Scenario:
Gayle Naftaly, was getting buried in emails and proposals. Owner of access.office inc., a PR and marketing firm that utilizes top talent through outsourcing, she was spending too much time with the administrative tasks on her computer and not enough time on making new sales. She needed a system that would work the way she worked and was quick and easy to use. It was imperative that in 2010 she spent the majority of her time networking and meeting potential clients! The challenge was how to simplify her tasks.
Existing Software:
Microsoft Outlook
Microsoft Excel
The first step in the process was to understand Gayle’s unique administrative/management needs.
After her needs analysis we arrived at three distinct system requirements:
1. Contractor tracking: She needs to track who is working on which project, and how many projects each person is working on. Since the teams are project-based it is common for Gayle to manage several different teams at once. In addition to current projects, she also wanted to keep a history of which teams worked on completed projects.
2. Easy proposal creation: Opening an Excel template, entering information from scratch, and saving a new file every time she created a proposal took a great deal of time and added to the number of documents she was storing for each project. Plus, this system did not allow her to see total sales, so she had to enter the information in a master spreadsheet that would add it all together. Double data entry was wasting her time.
3. Email organization: Dragging email messages to specific folders was a lesser issue than the actual number of folders she had set up. The subfolder hierarchy was Clients folder, Client Name folder, Project folder, Team Member folder. This resulted in some contractors having 10 or more folders which easily created confusion.
The First Solution:
QuickBooks Pro 2010
We created a list of services that included the contractor who will be participating in the project. For example, if I were one of Gayle’s contractors there may be a service in the list called “Press release creation - Ellen” with my associated fee to Gayle listed as her “cost”. If there are other contractors that she uses for the same service then she adds them, with their name and cost.
When Gayle creates the proposal she simply has to choose from the list of services which service relates to the project and then the one that is associated to the person she wants on the team. The rest of the proposal includes any description she wants to enter, the number of hours, the total cost, and the total price. The printed version that is sent to the prospect only shows what she wants it to show - the description and the total cost. However, when she views the proposal she can see each member of the team. She can also run reports by item or service allowing her to see financial and project information related to each team member.
Once Gayle completed the list of services she was able to create a proposal in a fraction of the time it used to take, improving her turnaround time to the prospect too!
QuickBooks took care of her first two issues, but we have one more to go! Make sure to read my next post that explains how we organized her emails!
Until then…
Efficiently yours,
Ellen DePasquale - The Software Revitalist™
However, I also want to work efficiently, so I like being able to double-click on an icon that leads me to where I want to be. My newest desktop icon is the log in screen of this blog. With a double-click I launch my web browser and am prompted to enter my user name and password. This totally bypasses my designated “Home” page, since the shortcut icon holds a specific Internet address (URL).
Laurie, however, is in a great frame of mind because she KNOWS she needs to get organized and utilize more of the features in Peachtree. She is filling in the proverbial “cracks” before they appear. Using the software to support her business achieves two things;
