I believe that Customer Factor will get you to 4-5 crew easy. Then cross that bridge when you get there and cash flow the savings until then.
We are about at that bridge now in my business but the drive to get with customer factor has been great.
Hey Joshua,
Thanks. Yeah 4-5 crews is a ways off. That puts my mind at ease though.
I was just reading both sites (customer factor, and smartservice) For where I’m at and what I currently need I think in the morning I’m signing up with Customer Factor.
Also I think it is very cool that it integrates in with Responsibid, which is going on my new site I’m currently working on.
By the way, “Birds Beware Window Cleaning” is a great name… made me laugh. Nice.
Cool, you won’t regret Customer Factor or ResponsiBid. I have both and love them. Thanks for the nice words!
Good luck too!
Scheduling Manager by Thoughtful Systems sounds like the type of program you are looking for. You pay only once, when you purchase the software.
See http://www.thoughtfulsystems.com/industries/window_cleaning_software.asp or call 800-759-2532.
It does CRM, job scheduling, payroll, mapping, text messaging, e-mailing and more. The e-mail module lets you send e-mails to prospects and reminders to people who last used your service <n> months ago. It’s a great marketing tool!
They’ve been in business for over 25 years, and have thousands of users. They also have a real-time link to QuickBooks.
Any software to just manage clients info and rescheduling reminders ect?
I think I found the best crm software yet. It’s called zoho. It has everything I could possibly want in a crm does anyone else use this or heard of it. I’m rather impressed with the system. Best of all it starts at 12$.
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What are the features you like? Do you have a cliff note version of a tour?
There are soooo many features I’m very impressed with. I’m hiring a sales person so I can track everything through the various apps associated with it. I don’t have a cliffs notes version but it looks like it will do everything all in one place. This way I don’t need to purchase separate apps for different things. So far so good.
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I agree paying a one time fee sounds great… But the problem is, every couple years you would be having to upgrade your software because its out of date and crap. The customer factor is a great software. Totally worth the money
yeah, the one time fee would be cool… but in order to get relatively good software, the one time fee would be in the THOUSANDS of dollars. The monthly service fee is easy to include in your budget, and it keeps your costs down when it comes time to upgrade, as you mentioned.
you guys are crazy
Why davemac? Do you have a better one? I’m looking for something too. I just started using spinoffice but not sure yet.
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Yes. But can you be more specific?
FileMaker Pro 13 Resource Center | FileMaker I just don’t buy in the notion of you always need to up date software to the newest and greatest so you have to pay monthly. I have used some programs with no change for over 12 years. Although I am gong to update my excel spread sheet with this bad boy it will do anything you can imagine, they have a 30 day trial check it out. Hope that helps
[MENTION=12729]JaredAI[/MENTION], let’s collaborate and build our ultimate software solution with this ^^
But it’s apple. I’m not up to date enough to use apple products.
I’d use drupal to design something wicked powerful but maintaining it would be a pain. I’d use WordPress but I’d have to learn their loop thing and coding standards. I could do it in joomla but I’d rather get kicked in the face with a golf shoe.
Screw it I’ll stick with tcf for now.
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LOL. I guess my PM to you was in vain…
Nope check your inbox.
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[QUOTE=JaredAI;324029]But it’s apple. I’m not up to date enough to use apple products.
I’d use drupal to design something wicked powerful but maintaining it would be a pain. I’d use WordPress but I’d have to learn their loop thing and coding standards. I could do it in joomla but I’d rather get kicked in the face with a golf shoe.
Screw it I’ll stick with tcf for now.
Sent from my Motorola carrier pigeon. Please feed him before sending him back.[/QUOTE
I am using it with windows
Filemaker is definitely interesting. I downloaded the trial and it’s pretty cool. I like that you can develop solutions and sell them.
But I’m not sure it’s the way I want to go. It’s 329 for the filemaker license, 200 for the quickbooks plugin, and I’m not sure whether fileserver is extra but if it is, then that’s another 350 per year.
If I had some extra time and money, I might play around with it. Or, I might just write my own using Drupal. When I was in a franchise, I looked at writing my own software but when I mapped it out based on experience, it would take me about 6 months of solid work to get it to be a solid CRM. Drupal is super powerful and wicked fast. I love everything they did in developing it and it totally appeals to the geek in me, but it is a righteous pain in the butt to keep up to date. Not to mention that the core versions move faster than the modules so it seriously messes with my ocd.
Wordpress also has the horsepower to be a solid crm for window cleaners, but I just get the feeling that it would take more work than drupal to get it to do what I want. Wordpress is at it’s heart a blogging platform and to make it do what I want would require some fiddling.
I’m going to stick with TCF for now, but I’m leaning towards mHelpDesk because the interface is so slick and it’s got some good functions like gps tracking. Then once I get 5 or 6 cleaners working, I might turn my hand at creating a basic CRM for wordpress designed for window cleaners. I want to do it mainly as an intellectual exercise because I’m a geek like that.
