Tools to run your small business in 2010
Posted by: Carl Smith on Friday January 8, 2010
Over the winter break I took a strategic look at all of the tools we had used to run the business side of nGen Works in 2009. My major realization was that I often pick tools based on what they can do, not how I work. Those tools always fail through no fault of their own. So as you read below about the changes I’m making in 2010 realize that what I’m doing may not work for you. You have to be honest about how you work and if you’ll keep using a new tool when you get slammed. This is the year of simplicity for me personally, so with that in mind let’s look at my toolbox.
Organizational (GTD) Tools
Things
Most of 2009 I was a Things junkie. It’s a great application and allows you to organize your to-dos based on the GTD approach. Look at your lists a bunch of different ways, whether it’s where you are, how much time you have, by project, etc. It really is an amazing tool. It also synced well with the iPhone early on although that got buggy later. Towards the end of the year I had really slowed down on using Things, mainly because of the homepage. While I could always select to just show items for today, it still showed every project or category. Basically it felt like there was a ton to do and that weighed on me. As a result I played around with TeuxDeux for awhile. It is sexy but it wasn’t easy enough for me. Especially moving tasks into the future.
Gootodo
Looking over all the to-do list systems I had used since starting nGen Works, I realized Gootodo was the one I worked best with. All of the others were solid, but Gootodo was based on turning emails into to-dos. I pretty much live in email so it works for me. The main benefit is it only shows what’s going on today. My brain can let everything else go knowing it’s captured for review in the future. It’s not sitting there looking at me. And it encourages you to procrastinate without losing the task. So if it’s the end of the day and I don’t want to reply to that email I just send it to next week. BAM! Yes, all to-do lists allow you to shift tasks around. But for me Gootodo feels easy.
Financial Tools
Pulse
Most of you who have met me have heard me rant about the importance of understanding your company’s cash flow. I didn’t for a long time and it made my life terrifying. I really couldn’t make financial decisions without a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach. Then I found Pulse. Pulse walks me through entering the info and allows a simple or complete view of what’s going on. It’s easy to set up repeating costs or payments. It’s easy to shift expenses and receivables into the future or zero them out. Basically it’s easy and that keeps it up-to-date and lets me sleep peacefully.
Excel
When we hired our accounting firm my only request was that I never have to look at Quickbooks ever again. They asked if I would be willing to keep a simple ledger using Excel. All they wanted was who, what, when, how much and the balance. Using the ledger with Pulse I have a great feeling for what’s going on today and what to expect tomorrow.
Harvest
Harvest helps us manage all of our invoicing as well as tracking incurred time versus estimates. It’s the cornerstone of watching projects for profitability. I also have to say that the team at Iridesco listens and acts on the input from their community. If we have issues I’m confident that they’re working on a solution. If we have an idea we know they’ll consider it. Good job fellas.
Co-op
Also from Iridesco, Co-op is Twitter for time tracking and team collaboration. It allows us to know what’s going on that day and syncs that information into Harvest. We know exactly where we are in a project financially real time. If a client calls and asks I don’t have to say let me call you back, I say hold on a sec. That’s pretty bad ass. Being that on top of where we are also allows us to identify issues early and correct them.
New Business Management
Pipeline Deals
I became aware of Pipeline Deals in the middle of 2009, after spending time with Highrise. I felt Highrise was too simple and didn’t give me enough. So I switched to Pipeline Deals which gave me the ability to create process flow templates and see status data in a graphical format. In the end though I didn’t use either system because keeping them up-to-date was a pain for me. This may rub traditional salespeople the wrong way, but the best system for me is keeping new biz to-dos in Gootodo with all the other things in my work life. We are still using Pipeline Deals to manage our client/prospect database but that may change before too long.
Project Management Tools
Basecamp
If you’re reading this you probably already know about Basecamp so I won’t go into detail. It works great as a central place for managing all project communications, tasks and files with both the internal and client teams.
Signup Bot
Signup Bot has been a big help for us in scheduling user interviews and remote user testing. Rather than spending time chasing users and trying to find appropriate times to get together, they just log in and pick a time. It’s extremely simple and is shaving hours off of projects.
I’d love to hear about the tools that are making it easier for you to run your small business, as well as any questions or suggestions you may have for us.
Comment RSS Filed under: Business, Resources
Chad Crowell
01.08.10 at 3:55pm
Great post Carl – I love this stuff from like-minded professionals. Having just incorporated, rebranded and in the process of re-inventing how we present our company, we also are in the process of evaluating tools we use.
