Small Business: Money & Management

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Software Moves Small-Business Chores Online

Jonathan Blum

It's all about the service.

Word processing, spreadsheets, project management and many other hard-core business tasks for the small enterprise are now being delivered online. There is no need to download or install software like Microsoft Office(MSFT Quote) or Apple(AAPL Quote) iWork.

Instead, simply go to, say, Google Apps, Zoho, Dabble DB, QuickBase, Coghead or Basecamp and sign up for service.

Right there, in your browser, you will find applications that process words, keep schedules, organize projects and all the other software we use to handle our small business chores.

The price is right with these online apps: Basecamp, for example, is free to start and top-of-the-line services run $149 a month. Others are in that range as well.

I recently installed Basecamp in my business. And while it's far too early for me to endorse this product -- some issues have already arisen -- so far, so good. The system does a nice job of organizing the half-dozen people who work both in my office and remotely for my content-creation business and handle about a dozen projects at a time.

Basecamp, from a company called 37 Steps which is backed by an investment from Amazon.com (AMZN Quote) owner Jeff Bezos, offers a powerful project-management architecture: It renders your business as a series of Web pages, each containing a different facet of the projects, tasks, files, time cards, employees and other bits of data that come together to create a product you sell to your clients at a profit.

Basecamp revolves around a dashboard page: With calendar, a list of projects and broken down list of who did what over the past few days. Initially, this page -- or any page in Basecamp -- won't do you or your business much good. You need to populate these pages with your data yourself, by hand. That is both the big challenge and the big opportunity with Basecamp. There are no direct quick data imports, wizards or anything of the sort. Everything has to be installed -- and thought about -- by somebody.

I assure you, this is no small feat. It took me several iterations of various tools within each project -- Am I leaving a message? Or posting a "to-do"-- to figure out what the designers at Basecamp had in mind as the best tool for a given job. This will take time. Figure a good, solid 12 to 15 hours just to get the first draft of you business laid out.

But once working, I felt liberated. And organized.

Not a bad outcome for a day's work.

You can expect growing pains. You and your people will be confused at first. Everybody has to go through the same curve you did. And you can expect a few go-rounds between yourself and your employees as you figure out how to organize your business in a new way.

You are connected to your content via the Web, so access can be spotty, particularly in the middle of day when Basecamp servers are loaded expect things to run slower. Also the system also sends out emails that cannot be responded too, which confuses many people. Some don't come into the system as they should. So that is problem. And sometime servers don't update as fast as you'd like them to.

Finally, you will face many, many debates about what bit of data goes where. But, slowly, eventually, you'll figure out what works for you and your business. And the effect is startling.

I now start my work day by looking at a single page that tells me what has happened over night. And I can expect over the next few weeks. Honestly, for a business like mine that manages dozens of assets for dozens of clients, every night and day, the process can be a revelation. I'm still not sure what the bottom line, long-term effect will be. It could all just be a pretty picture on a computer.

But I doubt it.

After more than 10 years of battling with Outlook to keep my little digital world organized, finally making some progress with a new business tool is big news for me.

It will probably be for you too.