Service business software propels this business forward.

Small businesses often find it difficult to select software solutions to manage their expanding operations. This is usually because they outgrow popular stand-alone software products. When they start to investigate integrated software options, it is the ‘enterprise level’ solutions that stand out as these are well marketed. There appears to be a dearth of cost effective integrated solutions that can take small businesses to the next stage.

In late 2008 Solany, a document management company based in Colorado USA, found themselves in this exact position. Solany’s core business involves providing document scanning, storage and imaging solutions for its customers. This includes end-to-end solutions made up of both software and complementary services required to implement, develop and support the software.

Solany had been using a range of stand-alone software products to address their business requirements. This included: Harvest to track consulting time; Basecamp to manage their project collaboration; Microsoft Outlook to handle contacts; and Peachtree for accounting. Solany found that the administration cost of managing their business’ data across disparate systems was starting to increase. Further to this, visibility of the business’ performance had become extremely limited. Upgrading to an integrated solution was now essential.

The owner of Solany, John Cushman, decided to look for a new software solution to manage their operations. John’s research uncovered more than ten possible options, including Salesforce.com, Netsuite, Autotask, Heap CRM and others. After a four month selection process, John found that none of these solutions had enough coverage to meet his broad requirements. In spite of this, many of them came with a heavy price tag!

In order for Solany to service its customers properly, they needed to: schedule project activities; the team had to enter time against completed tasks; and customers had to be able to view project status in real time. John and his administration staff then needed the ability to generate invoices quickly to meet billing cycles as projects were delivered. In addition, John wanted to manage his contacts and full sales process within the system, and wanted to be able to generate key management reports in real time. Finally, John needed the same system to be able to handle their support requirements as customers logged and tracked helpdesk issues. John had discovered that this broad set of requirements typically only existed in larger ‘enterprise level’ solutions.

A final search conducted by one of John’s team members uncovered a solution that John had not been exposed to before, WorkEtc CRM. After a quick assessment, John realized that WorkEtc would cater for almost 95% of his requirements and, moreover, the solution came at a value for money price point! John was elated at this discovery and, after trialing a number of business scenarios, immediately purchased the software.

John particularly liked the fact that WorkEtc allowed him to manage his billing in addition to handling operations. He was able to get updates on projects and to view the financial status of Solany at the click of a button. As consultants completed work assignments they logged time against job activities over the web, and John could report on this activity immediately. WorkEtc’s configurable reporting tool gave him the means to enhance existing reports or to generate new reports from any part of the system- extending existing functionality. This directly addressed one of John’s key issues, that of viewing business performance in real time.

A second benefit for Solany was the fact that the whole team could operate off the same schedule, which was held in WorkEtc’s shared calendar. It meant that John had daily visibility of team activities. Again, this enhanced business performance as it ensured that there were no scheduling gaps and gave him a chance to correct this before it became an issue.

Thirdly, WorkEtc gave Solany a highly configurable web forms integration tool. This allowed John and his team to generate custom web forms quickly with negligible technical knowledge. Just in development time alone John felt that tool had saved him thousands of dollars. No more need for complex customization... saving hours’ of development time!

Finally, it was possible for Solany to systemize their knowledge using WorkEtc’s knowledge base. Such a base of knowledge in the system would grow as users contributed over time, making this dynamic business knowledge available to the team in real time over the web.

Although Solany has only been live with WorkEtc CRM for six months, the solution has already transformed their business. And what’s more, WorkEtc has provided invaluable support as Solany expands the software across their business, which has made the process pain free. John summed up his overall customer experience when said that he was excited to be working with such a dynamic organization and to see it go from strength to strength.