Paperwork for small business?

[dlskidmore]

I have my first lamb customers, and I'm just trying to get a hang of the transaction records I should be keeping.

Besides keeping tack of the income for tax purposes, I'm thinking I should also have some sort of ledger of customer contact information and preferences. I'd like to give repeat customers first dibs on next year's crop.

What tools do you use for keeping track of (and keeping secure) customer information? What tools do you use for the financial side?

I'm a software developer, I've been half thinking of building my own software that can cross-reference customer information and flock information, but that is a very time consuming proposition.

[AdmiralD7S]

If you're small enough, you can do it in excel easily enough. If you're medium (or small but expect to grow quickly), I'd do a relational database and then maybe stick a pretty front-end on it to encapsulate your queries. Much quicker than rebuilding the core functionality yourself. Please note that I recommend this only because you're a software developer; I would not expect John Doe to have the necessary skills to create and interface with a database on a daily basis.

[dlskidmore]

Yeah, I'm strongly considering a MySQL DB, but I'm having some security concerns with putting customer data on a web server. I need to think out all the angles first. If I build and Android app for data entry then I'll need to provide some sort of secured tunnel for the data. I want the app so I can take my old phone to the barn and take notes on the sheep directly into the system.

Technically my copy of Excel is the home edition, the professional edition costs more than the financial software.

[TheMartianChick]

I like Quickbooks for the bookkeeping and would probably just create an Access database to manage the customer information.

[SeanInVa]

there may be some general purpose invoicing software you could use. There are some online ones, like Freshbooks (I have used this, and while it doesn't have tons of features, it's fairly solid).

Building your own is indeed more work, but it sounds like you don't really have a whole lot to track. If you are using MySQL and PHP/Ruby/etc, you could probably find a small VPS and host on that, get a cheap SSL cert (you can get "QuickSSL" or "RapidSSL" style certs for $10-20) and be on your way.

So what tables would you need? Well, to get started, probably something like:

- Customers (basic demographics - name/address/phone and maybe a few custom fields as needed)
- Products (or some variation thereof, so you can track what you are selling, and what the prices are - but may not be needed at all if you manually create each invoice)
- Invoices
- InvoiceItems (optional to hold the line items on the invoice)
- Payments

Depending on how adventurous you are, you could even develop the website using HTML5 and create an "offline" version using some of the new features in HTML to let you run the app, locally, on your phone when not connected to the internet.

Here are some links to get you started with a few of those features

http://diveintohtml5.info/storage.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_manifest_in_HTML5

[Harry Chickpea]

The first part of any decent software is a decent systems analysis - what do you want for input, what do you want for output, what stuff do you want done by the software?

What you have described so far is little more than a ledger that any spreadsheet or database could handle with ease.

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, do a search for free inventory and/or POS software. You'll likely find a half-dozen that can do the job.