Small Business Tech Stack #3: Business Management Tools

February 9, 2024

So much goes into running a small business. Not to mention actually running the business, maintaining customer records, managing projects and overseeing the financial side from payroll to taxes to invoices. Here’s the great news though — technology can help you manage all of these pieces so you can do what you love to do and spend less time in the day-to-day nitty gritty work. 

To tackle this important topic we invited Travis Schumacher, co-owner of Tranquility Internet Services. He’s not just my brother, he’s also a major player in the MayeCreate tech stack as well as the other businesses on his client list. He fills in the tech knowledge gaps, big and small, to implement the right technology so businesses smoothly. 

Travis says, “The tech stack is huge. It helps you be proactive versus reactive. Without our technology tools, we’d be putting out fires all the time, instead of preventing them.”
We second that. Implementing technology was key in MayeCreate’s ability to transition to a four-day work week. The team at MayeCreate and our partners worked hard to find the best solutions to meet our needs and goals.

The Ultimate Trio

In this article we’ll share our learnings and tips for getting the right technology solutions in place for helping to manage your small business. We lovingly refer to this part of our tech stack the ‘ultimate trio’ because we’re pretty attached to these tools. In Fact we all agree we’d be lost running our businesses without them:

Just like the other systems in your tech stack each business has unique needs. We’ll break the Ultimate Trio into parts for our discussion today. But keep in mind, for some businesses there are all-in-one solutions that combine features such as marketing, customer relationship management, project management and more. For example, Travis has a software that handles his billing and project management but uses a separate system for his CRM.

Customer Relationship Management Tools (CRM)

Tracking your customers and prospects, their information, their relationship with you, and other bits of information is important to maintaining a healthy and happy customer relationship. 

A customer relationship management (CRM) system does just this. Whether it’s a simple spreadsheet or a full blown system like Salesforce, a CRM needs to work for you. Your employees should not work for the CRM, meaning you don’t want the system to be so complicated or thorough that it’s too time consuming to use appropriately. 

A CRM should support your process, not add extra work.

“Make sure that your CRM has the features you need when you need them, and that those features don’t take a lot of time to get to,” advises Stacy. “Because the last thing you want to do is have somebody on your staff who is managing your CRM as their full time job.”

At one point we implemented a CRM that I swear forced us to spend as much time clicking as we spent talking to clients. Eventually we abandoned the software and went back to our tried and true Google sheet.

Start simple and build from there.

We are big supporters of starting simple when it comes to tracking client information. Some of our nonprofits use the tracking features in Square as their Donor Management System, some have plugins in their websites. But many of the small businesses and nonprofits we work with just have a good old spreadsheet. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Using something simple, like a spreadsheet, at first allows you to really understand what you need to track and what you want out of your end system.

Opt for cloud based.

If multiple people are going to be working in your CRM, it’s best to select a cloud-based system instead of desktop software. A CRM may crossover into another system. Some work with the ticketing system or others with the project management tools. Or the CRM may even be a part of these tools too. 

Two simple CRM systems we’ve used that integrate with email marketing, SMS and chat are Active Campaign and Brevo, formerly called Send in Blue. We found Brevo’s user interface especially easy to use but moved to Active Campaign in the end because of its enhanced automation capabilities.

Travis uses WHMCS because it integrates with his hosting platforms to automate tasks and also handles his invoicing.

Project Management System

A project management tool helps manage how you do work. Businesses have different needs to manage their workload. Luckily project management systems come in all shapes and sizes.

Project management tools can manage scheduling, internal and external communication, and resource libraries, time tracking and management, invoicing, inventory management.

Know what you want and what you need.

The important thing is to know the difference between what you want and what you need to run your business efficiently. Because, from experience I can tell you, you’re going to fall in love with features you never dreamed of only to find out that the system, while it’s mega cool, doesn’t have a core feature you need to run your business. It can be a total roller coaster. 

When MayeCreate went to look for a new project management system three years ago (spoiler alert: we ended up staying with what we had) we knew we needed to:

1. Schedule work, 
2. Manage our #1 resource – time
3. Track time for billing
4. Internally and externally communicate
5. Manage multiple projects within one client

There were a ton of systems that did the first 4 but not many that offered #5. In the end we just upgraded to a cloud based system of what we’d been using all along, ActiveCollab.

Smaller teams can work well in dashboard systems like Trello or Milanote. Our staff uses Milanote to manage our personal tasks and details. We use AirTable to manage due dates and data for tedious recurring tasks that don’t fit into our normal workflow.

We even use Google Docs to work back and forth on some tasks. It feels more and more like a mini-project management system with every update with new features that allow you to assign tasks and due dates. 

Whereas our business is mainly proactive, much of Travis’s project management is responsive. So he uses the ticketing system built into his CRM, WHMCS, to manage projects and assign tasks to his techs. His team gets interrupted a lot, so his team is diligent. He explains, “We deal with so many different things throughout the day, that if we didn’t log them, track them, put them in the right places, we wouldn’t be able to pick up where we left off.”

Financial Management Tools

Managing the financial side of a business is critical. You have to do accounting, invoicing and payroll. Budgeting and planning keeps your business on track. And yes, just like everything else technology can help! 

Some of these financial processes may be handled in another program like your CRM or project management system or you might decide to get a separate financial management system. 

Our companies use Quickbooks.

At MayeCreate, we use a separate program for invoicing from our timekeeping program, which is part of our project management system. This gives us a checks and balances process to make sure that the time that is entered is correct and billed fairly, especially if we are working on an hourly project. If we have a new designer or developer who is training, we don’t want to over bill clients for their learning time.

“The checks and balances piece is huge,” agrees Travis. “A lot of different tools integrate with QuickBooks, so they can import all that data. But there still has to be that checks and balances to make sure it’s correct.”

Considerations for a Cloud Based System

Like with your CRM, if multiple people are going to need to access the financial management system (time entry for example) you should look into a cloud-based system instead of a desktop version. 

Financial management technology can also accept credit card payments, send payments to the IRS and even manage payroll.

For the love of Pete, consult a professional.

Many financial professionals are familiar with or even certified in various technologies and can help you to make sure your programs are set up correctly. When it comes to taxes and withholdings, it is imperative that these items are set up correctly. 

Even with professional help setting up our books and payroll we paid the IRS for a year and a half not knowing we needed to accompany our payment with a completed form…aaaand I came back from a meeting to be greeted by an IRS agent in our lobby. #freakoutmoment! He turned out to be really nice and we got it all sorted out. I still don’t want to do it again though.

Each state is different, federal stuff is different…it’s a maze. So, you might want to reach out to a professional to assist if you are not familiar with this.

All of the tools we talked about in this series can be brought together to create your tech stack to help your small business run more efficiently. But even the most wonderful tech in the world isn’t going to be useful unless it’s used correctly.

You can have the best system on Earth, but the humans who work the system and adhere to the processes, are what’s going to make it good or not, because no software is going to manage your projects for you. It’s the people who use it.

Business Management Tools Links

Here’s the shortlist of our recs for small business management technology tools.