A More Productive, Organized Business for the Year 2009

As a free­lancer, the way in which you manage your busi­ness can make or break the oper­a­tion. Account­ing, client com­mu­ni­ca­tion, invoic­ing, they can really start to eat away at your bill­able hours if you don’t get them under con­trol from the get go.

In plan­ning for the new year I have spent the past sev­eral months search­ing out and review­ing project man­age­ment apps. Apps that will make my life easier and more pro­duc­tive. The idea is to keep it simple for myself and for my clients. The fol­low­ing are a few of the tools and appli­ca­tions that have made the cut thus far, not set in stone, but they are worth check­ing out.

Email

The most basic of your needs as a busi­ness these days and prob­a­bly one of, if not the most impor­tant. I have found that read­ing, orga­niz­ing and respond­ing to email can easily eat a whole days worth of time in the blink of an eye. My prod­uct of choice:

The beauty of Gmail is that it allows me to have all of my email in one easy to manage inter­face, no switch­ing pro­files or start­ing new pro­grams. Email is easily orga­nized using a handy little color coded cat­e­gory of my choice. There is a ton of space to store those emails you just might need in the future and best of all, it’s absolutely free.

Billing and Finance

Another essen­tial duty to run­ning a suc­cess­ful busi­ness is get­ting paid and keep­ing track of your money. For years I had been using Quick­books to track finances and invoice clients, it’s a great appli­ca­tion but it seemed a little bloated for my needs. When I started free­lanc­ing back in March of this year I was intro­duced to an amaz­ing little appli­ca­tion called Freshbooks.

• Fresh­books allows you to create, send and manage invoices in a matter of minutes.
• Accept pay­ments online through a number of proces­sors from PayPal to Autho​rize.net
• Track time and expenses.
• Gen­er­ate a number of finan­cial reports.
• View paid and out­stand­ing invoices at a glance.
• Send follow ups automatically.
• And just recently added the abil­ity to pro­vide cus­tomer ser­vice via an open ticket system.

The inter­face is simple to under­stand and a breeze to use plans start at $0 for three clients and go up to $149 for as many as 5000 clients at a time. This par­tic­u­lar appli­ca­tion is one I couldn’t live with­out and has increased my pro­duc­tiv­ity in the billing depart­ment tenfold.

Next on the list:

Boot­strap is a simple online bookeep­ing appli­ca­tion that is fully inte­grated with Fresh­books (if you so choose). With the click of a button I down­load all of my paid and unpaid invoices, input expenses and easily gen­er­ate all of the nec­es­sary reports come tax time. It even esti­mates your fed­eral taxes for you. The best part of all, Boot­strap is cur­rently free of charge! (they plan to charge for the ser­vice in the future, pric­ing is not cur­rently available)

The com­bi­na­tion of Fresh­books and Boot­strap has allowed me to com­pletely replace that old bloated Quick­books app.

Project Management

Allow­ing a project to get away from you, chances are we have all been there, things start to go miss­ing, com­mu­ni­ca­tions breaks down and money is lost. The search for my final choice in project man­age­ment apps has not been an easy one. There are dozens of them out there vary­ing in price and com­plex­ity. My per­sonal needs are basic and simple, I want orga­ni­za­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It doesn’t have to be an all in one but the combo needs to be rock solid. The final test, the app needs to be all of the above for my clients as well. The app I choose needs to sell itself to even the most weary of my clients. Here’s a few worth check­ing out.

37 Sig­nals the pio­neers of the online project man­age­ment appli­ca­tion indus­try. They may simple apps that get the job done…periods. Their list of soft­ware includes.

Base­camp – Project Man­age­ment and Col­lab­o­ra­tion
High­rise – Online con­tact man­ager and simple CRM
Back­pack – Intranet, group cal­en­dar and orga­nizer
Camp­fire – Real time group chat
Write­board – Write, Share, Revise and Com­pare online
And on of my favorites but lesser know – Ta-​da List – Simple to-​dos

Cur­rently I find myself get­ting the most use out of Base­camp free trial with the second most useful being Ta-​da List, how­ever as I look towards the future I see sev­eral of these apps coming together in a rather useful way. They are clean, unbloated and most impor­tantly they are simple. All of their appli­ca­tions come with a free basic plan and work their way up from there. For instance, Base­camp tops out at $149 for unlim­ited with 50Gbs of space.

