Following on the heels of my post of Five of my must-have tools, I thought I’d share this list of services that might be valuable to others that have started their own at-home business.
Harvest is a service for tracking time, expenses, and invoicing your clients. I find it very easy to use and manage due to its straight-forward interface and tools such as the Dashboard Widget and iPhone application help with keeping track of my time. The emails sent to clients are customizable and the invoices look professional with the option to include your logo. It also supports partial payment of invoices as well as invoicing services and products. If that’s not enough, you can also define different hourly rates for different people, or different projects, or even different types of tasks. Plus, you can give log-in credentials to contractors so that they can track their time in your system, making it easier for you to invoice the clients. If you like PayPal, it even has invoice payment integration with PayPal and automatically marks invoices paid when payment is received via PayPal.
Google Apps for Domains Standard is a great, free, solution for your e-mail, calendar and document management. Web mail allows you to use your email from any computer, and IMAP access allows you synchronized read status across your multiple devices (computer, phone, etc assuming all your devices support IMAP). The calendar program is feature rich and helps you keep on top of scheduled events. Google Docs is an easy way to create and read simple documents is basically any format. Though for more complex things you might still find yourself wanting a more robust editor. The great thing about the Standard edition is that it is free for up to 50 users so you can stick with it if you decide to grow your company, and with things like Sites (Google Apps version of a Wiki) you’ll have a place to share documentation for policies/procedures/etc.
RingCentral can work quite nicely for your phone needs. Whether you want to sign up for it and just send calls to your cell phone, or if you want to buy an IP Phone to have a nice desk phone that calls ring into. I use an IP Phone with my account and have had no problems at all other than my internet connection going down. But in a previous job we used it and routed calls to our cell phones which worked well too. You can define different call rules for different hours of the day so that during nights/weekends calls go straight to voicemail, but during normal hours your calls will be routed to your cell or IP phone. It costs a little money, but can be nice and is another service that can grow with you if you decide to grow your business including features like auto-attendants, “office” extensions (though you don’t all need to be in the same place), etc.
Remember The Milk is a simple task management system with some surprisingly powerful features. This is a recent re-entry into my work-flow. I like the ability to create different lists, whether it’s a grocery list, or keeping track of follow-up calls/estimates/quotes that I need to send out for work. They make the data entry as painless as possible and then you can setup things like iCal feeds to have tasks show up on your calendar. There is also a pretty decent iPhone app available to Pro customers that let you take your to-do list with you to keep up with things. I also have used this in a previous position and the ability to let team members send you tasks via email that are then added to your to-do list can be nice to have if working with multiple folks.
Campfire is an online chat room for teams to collaborate and keep up with each other. Admittedly, this one is a bit of a stretch for a small at-home business but we all need to collaborate with others on projects from time to time and if you’re working from home, this might be the perfect solution. For free, Campfire offers you a chat room with up to 4 simultaneous chatters and up to 10MB of space for uploaded files. It can be a quick way to chat with multiple folks about a project and share images. It could even serve as the virtual water cooler if you’re working with other folks in different geographic areas or if you just want to invite some friends into it to fight off the lack of social interaction from working at home :)Bonus
CoTweet — This one is definitely more team focused. If you have several folks on your team and you’re interacting with Twitter then I would consider this to be a must-have for your team. It allows you to receive email alerts when someone sends a @reply to your twitter account and allows you all to be logged into the same Twitter account at once and see conversations your account has had with users before you respond to them. If someone else on the team has already responded to someone, you wouldn’t want to send a second response from the same account, would you? :)
What would be on your list? I’m always looking for a better mouse trap.
