In part one of this series we looked at Nimble, an online customer relationship tool that can help you keep track of your clients, leads and contacts and help you manage their different portions of the sales process. Today, we’re moving on to internal productivity.
One of the biggest pains for service related businesses is the need to track time to ensure that you aren’t blowing your internal budgets and your clients’ budgets. You need to make sure that you’re quoting appropriately based on the budgets that you’ve set for them. If you’re quoting a job at 10 hours and the job ends up taking 15 hours, then you’ve essentially sold yourself short by 50%.
The best part of owning a business is working half days. Only 12 hours!
Time Tracking and Invoicing: Harvest
Harvest helps alleviate that problem by giving you many ways to track your time. Desktop widgets, mobile apps, website app, and even integration with task tracking systems and platforms like Gmail. Harvest basically gives you no excuse not to track your time and ammo if your colleagues aren’t tracking theirs. Once you’ve tracked enough projects with Harvest you’ll begin to develop a much more accurate sense for budgeting and quoting.
Once you’ve perfected the budgeting process, Harvest also allows to invoice clients. With awesome integrations to Paypal and Stripe you can even allow your clients to pay online. If tracking down receivables is a nightmare, the auto reminder system for invoices is a godsend. It will notify your clients of overdue invoices based on the net interval that you’ve set for it.
Set invoice reminder every 45 seconds. Done.
The time tracking feature alone is worth it’s weight in gold by making sure that you’re not shortchanging yourself and the bonus is that Harvest also keeps invoicing nice and tidy and easy to manage, so that you can keep focus on more important tasks.
Speaking of tasks, next time will be looking at our favourite project and task management system.
No Comments
Be the first to start a conversation