One of the first things that I did when I started off as a full time freelancer and entrepreneur was to look for those applications that would help me do a variety of things. And one of the criteria that I had was that all these tools had to be online tools, allowing me to use them where ever I am, if there was an Internet connection and also which would allow me to share them with my future accountant or other admin staff members, where ever they also may be. What ever I did, I was keen on building a business that operated on through the Internet as opposed to through a traditional office building.
The other reason for looking for web based applications was because of my keenness to build a virtual business operation where the employees were telecommuting. This would allow me to tap into the best people immaterial of their location, allowing the business to scale up and down with the demand for its services, and allow the employees the freedom to work from the comforts of their homes.
Here are the applications that I looked at and eventually settled on.
Email / Calendar / Web Presence / Document Sharing
Google Apps for your domain without a wink of an eye. I had used this before for my personal domain and it was a no brainer. You get so much of services for free if you have less than 50 users. And the limits on these accounts are more than enough for my use!
The older version of Google Apps had Google pages which were pretty good to design and host a basic web site. But with the phasing out of Google Pages and introduction of Google Sites, the new wiki style web site structure may not be ideal for a company wanting to project a professional image.
Invoicing / Accounting
Since I am not an accountant and my exposure to accounts are really minimal, I am not sure what an accounting application needs. But for the purpose of sending estimates, tracking time spent on clients and projects and invoicing, which were the things that I needed to do, FreshBooks.com met my needs perfectly.
So far I can live with the limitations of the free Freshbooks account. The one that I am going to exhaust the soonest is the limit on clients. It allows three and I already have three on my account. But it allows unlimited projects and that is a relief.
But I am not entirely happy in the way in which it manages projects, which seems like a bit of an unorganized approach. I think it works fine for Freshbooks as its intention is just to record time spent on each task on each project.
I have already hit the ceilings of the free account in Freshbooks. But I am still not in a hurry to upgrade as my main client is through oDesk and oDesk tools are what I am using for him. So I can scan stick to the free plan on Freshbooks, at least for sometime, with creative using of clients.
Actually there were a couple of other tools that I evaluated, LessAccounting, CurdBee, Blinksale being some of them. One of the main issues I had with those were the lack of an integrated time tracking module. Though they had integrations with other Time Tracking apps, none of those apps were easy enough to use or were free!
CRM
This is not an application that I am using much now due to the fact that most of my project chasing happens on oDesk and others are happening through word of mouth. But Tactile CRM is my choice. There are a few limitations on the free version, but I think it is a decent start.
But if you are creative enough you can use Google Contacts also for this purpose.
As my business continues to grow I may outgrow some of these applications. But that will be a long way to go, until I reach that point and at such times I will stick to these choices. At some point you have to stop evaluating and start using them!
With these kind of free services available on the net, it is pretty easy for companies to start operations. There is a whole lot of infrastructure available, at our disposal at no cost. So all you need to do is to concentrate on the business.
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