My favourite tool for managing my business: Dubsado

I honestly wanted to keep this tool all to myself because I love it so much but I thought I should share it now that it’s had a refresh and new look. It’s the tool I alluded to in my earlier post all about my 5 favourite tools for running my own business.

Dubsado* is a CRM tool for managing your business. When I started freelancing I was spending loads of time creating contracts, sending invoices and trying to keep track of everything in a spreadsheet. Julie showed me the tool she used for photographers and I knew that I needed something like that – after some googling, I found Dubsado.

(* FYI - This is an affiliate link – if you use it, you’ll get 20% off your first month. I get a credit towards my account if you do decide to keep on using Dubsado after your trial. However, I’m not biased and wouldn’t recommend it if I didn’t love it!)

I found the initial set up a bit of a challenge, I won’t lie. I didn’t find it all that intuitive but once I read through the guides I got the hang of it. To make the most of Dubsado, it’s best to plan out your workflows as a starting point. Create your template contracts, forms and emails, and go from there.

For example, your workflow might be that you send your clients a client a proposal, a contract and an invoice. You’ll need to get those set up as documents in Dubsado before you start adding clients.

Now I use Dubsado for everything – bookkeeping, client questionnaires, client management, automated workflows for booking packages, invoicing. I find it such a straightforward tool to use and really like the dashboard showing me what’s going on with my business. Especially if I’m juggling a big workload, like I am at the moment.

I’ve not included any screenshots in this post as I didn’t want to have to obscure all my client info! This features page on their website has all the info about what it offers as a CRM if you’re interested in seeing how it works.

As a business, I’m impressed by Dubsado as they have really useful customer service (including a white glove service if you’re using another CRM tool and want to move to Dubsado – they’ll do it all for you), a great Facebook community and an impressive level of transparency about what new features they’re working on. They did a lifetime membership option a while back so I jumped at it while I could, that’s how committed I am to Dubsado!

I hope you found my little ramble about why I love Dubsado so much interesting. Do you use a CRM tool?