.

Tools Your Business Should Use:

At a high level the tools you choose for your business should help you with:

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  • Financial Management
  • Invoicing and Cashflow Management
  • WorkFlow
  • Client Engagement

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Let’s have a look at some of the tools that we

 

Financial Management:

Financial ManagementMaking sure your finances are ‘under control’ is the keystone to good business management.  If you don’t know what you’ve invoiced, what’s paid, what’s not and who you owe – how do you manage cashflow and profitability?

The next part of this equation, is how do you keep it all up to date?  Do you a Virtual Assistant to help with your bookkeeping and BAS submissions, do you have a Book Keeper come to your place of business – how do you share the information so that it can be updated?

I prefer to use as many Cloud based services as I can – that way, I can easily share the workload geographically and don’t need to rely on my service providers coming me or me going to them.

Here are my top picks for Financial Management services

Accounting System

An accounting system helps you track incomings and outgoings, manages your profit and loss; balance sheet; BAS.  In some cases it can also manage your invoicing and Payroll.

There are a few systems around:

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to name just three.

We use SAASU and choose this very early (back in 2009) because it offered Multi Currency and payroll.  Since then, the other offerings around have added in the missing features but I still like SAASU feature sets (I also think it’s better value for money)

If you’re unsure about which system is best, it’s a great idea to talk to your book keeper or accountant first.   They may have a preferred system already.

When we transferred over, our accountant was still using the traditional MYOB systems (Cloud Apps were still really, really new) and there was a period of learning and adjustment.

Invoice Management

FreshBooksTaking payments is important – making it easy for customers to pay us is really important.

I wanted a system that would let me send an invoice to my customers and provide a link they could use to pay me, initially via Paypal and later via Credit Card through my merchant facility.

I also wanted an automated reminder system – if an invoice remains unpaid after a predefined period, a reminder should be sent out.

The best system I found was FreshBooks – there are other systems around, but I feel in love with FreshBooks from the day it was recommended to me (by my Book Keeper).

Fresh Books portray themselves as ‘cloud accounting’ however, the don’t offer Balance Sheet and P & L capabilities – so not really an accounting system.

Fresh Books lets me send out automated reminders and take payments through Paypal and Eway.

Support and HelpDesk Management

Streamlining and managing how your clients can contact you, request support and raise issues will help you be more productive.  In my experience, relying on email as a support mechanism isn’t a great idea.  I needed something that allowed me to move ‘requests’ through different statuses, assign it to other team members and still be able to track the progress.

Initially, I wanted a system that would allow me to help me manage projects (longer term tasks) and client issues / requests.  Afterall, they are very similar in nature.  The reality is that there are very few systems that marry both Work Flow / Project Management and Helpdesk Management together well or affordably (for small business).

One feature that was a ‘nice to have’ was the ability to provide a portal so that a clients can check the status of any / all of their tickets, check history etc.

In the long run, my choice came down to two solutions – that were robust and affordable:

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I’m currently using Rhinosupport for two reasons:

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  • Price included unlimited helpdesk agents – this means I can have my entire team listed and can assign tasks accordingly.  If one team member is used rarely, I’m not paying for a mostly unused seat
  • I knew some of the team who created the system – the same guys who created Wishlist Member
  • Privacy between groups – I can assign an agent to a group and that agent will only see tickets designated to the group.
  • API available from Day 1 to integrate with my other processes
  • Zendesk called me a number of time “offering help” and when I asked certain questions told me “someone would be in touch”, they weren’t … and I had to make a decision

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Of course, you still need great processes but being able to capture requests and contacts in one location is a great thing.

What neither of these systems currently provide, is time tracking or invoicing capabilities.  If work is billable, we have to manually review the tasks and raise an invoice… I’m also a statistics nut, so seeing how much time is spent on a specific task / client is important to me.

Workflow (or Project Management)

As I mentioned above, I have a need to manage longer term or multi task projects.  These require more collaboration between the internal team members and, potentially, the client.   Breaking bigger tasks into smaller sub tasks, being able to set priorities and different stake holders and creating a project plan are an important part of collaborating with a team to ensure the work is completed.

I’ve looked at a lot of systems over the last 5 years, and I’m sure I’ll look at more.  I’ve also found that as my business grows and changes, I out grow particular systems – so it’s important to keep an open mind in regards to these tools.

TeamworkPMMy tool of choice these days is TeamWorkPM – a system I looked at 2 years ago and simply did not like.  Recently, out of sheer desperation with the tool I was using and hearing some of my colleagues rave about it, I gave it another go.

My main point of desperation with the tool I was using was that I paid via the seat – so I couldn’t create project teams quickly and easily – and made collaboration very difficult.

TeamWorkPM provides:

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  • Multiple projects – fees are based on the number of concurrent projects you have open
  • Unlimited people – meaning that I can have as many members as I like in a team.
  • Privacy between projects, and between tasks in a project
  • Integration with FreshBooks, Google Docs, Box.com, Dropbox
  • Timer – for desktop, android and iOS.
  • Client portal

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It comes down to processes

Regardless of what systems are in place, it’s important to ensure that you have processes in place.  No matter how great the tool, if you don’t have processes and procedures for how your business works, the tool will not be completely effective.

It's all about processes

 

 

 

About the Author Charly Dwyer

Charly has more than 30 years experience in the IT industry ranging from hands-on technical, to high-level business management, Charly has installed and configured computing equipment and has managed business contracts in excess of $25 million dollars.

As a result, Charly identifies the best way to integrate solutions and technologies for the most cost effective way to achieve a businesses outcome.

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