Online Tools For Tracking Your Client List

As your business grows, you will have to track multiple customers. As your customer list grows, you will have more invoices, deposits, customer balances, and customer service issues. It can be daunting, but if you stay organized, it doesn’t have to be difficult or stressful.

All-In-One Solution: QuickBooks

Quickbooks has a customer management tool built in that allows for you to track customer balances, create and track invoices, issue credits, add discounts, and, if you pay for the extra service, accept customer payments.

I use QuickBooks for for my businesses and non-profit. For the businesses, Quickbooks allows me to create, print, email, and mail invoices when needed. It also connects to my bank account and PayPal so I can track the payments as they come in.

For my non-profit work, which has a over 200 members and much more complex payment and income tracking, we use many more QuickBooks tracking features. It can be used to track annual membership dues via the subscriptions feature, and allows for us to track reimbursements, donations, and put accountant reports together for our annual IRS filing.

PayPal

PayPal has invoicing, customer, and inventory tracking and payment processing. Unlike Quickbooks, PayPal charges a fee for every payment, but it is much easier for a small business.

I like PayPal for my online businesses, because I can send quick and professional invoices and get paid quickly. It is the standard of payment for online advertising and freelance payments. However, for larger payments I avoid it. PayPal charges a steep fee that can take a big chunk out of large payments.

When you use PayPal, your records are all online and you cannot easily convert your records for your end-of-year accounting. It is good for your customer level finances, but does little beyond that for your financial reporting.

Excel

Microsoft Excel can work for tracking customer balances, but it does not scale well for larger businesses. If you put each customer on a new tab, you can run independent customer ledgers and use summing formulas to aggregate everyone on a summary tab.

If you have more than 10-20 customers, this is not a viable option. Excel is manually intensive and has no automation for new customers.

Access

Microsoft Access, a database program, is good for tracking large customer databases but is not as powerful for tracking financial records. You can track a very, very large list of customers and information, but adding a new record for each customer transaction is not easily possible.

Access is only useful for very large companies to track customer databases and mailing lists.

Online Options

Many companies offer online options as well. Products like Wave Accounting and Quickbooks Online allow for invoicing and customer tracking anywhere you have an internet connection. Although Wave Accounting is free, most of these products require a monthly or annual subscription, but allow for flexible and powerful customer and account management from your web browser.