Hunting for a Freelance Design Business Software Suite

The world of software as a service and online hosted business applications is huge. I’ve worked in this industry for a while and I know how powerful and amazing hosted web apps can be. Thanks to GMail most people will never have to know about the inconvenience of Outlook. The whole Google suite of docs and calendaring is pretty amazing for organization of personal and business affairs. Lately I’ve started looking for solutions to help my brand new business doing freelance web design in Colorado Springs. As a former agency employee I am familiar with the necessity of good project management and time logging. I am a lot more motivated of course when I’m my own employer.

We used a complete end-to end solution at that company called Info@Hand. It had everything in one work flow, sales, CRM, estimates, internal project management, invoices, bug tracking, and support help desk. It was a great idea, but it was incredibly unpleasant to use. It was built on an open source CRM package and then had tons of bloat added to it. The underpowered servers we ran it on just couldn’t handle it, and the amount of javascript in their front end code didn’t help any. So, logging time and doing anything at all took forever and the app just wasn’t intuitive or pretty.

Now that I’m on my own and doing my own project management I am thinking about the best way to operate my small sole proprietorship while maintaining a level of professional organization. I want to give my clients a nice workspace to log into and follow the work I’m doing and see their account status. I want to keep my own internal tasking and data management clean and effortless. I want to learn to manage a real sales process, which is something I know almost nothing about. And most of all I want to deliver great design without losing my mind with all the management stuff.

So I’ve broken down my requirements by the role in my process they will fill.

  1. CRM (customer relationship management (sales))
  2. Estimating
  3. Project Management (collaboration and bug tracking)
  4. Invoicing
  5. Accounting

So I knew of a few applications that did some of this stuff but I wanted to get the most value for my (limited) dollars. I looked at hosting my own open-source software, but have pretty much abandoned that idea due to the poor quality of the software available that I installed and tested. So that leaves hosted solutions, which have a variety of price points and numerous hurdles for integration and cross app communication. What would be nice is if the data could enter at the sales process and follow my work through all the way to the final accounting records. Unfortunately there are very few products that really deliver on that idea all the way through.

There are a lot of programs that do one thing or two things in that list, but then I would have to hand the data off to another application at some point. Sometimes the data transfer is already setup through their API’s, but sometimes it will have to happen through importing CSV files, or just manual copy and paste. The other problem is the huge variety of programs out there! There must be hundreds of applications in each of these categories. I can’t do free 30 day trials of every one of them.

I started with a really popular program, FreshBooks and liked it, but balked at the $20/month price tag for getting more than 3 clients. I’m not totally unwilling to pay that much, but I just wanted to see what other options were out there. FreshBooks doesn’t offer CRM or project management, but it does integrate with some apps that do that. So, I started looking at all the other options and began to assemble a spreadsheet of various freelance business workflow software. As you can see I very quickly ran into many many options, and they became fairly expensive when combined. I really shouldn’t be paying anywhere near $60/month right now for this stuff.

So I’m trying a few things out right now. I like products that integrate with my Google apps email accounts. I like products that offer a nice looking interface and seem intuitive. I really like cheap and free products. A few front-runners right now are all of the Zoho applications (CRM, Invoices, PM), a very pretty project collaboration tool called MavenLink, and of course FreshBooks still. There’s some others that have caught my eye and may find a place in my workflow, such as an accounting app called Outright, a document signing service called RightSignature, and a potential all-in-one product BlueCamroo. Leave a comment if you know of something great, but I don’t know if I can handle many more suggestions or options to consider, I need to quit thinking about management and get down to actually doing some work.