Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
Merlin’s weekly podcast with Dan Benjamin. We talk about creativity, independence, and making things you love.
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Business management system for a start-up?
thatcanadiangirl | Dec 16 2006
My husband and I have started our own business less than 6 months ago, as an aside to our day jobs. We expected to get some contracts and be relatively busy, but the response has been unbelievable, with word-of-mouth causing our name to spread like wildfire. However, I still feel that I haven't got the necessary tools to manage the business. My current system goes as follows: It certainly isn't centralised or easy to maintain, and as I'd rather spend time on really dealing with the clients, rather than fudging spreadsheets together, I thought I'd ask the wise people of 43folders to suggest some applications which could help us out. We considered writing our own, but I would imagine something already exists. My wishlist goes like this: I've tried a few systems like Zoho, Sidejobtrack and a few bigger systems which are meant for larger businesses, but I just haven't found the right thing yet. I quite like the Basecamp simplicity but my husband doesn't like it, and wants something that offers a better calendar-style snapshot of the month ahead. I'm also willing to pay a reasonable price if the app really fits the bill. Would anyone have recommendations on the best apps for this type of work? Has anyone tweaked any of the systems above to meet their needs? 11 Comments
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Two recommendations to experiment with: activeCollab....Submitted by mwr on December 16, 2006 - 8:48am.
Two recommendations to experiment with: activeCollab. Created to be a Basecamp replacement. Having never used Basecamp, I'm not sure how far they have to go. But it's a project management and collaboration thing. You can set up accounts on it for your client companies and people in them, and they can check in on projects or contribute files to them as needed. One definite bug in the latest release: Safari will truncate the last character of a filename it downloads from activeCollab. Firefox, Camino, and others have no problems. The files aren't corrupted, it's just that bob.doc gets downloaded as bob.do. Rename it and it's fine. This would be very easy to install on a normal Unix web host or a Windows system (only needs Apache, php5 and MySQL). Hosting on a Mac would work, but I don't know the details. Easy Mac installation instructions are available. Tracks looks to be very slick for personal organization, but I don't think it has activeCollab's collaboration features. I may install Tracks later today and get a better-informed opinion. EDIT: Tracks projects are single-user. No delegation, collaboration, etc. » POSTED IN:
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