When small business becomes a big pain – Part 1
Inevitably there comes a time in every small businesses life where some of it’s needs start to become a big pain. I have been dealing with some of these big pains for quite some time now in my own personal work environment.
What is my big pain? Well to be honest it’s a combination of a few smaller pains. They are:
- QuickBooks? God I hate QuickBooks!
- Task Management.. Well kinda..
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management). Your joking right?!
- Being a web application developer. Screw that I can just build it!
- Being the funnel. BOTTLENECK!!!
- Insomnia. the necessary evil?
Some background:
I work for my brother in law who owns two companies. One company is a roofing company where I act as an office manager. The other company is a small manufacturing company where I act as the office / operations manager. In this company we have two fairly new to our industry products and more coming soon. Both companies are in the same location.
When I started work here about 3+ years ago the roofing company did everything on paper. The manufacturing company did not exist yet, however an idea that was soon to be one of our products was in the late creation early R&D process. I had never worked in either industry before this point in my life. The pain hasn’t started yet, don’t worry.
1. QuickBooks? God I hate QuickBooks!
I am sure that statement has been muttered by lots of small business owners/employees’ past and present.
First I attempted to use QuickBooks for our roofing company but began to feel that it was very cumbersome in some areas and seriously lacking in others. To me it was simple, I just needing to create an invoice, monitor the AR, keep client information, and track service history. My sister and our accountant take care of the financials so I didn’t really need to monitor all that stuff. Sounds simple right? WRONG! Some of you can attest that in QuickBooks if you are not set up from the beginning 100% correctly you are just flat out screwed, and even if you are you can quickly end up screwed anyways.
After a few days of searching for an adequate solution item number four on my list came into play. At the end of the week we now had version one of our invoicing software. Well maybe it should be called version .001 because all it did was invoice and track AR. This software is now about 3yrs old and has been revised thousands of times and I have coded thousands of lines to tailor it more and more to our business and being web based we can access it from almost anywhere.
The next encounter with QuickBooks came after we set up the second company and started to need a way to invoice and track AR for our product. QuickBooks functioned well in this isolated type of usage for me. It did exactly those two things flawlessly, and later on I found some other cool reports I could track from it as well. Trust me, I know I was not even close to using QuickBooks to it fullest potential.
About 2.5yrs later I began to run into issues with QuickBooks again. Well in truth the issues were not with QuickBooks, they were the fact that my needs were growing and now I needed a better way to track sales, AR, Reports, Customer Data, Sales Rep leads and information. I again started to write a web based solution for our specific needs regarding this. This year will be our first year using this software and like the roofing software it will continue to change and get better each year.
I am sure that QuickBooks is a very solid piece of software when used as intended by people who know QuickBooks. I personally have never had this program actually be my solution, I have tried to us it 4-5 times (a few times before this) and my personal needs always began to fall out of QuickBooks scope of support.
Part 2 of “When small business becomes a big pain” to follow in the next few days.