Boyink! - Spring Forward on the Web

So after my main desktop went out in a cloud of glory this week I’m still moving into the new Win7 model.  Initial impressions are favorable - but I’m running into snags with the email / calendar / invoicing process I’ve been using for years as some of the tools involved are seemingly now obsolete.

Here’s the process I’m after:

• Client is setup as a contact available to both in email and invoicing.
• Email comes in - for a meeting or feature request or what have you.
• Email is dragged to calendar for scheduling.
• Calendar item is assigned to category.
• Category determines if item is billable or not, and rate if so.
• Invoicing app hooks into calendar data for client billing address, time spent, and calculates invoice amount.
• Billable hours can also be assigned by just adding a calendar item and assigning to category.

In the past I accomplished this with Outlook and an Outlook add-on that did the invoicing piece. The nice thing was the calendar could have both personal/family items on it along with business items—and they could be seperated out for invoicing by category.

A new solution doesn’t have to be Outlook-based and could be web-based. If desktop-based however it does need to run on a PC.

It looks like Microsoft had it’s own solution to accomplish this - but it was recently discontinued and I can’t tell if Outlook 2007 can just spit out billable hours to an Excel file or something.

** Update**

I don’t think the perfect app exists here yet - at least in the PC world.  So - especially in light of our plans for next year I’m going to give Freshbooks a go.  Being all web-based & with available iPhone apps should give us the connectivity we need while not worrying so much if we get vandalized while on the road and lose data.

Along with this move will be attempting to do email and calendaring via the web as well.  Our initial idea there is to just try using the more of the features in the web interface that EngineHosting provides, with looking at Google’s services as a backup.

2 people have started a comment party - join it!

1. Naomi Niles on December 20, 2009

   I started using Freshbooks earlier this year. One of the best decisions I’ve made, no exaggeration. I used to spend at least an hour or two on manually invoicing each month. Now I can get it done in about 15 minutes.

   I’m thinking about getting ActivCollab for the project management tasks. I like this feature it has where it can automatically track emails and turn them into tickets. That’s pretty neat because you don’t have to force clients to use the system and they can still use email like they are used to.

   The corporate version is a large investment for us though. We might try the small biz version and then upgrade in the future.

2. Boyink (Author) on December 20, 2009

   Thanks Naomi -

   I did a couple invoices out of Freshbooks yesterday and was pleased at the flow.  Once I get all my clients setup I think overall it’ll be faster than invoicing was before, and I won’t have to manage a bunch of PDF files like I was doing.  The only bummer I could see is that it really tracks only invoicable income - so it’ll never paint a complete financial picture for us.

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