I’ve used The Customer Factor this year and thought it was awesome. Clients love automated emails the day before reminding them of appointments they think I personally send them. Prints and emails invoices. Keeps reoccurring appointments and you can keep all your prospects in order. Works good for smaller companies.
For those of you considering Service Autopilot they are now offering our members a discount! If you are a WCRA member the set up fee of $97 is waived. Send me an email if you are considering using the service [email protected]
I know this thread is a bit old but curious if you went with kickserv. Looking at it, it looks promising. I’m tired of double entry in my accounting and crm. Would love just one spot. So I was wondering if you went with kickserv and pros and cons of it?
Maybe I’m cheap but we use Google calendar for scheduling , Google docs for keeping all detailed information on our res clients , it’s all cloud based so can access anything on the go. Our estimates and invoicing are done with joist and quick books online. Between these 4 the only service we pay for is quickbooks. It is a bit much to get a system down using so many different programs but has worked great so far. Seems like every program I look into I can’t justify the cost for what it offers. … the programs we use now do almost everything they offer.
Luke, how many times do you find yourself entering the same info into different programs? Or are you able to get everything to sync seamlessly?
for the most part not much . for example if i am scheduling a repeat customer , I look them up in docs copy and paste it to my google calendar info and adjust the time and finished. When I invoice electronically I do find myself entering the information twice to get the account set up in joist and in quickbooks. But once that is done it is pretty seamless. Im sure there are great programs … i just havent found one yet that does all of this for a reasonable amount of money.
So I came across this thread and wasn’t sure if I was going to post. But I wanted to see if I could add something. I see a lot of people post about finding a cheap software solution to manage their business. This is the wrong approach to take with SaaS(software as a service). I don’t want to sound like I’m some software expert but I worked for multiple technology companies in sales, selling cloud services. These programs are EXPENSIVE to deliver and complex to maintain and keep running.
A good company should be delivering services out of multiple data centers, replicating data across all locations, have a backup and disaster recovery plan in place, and a hardware replacement/upgrade strategy in place. A huge problem with many of these SaaS companies start out using Amazon web services or Azure or some other virtual server provider. Why is it a problem? Their services are horribly expensive to scale with, their per GB price is steep and the licensing gets expensive because its a monthly fee, typically, for the licenses you need to run virtual servers, other software licenses, etc. Once you gain momentum and need to scale, now you’re looking at huge costs to scale with the server hosting provider or making a huge infrastructure investment (a decent SAN Server costs over $100k per box). This is one of the reasons that these companies go out of business so quickly.
You need to really ask yourself, what happens if this company goes under and they hold all of my business data. Once you start to get into bed with a company like this and you are 2, 3 years down the road with them, managing hundreds of recurring accounts, over 1k in customer records, etc it’s not easy to get off of the platform. How do you get your data back to migrate it to another service provider? More than likely they are going to send you a stack of cd’s or an external hard drive with a SQL database on it and you better hope to god that data didn’t get corrupted in the transfer. Or even worse, if this provider that’s been charging too little the entire time goes under, can they even afford to keep people staffed long enough to off board the potentially thousands of customers they have? Doubtful.
We researched about 7-10 different SaaS providers when we started and I picked the one I did, in part, because they were the only ones that I felt were charging an APPROPRIATE amount of money to be viable long term. There were way too many providers charging less than $75 per month per user. That is too cheap! They won’t be able to scale long term, they will hit a financial snag somewhere along the way and 5 years down the road, you’re in trouble.
I’m not going to say who I use in this post because I’m not posting this to promote who we use. You can search my profile and see who I use as we have discussed it in other posts for other reasons. Or PM me.
Also, if any of these companies tell you they run everything on Amazon and Amazon has multiple data centers and you’re data is secure, don’t take their word for it. Amazon web servers go down all the time and if the SaaS provider that is running their platform on those servers can remotely access them, its up to the provider to get them working. All Amazon does is provide the server space and server licensing and the client manages the actual system. Same with rackspace, Azure, etc. Think of it in terms of renting commercial space(in California at least), the landlord provides you the 4 walls and that’s it. You build it to suit, something breaks in your unit, you fix it. Same concept.
I’ll get off the soap box now lol. I don’t mean to beat you guys over the head but not all SaaS companies are equal and i just wanted to get you thinking about these platforms in a different light. Their front end software that you interact with is the least of your concerns. You need to know what language they build their databases with, how updates are rolled out and their backup plan as well as their plan if they go under. If they don’t have answers to these questions, pass.
I can go on and on, if you want to ask me questions, pm me and I can Tell you what I know or probably get answers because I am still close to people at the companies I used to work for that are engineers that build this kind of stuff. Thanks.
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So who you using the point of this forum is to share
i tried kicserv last summer.i looked like the best i had seen and their write ups claimed they were mobile…WRONG!!!
i did try using it for estimates which of course you have to use the calendar. very clunky and not mobile at all.
tried using the mobile phone phone payment really bad.
tried to schedule jobs on my phone awful.
ended up very far behind with book keeping because it was faster to re-enter all the invoices from kickserve directy into qbo and continue with it.
qbo now has cc payment using your phone without swiper, also pay with card on the e invoice and it handles the payments and fees beautifully.
it is weak as a crm but what i started doing was sending estimates via email, they show as pending. when the customer accepts i mark them approved and sort the list so i can see jobs waiting and extimates outstanding. transitions from est to invoice to payment are smooth and easy on even mobile phone.
it currently has no scheduling ability which is a huge bummer.
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I signed up with kickserv for a trial. I think I might continue. I was using onepage crm but it lacks scheduling and really geared towards strictly sales. I really like it but I think kickserv fits my needs better.
The app is garbage for sure, but most crm apps are. I use the site on my phone and it works pretty well. The calendar is definitely useless it doesn’t even fit to screen which is a bummer, but I can sync it to Google calendar so at least there is a work around.
I think they may have done some updates since your last tried it because even though it’s not perfect its working pretty well for me using it mostly on my phone. But I do think that at the end of every week I need to sit down at a desktop and just clean up any loose ends, to keep it running smoothly. Especially with the QuickBooks integration. You just can’t do it all on a mobile device.
hey clear yes i’m sure they’ve done some updates and and they were great guys on the help line. i never used the app because right away they told me it was garbage and to use the site for my phone. the calendar worked quite well on pc but i do alot on my phone. and things like estimates, invoices payments etc are just way easier on qbo.
I agree qbo was great once I started using it. I think, that even with the weaknesses, the qbo and kickserv combo is way better then what I have been doing so I’ve been pretty pleased. One day if we could run our entire business from our phone that would be awesome, until then I guess we are always gonna run something that only does a portion of what we need, plugging holes the best we can 
thanks for the education Mark
