QBN Business Advice
Out of context: Reply #4
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My instinct would be to set up my own solutions with Airtable. If you’re comfortable with the basic concept of a database, it’s not any more difficult than learning some other software and it gives you the advantage of organizing how YOU want, nothing more nothing less. And a bit more design-y.
Think of a database as spreadsheets that can have relationships between the data in the cells.
Start by sketching out a plan for organizing your information before you try to enter everything in airtable.
I’d start with this:
1. Create a Base called Customers. The first column should probably be Company Name. Then add columns for each piece of information you might collect. Eg. Contact person, Address, phone, email, hourly rate, Client Since, etc.
2. Create a Base called Services. This will be for all the services you provide and eventually could automate your estimating. (You said you want to generate standard estimates from a list of services). So first column is Service and might include Logo Design, Small Website, Large Website. Then add columns for things like Description, Cost. (Note: cost could be a $ value, or it could be hours which then gets multiplied by the Hourly Rate value from your Customers database. Do you see how planning ahead of time will help?
3. Create a Base called Estimates. First field should be Estimate Number, and Airtable can generate a sequence. Then, create Estimate columns that “relate” to other bases. Get it? So you have a column for Customer and that pulls from the first column of your Customer base. The following columns might be Service 1, Service 2, and so on. This could allow you to pull in from your Services base and VERY quickly generate estimates. You can have Airtable generate PDFs.
4. Create a Base called Invoices. First column should be Invoice #. Then create columns that pull from your other Bases (Customer, Services). Now, at this point you could create columns inside Invoices Base to track payments, or you could create a new Base for payments. This would depend on questions like: do clients pay all at once or in two chunks? Or do you want to have monthly payment plans. If you have complex payment options, you may want your own Base to track payments.
Here’s why Airtable is great:
once you get set up, you can enter and lookup info manually, like if you meet a new client at a bar or networking event. And you can easily set up a form for new clients to request an estimate, or for existing clients to request an estimate. They can input their name and contact info and even select from a list of Services they want and you can basically automate the entire process. All the data gets input directly in airtable and you can edit it manually if you need.
Plus you can scale it up and even create dashboards for yourself and output profitably reports or anything you can imagine.
Airtable can also generate emails or pdfs or feed data to other sources. Like your website.
Airtable is extremely customizable, scalable, and is more elegant than most business software. And a good community of users and people who extend it via APIs and Zapier.
If all this seems too complex, just use Notion or Google Sheets until you’re ready to scale up. No biggie.
For your second point, hire an account to advise you.
- Airtable is pretty cool.canoe
- *claps* very professional advice!********