Managing Your Small Business online

Summary

A small business headed by 3 - 20 staff people finds itself overwhelmed by paperwork to keep track of customer contacts, customer conversations, quotes, salesorders (jobs), service delivery or production, invoicing, purchasing, inventory management, accounting and financial analysis. Most of them start out with Quickbooks Pro, a website, and the rest of paperwork may end up in spreadsheets and text documents. Some use MS Outlook as their contact manager. A lot of leads, quotes and A/R fall through the cracks. Calls are not followed up. Quotes are written up first on paper. They are only in the hands of the estimators and the owner. The crews keep purchasing whatever each one needs without checking the stock and the tools they have already.

The best solution to this problem is to put the whole administration online. Therefore an online CRM system, an online accounting or ERP system, a customer and supplier portal are the right solution for these small businesses. In addition mobile applications that come with these systems enhance tremendously the accessibility to information at anytime everywhere. Also such system force structuring and standardization of information and processes. However finding such system for small businesses is a challenge. Big companies use SAP which is the cadillac of the systems.

The Details

Our company, Internet Customer Solutions, has been quite successful in finding the online systems for small businesses. The full details can be found at http://www.intercs.com and see Horizontal Services, Horizontal Solutions, and Industry solutions.

For interactive website and portal development, Microsoft (MS) Office 365 Sharepoint Online is pretty good.

For online email, MS Office 365 Exchange Online is great and very reliable.

All this is integrated with MS Office Professional Plus 2010, and with MS Lync (web conferencing and instant messaging)

For online CRM , MS CRM Online is very useful and powerful.

For online accounting, Quickbooks Online is a good choice, and provides online payment by customers and to suppliers. If you have outgrown Quickbooks Online since you need more powerful product and service data structures, or dispatching,