Round­ing out the list of project man­age­ment are two that I have just recently added to the list, OnStage and No Kahuna. Both of these apps seem to be mod­eled after 37 Sig­nals Base­camp prod­uct, offer­ing an alter­na­tive worth taking for a spin.

On stage looks to offer a sleek easy to use inter­face, is avail­able in sev­eral dif­fer­ent lan­quages and fol­lows that same sim­plis­tic approach as Base­camp. Pric­ing starts at $0 for an ad sup­ported, 10 project ver­sion or just $10 for a sim­i­lar non ad sup­ported ver­sion with a max of $135 for the top end unlim­ited ver­sion with 60Gbs of space.

No Kahuna looks promis­ing as a less expen­sive alter­na­tive to the above. The prod­uct stays free with unlim­ited projects and users as longs as you do require more than 30 open tasks. If you require a bit more go ahead and upgrade start­ing at just $9 for 3 open projects and up to $99 for 100. Oh and for all of you out here keep­ing it open source, No Kahuna remains free of charge for the life of the project!

Prototyping and Wireframing

Almost all of us in the web design busi­ness start a project with some sort of wire­frame, dia­gram or mockup. For most of my projects I sketch out a nice little dia­gram to map out the web­site I am about to tackle and then I move into pho­to­shop to begin mockup the design. Pho­to­shop is great but it requires a lot of imag­i­na­tion for a lot of my cus­tomers to grasp how things will actu­ally func­tion once we are up and run­ning. How do you nav­i­gate this hurdle yet keep it simple and easy to under­stand, enter Jumpchart.

Jumpchart looks to be a nice little project plan­ning tool that allows your team to col­lab­o­rate in plan­ning the basic flow and nav­i­ga­tion of your web­site. The free plan starts with 10 pages, 2 users and 1mb of stor­age. The paid plans range from $5/mo for 5 projects, 25 pages and 5 users per with a total of 100mb of stor­age. The deluxe plan for $50/mo with 30 projects, unlim­ited pages and users with 5000mb of storage.

Blogging

If you don’t have your own blog up and run­ning you are miss­ing some great oppor­tu­ni­ties. If you do run your own blog or sev­eral you well know that writ­ing on a reg­u­lar basis is seri­ous busi­ness, espe­cially if you have other income pro­duc­ing work to tackle. So why not take advan­tage of an app makes it all a whole lot easier. Intro­duc­ing MarsEdit 2

With MarsEdit you are able to create, store, edit, pre­view and pub­lish from a single loca­tion. You can work on every­thing offline (a big plus for those of us that travel), store it locally and then pub­lish with the click of a button once you hit the ground. All of your images, tags and cat­e­gories zipped right along with it. My per­sonal favorite is that fact that I no longer have to squint and scroll as I work through an arti­cle. Start­ing with a free 30 day trial MarsEdit 2 comes with the extremely small price tag of $29.95, a price well worth it by any means.

Customer Support

So why would you need an added layer of cus­tomer sup­port when you already have these beau­ti­ful project man­age­ment apps, email and last but not least a phone number? I can think of three very good reasons.

1. Your inbox is flooded and although your inten­tions where to tackle the prob­lem at the end of the day that little issue got pushed to the bottom and lost in the shuf­fle.
2. Phone con­ver­sa­tions are never “just a minute of your time”.
3. Not all projects require a robust project man­age­ment solution.

All I want is a simple issues track­ing system. Client sub­mits a ticket, client receives reply. It’s all right there in front of you as simple or as com­plex a solu­tion as it needs to be. No lost emails, no work­ing and rework­ing over the phone because you got placed on hold just gold old fash­ioned cus­tomer sup­port. OsTicket looks to pro­vide that and best part is, it’s com­pletely free and com­pletely open source.

So there it is a quick list of apps rang­ing in price from free to just under $200, all of them easy to use and all of them focus on a common goal, to increase pro­duc­tiv­ity through orga­ni­za­tion and ease of use. It is not the end all be all of busi­ness man­age­ment apps, it is at the very least to be a guide in form­ing your own. There are a ton of excel­lent appli­ca­tions out there, put together your list and become a more pro­duc­tive, better orga­nized busi­ness in the year 2009.