When you automate your business flow, you’re not just saving yourself time, you’re building a better customer experience, and who doesn’t want that?

If you’re running a service-based business you most likely have a lot of paperwork to look after, for a lot of clients.

There’s nothing worse than feeling flustered and unorganized when you’re doing this, especially if you want to be delivering a top-notch client experience.

So the solution? A small business CRM software like Dubsado! (fyi, CRM means Customer Relationship Management)

Dubsado is currently our most used software, and has been for well over a year now.

As a CRM platform it helps us run our business by housing all contracts, invoices, proposals & feedback forms in one place, for each project. Plus, each of our clients can access those forms and everything else they need for their project with us through a beautiful client portal.

We love using Dubsado and recommend it to all of our clients who also have service-based businesses (we even transferred a couple of our clients onto it and set them up with unique systems that help them optimize their business too!) because we love it so much.

So without gushing any further, let’s dive into what this platform can do to show you why we love it so much!

Note: This blog post post contains affiliate links, and we receive a discount on our own Dubsado membership if someone signs up using our link or code.

What Can Dubsado Do?

At its core, Dubsado is set up for project and client management. It has some great automation features too that we’ll dig into in another blog post, so today we’ll just focus on the project management features, which include:

contracts
quotes/ proposals
bookkeeping + invoices
time tracking
client portals
task delegation + management
project calendars (that sync with your other calendars)
project management
canned emails + an inbox for each project
customizable dashboard to see all project info at a glance

Once you’ve signed up for the software, below is the standard Dashboard that you’ll see. You can customize this and control what parts of your projects you’re seeing which makes it handy for a quick glance at your calendar, project status or financial overview.

You can see the left side bar has access points to all of the main functions of the software, and this landing dashboard can be customized to show different views, including your upcoming events, missed payments, revenue goals and even the weather! There’s also quick access to notifications and recent emails in the top toolbar.

Dubsado links to your regular email account if you’d like it to, and all emails are sent from your email address. We actually now ignore this inbox in Dubsado, as we get replies to the emails in our regular inbox too and it gets to be a bit too much to read both inboxes. (There is an individual inbox within each project though, which is very handy for seeing if someone has read a recent email, or if they’ve had any payment reminders or other automated emails).

Our Favourite Features of the CRM software

One of the best things about this small business CRM software is being able to link all of your paperwork for a project together. No more sending separate contracts, invoices and proposals! Instead, you’re linking them all together so your client can review all the information up front, accept, sign + pay for a quote quickly and easily through one document.

This alone has saved us time and our clients have told us that our invoices are so clean and beautiful they’re actually excited to pay them…!! I don’t know how many businesses can say that, but we’ve heard it from more than 1 client!

Once completed, you can also then allow a client to go back when needed to their client portal to review their paperwork or any other part of the project that you’re storing in their portal system.

Below is an example of a quote that includes a contract and invoice. Notice along the top tab how a client could access both of those documents?

And here’s how the client portal is setup for our clients at Salt Design Co.! A client can access this through a link that’s sent to them, or from our website, and they can view all the documents and forms we’ve sent them per project, as well as any emails and appointment dates.

We Love Dubsado and We Think You Will Too!

If you’re interested in checking out Dubsado, the small business CRM software, and seeing if it can help your service based business, we highly recommend it! Use code ‘saltdesigncompany’ for a discount and let us know if you have any questions about the platform at all!

P.S We receive credit from Dubsado whenever someone uses our code to sign up for an annual plan. This helps us keep our business running as we genuinely use Dubsado for all client projects.

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