Taking the Business Online
September 10th, 2009
Published in
Business, Photography
2 Comments
Tags: freelancing, small business, tools
Not all my tools have to do with photographs. Like every small business owner, I need tools to deal with the whole administrative side of things. So far, I’ve been doing it old school, with files neatly organized in some more or less obscure folder structure on my hard drive. We all know, that’s not going to cut it in the long run.
I’ve begun setting up the back-end of my photography business the way I’ve been wanting for years: Online. By that, I mean that I want to have access to all my office tools everywhere I go. Need to find a client’s e-mail? Send off a bid, an invoice or even a newsletter? Preferably, I want to be able to do it from any internet connected device.
Shopping around for the right tools to do this with is hard. I want something that costs next to nothing or less, but it also has to be scalable, should magic happen and I got really busy. This is what I have come up with so far.
I have set up Google Apps to work with my newly registered domain (I got tired of repeating the dot d k at the end of my old one). This means e-mail รก la gmail, Google docs, calendar etc. is there and ready to rock. For free. Though it’s not optimal, I’ll be using Google to organize my contacts as well. Just to keep it simple.
One of the things I’ve been wanting to get started is an occasional newsletter. My blog is mostly read by other photographers, so I wanted an outlet geared more towards people I actually work with. Whether clients, models or other business contacts. Thus, I signed up with MailChimp. They have a free account which should cover me for a while, and upgrading is very affordable. Bonus: MailChimp integrates with Google Apps, Analytics, PayPal and even Twitter.
Another service which integrates with Google is the task manager, Remember The Milk. It’s basically an advanced to-do list, but because of those little extra details like repeating tasks and prioritizing, I like it enough to integrate it. Cost: Nothing, but there’s a pro version for $25/year which lets you sync with crackberries and stuff.
The most difficult decision for me, was picking a service to handle invoicing and the whole money handling side of things. I ended up signing up with Freshbooks. I like the way Freshbooks feels. It’s intuitive enough, that I don’t have to think too hard about how to do anything, and it has more features than I need (read: room to grow).
Freshbook’s subscription plan is based on your number of clients, so I’ll have to upgrade from the 3 slots you get with the freebie account pretty soon. Even so, it’s very affordable for a small fish like me. What finally won me over, was that after signing up, I got a phone call and e-mail from one of their representatives, offering to help me with any questions. Considering that I’m still on a free account, I think that’s pretty damn good service. One I’ll gladly pay a few bucks a month for.
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September 10th, 2009at 11:31 pm(#)
For invoicing, time tracking, project budget tracking, expense tracking, and now even estimates try Harvest. I swear, these guys rock:
http://www.getharvest.com/
They also integrate with Basecamp and Quickbooks if you prefer to use that for billing. :)
- Nick
October 8th, 2009at 10:45 am(#)
[...] my last post, I talked about using online tools to set up my business, thus taking it out of the administrative stone age. I did this because I had [...]