Review: Solo CRM
solo crm is a tool that would suit most freelance designers and developers very well if they are managing multiple clients or projects. The services it offers is quite customer-centric (hence the CRM part of the name!) and allow you to manage your projects and clients from one place.
Disclaimer: This is a paid review from ReviewMe. I will only review products that I think would benefit the people who read this site – no rubbish from me!
solo crm is a tool that would suit most freelance designers and developers very well if they are managing multiple clients or projects.
The services it offers is quite customer-centric (hence the CRM part of the name!) and allow you to manage your projects and clients from one place. For example, you can manage all of your content requests to the clients (after you’ve created a project-based account for them) so that you’re not endlessly ferreting around for an email to prove that you asked for it.
You can upload web URLs, images and content and attach these to tasks so that you and the client can monitor progress quickly and easily.
The part that interested me however was the tasks functionality. solo crm allows you set milestones and integrate a payment schedule with each milestone which is a different approach to other online collaboration tools I’ve seen that seem to ignore the fact that Freelancers might want to get paid! However they don’t seem to have integrated billing functionality to automatically bill the client and link it to something like a PayPal account which is a shame.
There are 4 account types that are based on the number of projects/tasks that you need to run ranging from Free (1 Project, 10 tasks with 10MB of space) to Gold (currently $59.95 for 25 projects, unlimited tasks and 1GB of space).
It does seem slightly odd to me to limit the projects and tasks as similar online services tend only to limit the projects that you’re running but the free version of solo crm should allow you to run a small project and to see if the setup works for you.