Is It Sensible to Embrace Software for a Home Business?

The following is a guest post by Grace Murphy, with News and Review Guru.

When starting a business from home – whether that’s providing a service to clients or running a few useful side hustles – it gets complicated quite fast. And that can be surprising to many people, as they think it will remain simplistic forever. Chance would be a fine thing!

At a certain point in every business, using software to do more, be better organized, and flat out avoid serious blunders, becomes almost a necessity. In this article, we look at which software might be beneficial for a home business and how to decide between them.

Are You Doing the Accounting Yourself?

Whether you’re doing it on paper, on a couple of Excel spreadsheets, or another way, managing the financial side of things is necessary. Otherwise, you won’t know how well you’re doing in your business e.g. which projects are profitable and which you should ditch in short order and pivot to something else.

At a certain stage, adopting an accounting package or cloud-based solution is required to get a full picture of the financials. Then it becomes a choice, and confusion often sets in over which accounting package to adopt. In a battle between QuickBooks and FreshBooks, for depth, QuickBooks easily wins out, but for simplicity and when freelancing rather than selling products, then FreshBooks is worth a look.

Also, sites like PieSync offer cloud solutions to help businesses sync data between different applications. This avoids some information being invalid because it was only changed in one app and not in all of them. Their solution links up the data to find new changes and updates them in multiple apps at the same time. It’s like having an extra pair of hands! Furthermore, their team have provided a detailed comparison between QuickBooks and FreshBooks, and you can read more at piesync.com.

Try Google Sheets to Share Spreadsheets

When you choose to start outsourcing tasks through freelancers to extend your reach, projects get harder to manage. Sometimes, there’s a need to put up information in a spreadsheet and share access to it. Rather than emailing the Excel spreadsheet to the freelancer directly, just use Google Sheets. It has a live feature that allows you to manage the sheet and make changes as required. Those changes can be seen by the hired freelancer almost in real-time. They can even be given editing rights (and you can remove them when the project is over).

Trello for Project Management

When managing multiple projects and dealing with different people on each project, it gets complicated fast. Staying organized by using written To-Do lists only goes so far, even if you’re following David Allen’s GTD system. Eventually, the sheer number of projects, tasks and people becomes too much for any manual system. Even a digital To-Do list is too basic once the number of projects grows.

Instead, try out Trello. It uses a system of multiple boards. Virtual cards get pinned to a board with each card representing a task. The card is pinned to indicate its status (To Do, Doing, Done). By using this virtual system which runs within a browser and as a mobile app, it’s possible to manage multiple projects and numerous tasks for them without any confusion. Once you start using it, you won’t know how you ever managed without it.

Embracing software is necessary to get your business to a level of sophistication. Even if you find new apps difficult to learn at first, persevere because the sooner you get up to speed, the better off your business will be.