Wondering what you use for payroll? We do use quickbooks and my wife, who is also VP and our biz manager is a whiz at it – so I don’t bug her about trying other things. We use the integrated QB payroll, which is painless, but if we ever jumped off QB I wouldn’t know what to do with payroll.
I haven’t been able to get into really using Highrise, so thanks for the Pipeline rec- looks like a good option. I am also trying to find a way to work basic CRM flow into Basecamp.
I think I’ll be ditching our Backpack subscription – it just doesn’t get used. I think Dropbox is about all we need to handle the aspects of Backpack that we do use. With milestones in Basecamp and google calendar we are pretty set there.
I also decided to use google apps for email rather than our own server, mainly for the spam filtering and letting them worry about space and bandwidth.
Max Cameron
01.08.10 at 4:05pm
Hi Carl,
Thanks for the list. I’m going to check out Pulse because we’re struggling to keep our financials really up to date. Right now we’re getting monthly snap shots from our book keeper, but the info is always a month old and that’s not doing it for us.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention Pivotal Tracker in this post. Do you do all of your PM work in basecamp?
Chris Olberding
01.08.10 at 4:42pm
Good post Carl. Might inspire me to do the same – we recently conducted a review of all business software that we use and are in the process of making some big changes – getting away from Basecamp finally.
I agree with your comment on Highrise, we used it for maybe a month. We use a customized version of vTiger (flavor of SugarCRM) now, better than Highrise but not ideal.
I’m over hosted solutions, if you have the development and IT expertise it makes a whole lot more sense to run software on your own servers that can tie directly in to your workflow and file servers.
Jeff Harrrington
01.08.10 at 7:50pm
I like Quickbooks online for billing/bookeeping. And by me I mean my bookkeeper. It works with Safari now and my accountant likes it too.
We tracktime in Tickspot. I think you used them at one point.
For new biz, I use a dolled up Numbers speadsheet. print them on 11×17. It’s not to interact with, markup.
Dittos on Basecamp.
Carl Smith
01.08.10 at 9:48pm
@Chad, glad you liked the post. Payroll is handled by our accounting firm. I just shoot them an email approving it and magically the money ends up in our bank accounts. Heaven I tell you, heaven. Pipeline is really good if you are the type of person who will keep up with it. Pipejump looked interesting too if you’re testing a few options out.
@Max, You are most welcome. Pulse really helps me in my decision making. Wether it’s going to a conference that’s 4 months away or if we take on a project I’m not sure about. I hear great things about Pivotal Tracker, and the Pivotal Labs guys have been super great to us. Our types of projects and the way we work just isn’t really suited for it. That may change, you never know.
@Chris, Thanks. I’d love to hear more about your decision to move away from hosted solutions. Buck that trend!
@Jeff, Quickbooks works really well for some people, just not for me. Having a great accounting firm fixed all of those problems for us. Tick is a great tool. When we used them we used Blinksale for invoicing which also worked really well. The decision to move to Harvest was based on wanting time tracking and invoicing in the same app. It’s really been a great decision for us.
Brad Pollard
01.08.10 at 10:10pm
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the tools that you use within your business. In the absence of good advice, business tool selection can quickly become a minefield.
We project manage a web design team consisting of designers and developers. On advice of others our main prerequisite has been to find tools that are easy to use.
Unlike @chris, we are a big believer in hosted solutions.
For invoicing we use Harvest. For to-do lists and time tracking we use Basecamp. For contact management/CRM/sales we use Highrise, however as you have found, there isn’t much too it… we’ll be checking out Pipeline Deals. Thanks for the recommendation.
For issue tracking we use DoneDone – our clients have really taken to this online issue tracker. DoneDone almost makes issue tracking fun ;-)
We have also based our business tool selection on whether the tool has a good API or not. Often, systems that are easy to use have had their functionality paired back to appeal to a wider market. Reporting appears to have been one of those areas to have been placed on the back-burner. So where then will we obtain important business performance reports? This is likely to come either from the tool authors themselves OR from third parties making good use of their APIs – mashing up time, invoicing and customer data to produce meaningful reports. We’re looking forward to seeing this evolution take place.
carl Smith
01.11.10 at 3:25pm
@Brad – Glad you liked the post, and I’ll definitely be giving DoneDone a look.We’re big fans of hosted solutions as well. Keep us informed of how your mashup evolves.
To see time tracking with great reporting features checkout Tempo (OK, so they’re a client but it’s still a great app!)
software development in Surrey
01.22.10 at 9:02am
Quite inspiring,
Some great business tools…
Thanks for bringing this up