So I’m back with another question for all the smart people here!
I do all the admin for our small family business. I’ve been using Quickbooks, but it has a lot of limitations. It does not allow for scheduling. Also, we don’t use a lot of its features because we don’t have inventory and don’t sell anything. We are 100% service based (landscaping, gardening, landscape design, etc.)
What is the best business software that combines the ability to do invoices, receive payments, etc etc etc., with SCHEDULING capabilities?? Right now, my sister is doing the entire scheduling half in Excel because she’s out in the field a lot more, and she just does not have the time. We need BOTH. Also, it needs to be online so that we can both use it at different times and places, and it should have a section to record estimates. What is the BEST solution here?
Thanks in advance, all you wonderful smart people!
A few years ago I used a combination of Quickbooks and something called ACT! for scheduling. This was for my husband, as he was experimenting with treating some private outpatient psychiatry patients from home. I explored a lot of integrated solutions, but found nothing affordable that did everything. ACT! was kind of buggy, but some of that might have been my inexperience with databases. It is, however, extremely customizable, and I was easily able to attach old paper charts and labs, and plain old scheduling was tight. It was about $500 for two licenses, I believe. If you go to their parent company, Sage, there are pricier options that may include billing and other financial aspects.
I did look at ACT, and thanks. But, well… I’m not kidding about our business being small. We just can’t spend $500 at a time on software. QB is $27 a month, and that MORE than covers everything except the scheduling. So I looked around some more, and there’s an actual scheduling plugin for QB Supposedly, this integrates with QB… there are still a lot of questions, though. (can you have multiple users, is it cloud-based or is there that option, does it integrate with QB online or just the one-user version, which would be bizarre… but you can’t assume anything.)
What are you trying to get out of scheduling? Why not migrate your e-mail to a hosted Microsoft Exchange service like Microsoft’s Office365? Exchange only is $4/month per mailbox.
I’m sure there are solutions better tailored to scheduling a service business, but it’s hard to beat as far as sharing appointments and synchronizing between devices/computers and the Web. If you add a new appointment to your estimator’s schedule or change a time for one of your gardeners they’ll hear about it on their iPhone in about 10 seconds. The price is hard to beat too.
I think that might be a great addition to the QB/SS package… the thing is that there has be an actual real-live list and schedule of jobs. We use Google calendar right now to keep up with things, but it’s just not detailed enough. Our main schedules are done in Excel, and that has a good capacity for keeping track of all the details, but then we’re all constantly making new spreadsheets and sending them to each other and getting confused. This is not good.
I dont bother with scheduling integration and use google calendar, for handling 3 onsite techs. I have an invoicing/job tracking service called “repairshopr” which will integrate with google calendar but does not allow me to assign a specific job to a specific persons calendar on google calendar.
Upload excel spreadsheets into Google drive. They can be shared, edited simultaneously, etc. Automatically updated. Drive has their version of excel called sheets, works well for simpler needs.
We actually keep all of the job files in drive, makes it easy to access, share, update, and remote storage.
I own a construction company and we use Google calendar a lot for scheduling, because we need to share that info amongst the sups, too.
