As an accounting professional, I tend to believe that financial integrity is the most important discipline in the world of small business. However, life has taught me that the most important aspect of running a business is the customer relationship.

Without paying customers, there is no business. The enormous task of recording phone conversations, emails, in-person interactions, service recalls, follow-ups, and keeping up with all of the info could be daunting if it is not managed via a strong system. This tends to fail when there is duplication of data entry, especially with your basic customer contact info.

What you’ll want is a customer relationship management (CRM) program, a simple system to input who your clients are, their contact info, when they called, what they requested, how they liked their product or service, and how they would like to work with you in the future. Having this information handy in real time makes it much easier to sell more to current clients, as well as recruit prospects and convert those prospects to clients.

There are three very popular QuickBooks Online apps that do most of the customer management functions you’ll need in a CRM: Method CRM, Intuit Demandforce, and Batchbook CRM.

All three bring a different flavor of the CRM aspect to the small business. I will share with you three different cases in which I had clients reaching out to me for advice on which QuickBooks Online-compatible CRM solution would best fit their needs. Each time, their needs fit perfectly into one of these three apps.

Method CRM

First, there was Mary, who owns an advertising agency in Miami. She is the CEO and controller of the business. Because she does not want any of her salespeople to have access to QuickBooks, she made them fill out a form that said they’d fill in new orders when they go on the road and visit their clients and prospects.

At the end of the day, all new orders come in; the next morning, Mary inputs the invoices into QuickBooks. She also keeps a separate spreadsheet of how many prospects her staff goes to visit every day and how many come back with an order, a system she calls her “New Business Close Rate.” She asked me, “Hector, can I automate this system? I spent half my day entering orders and tracking this spreadsheet.”