From scattered client work to one operating record

Kirk & Co. runs Kirk Web Design, its division for websites, SEO and ongoing growth work for local businesses. Every client relationship produces inquiries, website traffic and search figures to watch, invoices, and follow-up.

Client records, inquiries, traffic, search performance, invoicing and follow-up needed one practical operating view. Without it, the whole story of a client was never in one place.

Client records, inquiries, invoicing and follow-up lived in separate places, and traffic and search performance were read in the tools that measured them. Bringing them together for one client was a manual job.

The design starts from the customer, not from a vendor’s template. Everything that happens with a customer hangs off one record:

• A lead holds the customer’s details, what they need, and the quote and bid amounts.
• The pipeline’s stages are named and ordered by the business, and each column shows its count and value.
• Converting a won lead creates the client, copies the contact details and links the two records.
• Each client has jobs, with their tasks, materials and the people on them.
• Payments lists the invoices from the business’s own Stripe account as owed, part-paid, paid, void or written off.
• Email goes out from the record through the business’s own mailbox, and replies are saved on the same record.

Kirk & Co. designed, built and runs it. The parts that make it usable day to day:

• Each person on a team has their own sign-in and the access the owner chooses, and the activity log shows who changed what.
• Stripe is connected by approving on Stripe’s own site; no key is pasted in.
• Contacts, the pipeline and jobs fit a phone’s screen.
• Two-step verification and Google sign-in; each workspace’s records are kept apart from every other account’s.
• Nightly database backups, kept for 14 days.