I'm a bit stumped here, folks. I've been running my own business for a while now, and I've cobbled together a bunch of tools that help me get my work done, but what I'm doing only works because it's just me in the business. Because of that, I get by just fine using the most basic features of Freshbooks and Square, and then routing all my business email through GMail.

But now I'm trying to help a colleague out with her business, which is bigger than mine but very behind with technology. She runs a carpet cleaning (and other home services) company with her husband, and they have a few employees that go out to do the jobs.

She's looking to use technology to help grow her business. She wants her techs to have tablets for a few reasons (presumably iPads but whatever gets the job done - a Nexus 7 would be cheaper). She wants to do the following on these tablets:

- take credit card payments
- have her employees receive their agenda for the day, with all the address and service information on it
- if the employee ends up adding services on site, they update a central ticketing system (which I guess ties into that last one)
- get signatures on estimate forms and work completion waivers (personally, I think that from a legal standpoint she might want a paper trail for this one, but it's what she wants). Anyway, these forms are customized, so the solution here would need to work with them...

In addition to all this, she's also looking for good solutions for keeping track of customer data, and using that to feed the information for sending out newsletters.

Currently, their business uses Quickbooks for their accounting, but they're not in love with it. They also have a payment processor who is apparently really terrible. One of her customers contested a $10K mold remediation charge, and her CC processor refunded the money without even telling her! Yeesh. Long story short, she's not wedded to anything.

I'm really not familiar with anything that combines all of these elements. I also don't know much about ticketing systems...

Do any of you have experience with these kinds of tools, or know of anything that might be useful here?

For the credit card payments on a tablet/phone, I think you really only have an choice of Square. Their fees are in line with other card processors. I haven't used their services as a merchant, but I've purchased things from merchants who use them, and it's painless from that perspective. I was looking into using them for my wife's theatre, but we currently get POS card payment processing done for free via one of the city departments, so decided to forgo the extra $30/month data plan and processing fees.

If you haven't found it already, it seems that ServiceBridge does all the rest.

As for digital signatures, she's probably fine without a paper trail (although she could have one printed at the central office) -- the last few times I've had repairmen out for something, I signed on their tablets. One of those was for Sears, so if Sears is doing it that way...

https://www.apple.com/ipad/business/apps/
and
http://www.cultofmac.com/177333/ten-must...owners-feature/
and
http://blog.intuit.com/trends/50-ipad-ap...lysis-and-more/

are worth a look. These are iPad/Mac specific apps. Religious preferences aside, I'm pretty confident in saying that if a tablet needs to be in the mix, the iOS ecosystem is going to offer more solutions then Android or Windows 8 right now.

Heh. Did you look at the contents of those lists? Aside from Intuit GoPayment (didn't know about this one... good info), none of the apps listed provide any of the requested features. Instead, you get "Dictionary.com", Facebook, CNN, and MBA-ish apps.

iOS may offer "more", but I'm not convinced it offers "more solutions". ServiceBridge and ServiceMax (different company from ServiceBridge) are cross-platform, and PacketTrap appears to be cross platform -- all of which appear to meet the requested requirements.

Well, to be honest, I lacked the time to go in depth on the links and make sure all the needs were met. Instead just providing resources for Matt to review as part of his job.

I base my comments off the number of businesses I have seen that successfully function off just an iPad, or an iPad and Mac combo. I'm sure Android isn't a barren wasteland in this regard, but experience from traveling from two months along with local experience in Austin and Seattle has never revealed an Android solution in active use. Now there are still plenty of Windows POS and other solutions in use too, and those outnumber iOS by far. However, with the tablet requirement, I doubt any of those Windows solutions are Windows 8/tablet ready, due to the newness of that solution.

I only went in-depth out of curiosity about what the links were, and further in depth on my own because of your iOS comment. Of the field service techs/sales people I've had out to the house, who were using tablets, 100% of them were using iPads. All two of them. Or maybe it was three.

There was one who was using some hardware that I didn't recognize -- it looked like some ruggedized kit, but it didn't look modern (i.e. designed in the last 5 years). The remainder were on a variety of non-Mac laptops.


True enough on the Windows side.

I think POS isn't the right aspect to be looking for -- googling "field service apps" and "service tech apps" produced the links I found (except for ServiceBridge, which was buried in an article that I don't recall how I found).

I'm not being ungrateful, Tom, but that page was pretty barebones I'd also disagree with you in that - aside from all the Apple apps - most of those are available on Android as well.


I might not have been clear, but I wasn't looking for mobile-only solutions. The software that's implemented has to also be usable from regular computers, and those computers are Windows machines.


Those are all either cross-platform or have perfectly fine Android counterparts.

If you're looking to back your iPad dominance claim, I would have expected some more integrated solutions

Sorry, I'm just giving you a hard time, Tom. But while there's a lot of nice apps in there, it's a very piecemeal approach. For example, it's crazy to have one mobile app tracking jobs, then another app creating invoices. That means you have two customer lists to keep track of.


Canuck (sorry, I'm not sure what your name is), thanks for the links. I've never heard of any of those services, but they seem promising. They're the kind of thing I was looking for. I'm going to need to do a lot of reading up to figure out if they do everything that's needed, but I'll check it out! Thanks again!

Have you looked into online accounts packages like...

http://www.xero.com

I use Free Agent myself (maybe more UK based)...

http://www.freeagent.com/?referrer=415n1kdu

Both support plugins and allow you to do all sorts of stuff.

I actually use Tave for all my online contracts, quotes, invoices and schedule. But this is aimed at photographers really...

https://www.tave.com

It is a workable solution for me, and all my clients love the fact everything is done online. Maybe it's worth a bit more research to see if one of the packages fits your needs.

Cheers

Cris

Thanks, Cris!

It's a challenge. I'm sure there's the right service out there, but finding it is difficult.

I forgot to mention that being able to write up estimates on a tablet at the client's home was something she's looking for. Yeesh, I don't know what she can use...

Pardon the update, but the links to ServiceBridge and ServiceMax led me down some very fruitful paths.

First of all, thanks for the link to ServiceBridge, as it looked like a great product. Unfortunately it also looks like it's very expensive. Once you get to their pricing page, you start to notice all the small print around the page, with two important ones:

1- $500 setup fee
2- It's actually something that sits on top of the required "ServiceCEO*" service they offer, which costs $95/month/user


The important thing is, looking over these sites that CanuckInOR brought up led me to some strong possibilities. I eventually learned that this type of thing is frequently referred to as "Field Service Management" software. I ended up finding about a dozen companies that offer these services, and have been slowly trying to weed out the wheat from the chaff. I've gotten down to these two:

RazorSync - Not to say that visual appeal is the most important element of the decision, but it doesn't hurt that this was the best designed software of the bunch, both in attractiveness and in UI layout (you may not think it's appealing, but I assure you there are some dogs out there in this category). They also seem to hit everything that my colleague needs from such a service, and it integrates with Quickbooks.

Intuit Field Service Management - speaking of integrating with Quickbooks! That would be a good advantage, plus you get the confidence that Intuit could be around a little longer than some of these companies I've never heard of.

I'm calling these guys and going over some of the more company-specific needs, but they seem like good candidates. Neither of them appear to use platform-specific apps, instead opting for browser-based applications, which has positives and negatives.

Thanks again to CanuckInOR for the suggestions that got me on my way!



*completely irrelevant, but ServiceCEO's website uses oddly low-res graphics for their main page...