Continuing on from my previous post there’s lots more useful tools to get you up and running as cheap as possible.
Accountancy Software
This took a while to find. The usual suspects of Sage, Tas books etc were briefly looked at. But I felt they were quite expensive and you had to install software onto your PC. How quaint! So I looked around at online alternatives. In this space there is Freshbooks who some on the Hothouse use and it’s great if you need to bill out your time to clients. I went with xero however. This gives you a clean web based interface and works at approx €23 a month for the service. In here you can keep you bank and credit cards reconciled. Issue invoices, keep track of your expenses and accounts payable. All the basic stuff. You can also give your accountant a login to see how things are looking.
And it would be really neat if some of the Irish banks made their statements available in an electronic format. xero can automatically do the reconciliation for you once it can get bank data in csv format.
With the world converging into cyberspace, taking your accounts online gives you a lot of possibilities that could be useful. One of the more interesting aspect of xero is that they have an API and are encouraging partners to partner with them. This includes Banks (in NZ and the UK), payroll providers, CRM companies. So you can track your customers from the accountancy system directly into your CRM system. Neat!
email and calendars
Here go for Google Apps. While Google have received some bad press about downtime recently, for the price you pay ($0 for basic access) it’s terrific. They include full details about how to get your domain fully set up so all mail looks like it has come from your domain. The google calendar is great and integrates into most mail clients. You can create your own site page for employees, and the control panel makes it a snip to add new users. I’ve seen some startups install outlook and set up some sort of exchange system. But using google has 2 major advantages, one it’s very inexpensive, and 2, you don’t need to be worrying about having to back up your email. If your laptop goes bank in the morning, you haven’t lost 3 years worth of email.
Customer Relationship Management
Being a techie, you can start off for free here using Sugar. Sugar is huge, there’s lot of options in there and you’ll be a while learning it. You can track your customers well, run campaigns etc. You can integrate your crm system with your Google Apps so mail to your clients that are present in the CRM is picked up automatically. I’ve put a CRM in place, even though I don’t have customers yet. But start as you mean to go on, and all my potential leads are being put in there.
Project Management
Calom uses Agile techniques to develop its software, and we use Trac to put coordinate developer activities. With trac you can set milestones, define tasks and activities and show how the overall progress of your application is looking. You can also tell trac where your svn repository is so it can track the commits coming in. In your commit message you can mark tasks with something like “Fixes #10″ and trac will close task 10 automatically for you in its database. So after setting up your milestone with the activities you plan to do, as you complete them, you will be able to see all the commits that affected each task being rolled in. You can also even see the code that was changed. Your Hudson build can also integrate here so that as a build completes, it puts an event into trac. Now you can see the commit with all the details and the status of the build that immediately followed it.
Web Site
I took time to learn how to install and use drupal. This blog is based on drupal as are the main Calom websites. It’s a pretty powerful system and will take some time to get over the learning curve. But there’s a few new books out for the latest version that will help you out. And once you’ve cracked the basics of how its structured, you can become very productive with it.