Small Accountancy Business Case Study #3: Choosing a CRM

Last week we looked at Leen Accountancy, a small business run by its solo entrepreneur, Miss Leen, which moved to operating mostly online and seeing its customer base increase to the level where traditional management in Excel and Word added more work and so time management became critical.

Miss Lee is now looking for a simple customer relationship manager to organize her clients’ information and interactions, deadlines, together with quotes, invoices and a basic sales analytics tool to work out a rough measure of profitability in her growing business.

A CRM, or a customer relationship management tool, centralizes customer information at the least, and at the most it offers sales team management options and even call centre and e-mail integration options. It can be a contacts CRM, such as Google Contacts, a conversations CRM, such as SalesForceIQ, or a leads and deals tool, such as Jetpack CRM.

We made a list of requirements in our previous post. It seems that Leen Accountancy needs a leads and deals tool that offers basic features, is quick and easy to use and install and saves time, the over-arching requirement being that of security and confidentiality of client data. With hundreds of business contacts’ information, figures not publicly available and details of operations to manage, a key criterion in choosing the right CRM is control over data security.

Self-hosted CRMs run on users’ servers giving them full control of their data, as opposed to web-based tools, which, while they’re easy to access anywhere there’s an Internet connection, are based on the provider’s server, subject to their control of security, meaning that any large scale breaches can result in loss of data, or the passing of data to third parties. This can mean the end of an accountancy business and a disqualification of its director!

So what are a some of the self hosted CRMs out there?

  1. Oracle CRM:
  • Suited for businesses of any size
  • Offers importing of .csv, .txt and .xls files
  • Offers business analytics
  • Offers an e-mail campaign option
  • As extra features, it offers agreement management and call centre optimization, amongst others
  • Is on the pricey side

 

  1. Sage CRM:
  • Suited for small and medium sized businesses
  • Offers importing of .csv, .txt and .xls files
  • Offers an e-mail campaign option
  • As extra features, it offers relationship management graphs and customizable graphical workflow, amongst others
  • Is on the pricey side

 

  1. On Contact CRM:
  • Suited for small and medium sized businesses
  • Offers importing of .csv and .xls files
  • Offers business analytics
  • As extra features, it offers marketing automation and links to social networks, amongst others
  • Is on the affordable side

 

  1. Jetpack CRM:
  • Suited for small businesses
  • Hosted on WordPress, an easy to install platform
  • As basic features, it offers customer, quote and invoice management
  • Sales analytics, data importing, PayPal Sync and WooCommerce Sync come as extras, packaged in bundles, such as the Freelancer Bundle, designed to suit the needs of entrepreneurs
  • With the core function free, and the bundles on a pay yearly tariff regardless of the number of users, is on the affordable side

Having looked at what these CRMs have on offer, we decided that Jetpack CRM is exactly what Leen Accountancy needs at this stage in the business cycle. It can go for the Freelancer Bundle, which offers a choice of three extra features plus a choice of sync option, 12 months’ support and updates at a reasonable price.

Next, we’ll see how exactly Leen Accountancy can use Jetpack CRM to boost its profits and save time:

Read on: #4 – Small Accountancy Business Case Study: Learning to use a CRM