Invoicing/scheduling/CRM, what do you use ?
Discussion
Our small business is growing all the time, now at 20 staff I'm finding things all a bit complicated,
I need simplicity.
Currently using Jobber (as suggested form someone on here) Its good, but lacks some stuff. Considering going back to QuickBooks, SAGE is always mentioned but, not sure if useful to us. I need to schedule jobs, schedule staff and generally get more organised.
The other major issue we have is keeping track of job leads,
We can have 10+ leads per day, all of which will need a site survey. We are losing tracks of leads, and in turn probably losing business.
I've recently discovered there is software too track this stuff, but again it seems such a minefield.
Does anyone have a decent set up you use, that is simple and each to teach staff ?
We are an electrical contracting business and general property maintenance/installation.
Any help is appreciated
I need simplicity.
Currently using Jobber (as suggested form someone on here) Its good, but lacks some stuff. Considering going back to QuickBooks, SAGE is always mentioned but, not sure if useful to us. I need to schedule jobs, schedule staff and generally get more organised.
The other major issue we have is keeping track of job leads,
We can have 10+ leads per day, all of which will need a site survey. We are losing tracks of leads, and in turn probably losing business.
I've recently discovered there is software too track this stuff, but again it seems such a minefield.
Does anyone have a decent set up you use, that is simple and each to teach staff ?
We are an electrical contracting business and general property maintenance/installation.
Any help is appreciated
For the lead tracking and pipeline stuff I use Base CRM - it's cloud based, simple and intuitive for even computer/app phobic staff. That said, I saw a video of hubspot CRM recently and it looked quite good too. Both systems probably lack the features of higher end stuff like Salesforce but they are simple and effective and I use base to track leads from the very first contact through to becoming a deal, moving through the sales funnel to become a sale [or lost, lol]. Only slight weakness is you can't create any stages for after you have won the deal (i.e. post-sale). That would be useful for operations side of things.
Depends really, you either put in cloud software and adapt to fit in with its constraints, or you write your own...
Do you have a strong clear picture of all your processes, the data you need to capture and how it should help you? Once that is worked out, run that against software to check it can do it - ideally without needing to be tweaked...
We use our own coded for us, but it does bespoke stuff and as we code systems it is not difficult to make it work how we want...
Do you have a strong clear picture of all your processes, the data you need to capture and how it should help you? Once that is worked out, run that against software to check it can do it - ideally without needing to be tweaked...
We use our own coded for us, but it does bespoke stuff and as we code systems it is not difficult to make it work how we want...
I'm always on the lookout for similar systems and have yet to find one that will do the whole lot and is targeted towards small businesses. Pipedrive and some of the other sales focussed CRM's would be good for leads and new enquiries. For scheduling jobs/teams ServiceM8 might be worth a look although I'm not sure if it's that different to jobber. It does hook in to Xero though so if you are thinking of changing your accounts software it might be worth looking at the products that integrate with that first of all. WorkflowMax may also be worth a look if you do go the Xero route.
Splats said:
For the lead tracking and pipeline stuff I use Base CRM - it's cloud based, simple and intuitive for even computer/app phobic staff. That said, I saw a video of hubspot CRM recently and it looked quite good too. Both systems probably lack the features of higher end stuff like Salesforce but they are simple and effective and I use base to track leads from the very first contact through to becoming a deal, moving through the sales funnel to become a sale [or lost, lol]. Only slight weakness is you can't create any stages for after you have won the deal (i.e. post-sale). That would be useful for operations side of things.
We run Base and Hubspot. The Hubspot CRM is only really serves to put the leads captured through a website into some sort of basic workflow. We've run both in parallel and Base knocks spots off it. We'll probably end up getting the leads in Hubspot sent over to Base using integration via Zapier. On the scheduling side we use Harvest Forecast - it's not bad. We use the Harvest T&E so the integration helps. Last but not least we have Xero for accounts & invoicing. It takes a feed from Harvest which is pretty useful.
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