If you’re in the market for interior design business software for your firm (and you should be!), then consider these tips before you make your choice. This is a big decision and moving onto a software platform is a move you ideally want to make only once. Choose a software that is robust and scalable enough to grow with you as your business model changes and your needs increase over time.
1. Custom Time and Fee Management
Does your software automate time tracking and billing to the point where this process is quick, easy, and suited to your needs? Fees are a big part of the profitability model in most firms. If the process of going from tracking time to invoicing is taking a lot of time to complete, then you’re losing money. Find the software with the best time tracking and invoicing procedures. You should have automatically-fed billing queues, flat fee estimation tools and variance reports, powerful reporting on time entries, and professional invoices capable of providing the right level of detail to your client.
2. Procurement
An area where there is a lot of room for things to go wrong is purchase orders and the following up of them—unless you have a software to automate them. Your software should be powerful enough to be able to tie payments to purchase orders, to create custom workroom orders, and to create updated versions of POs as things change.
3. Access and Collaboration
Flexibility and freedom may be the two greatest personal benefits to design firms using online software. Having the choice to work from home, work on the road, and to access your business while out of the country (should you want to) is a serious upgrade in independence. All staff should be able to access the system concurrently to collaborate and work on projects together and at the same time. Securities should be controlled by a staff member, so as the business owner, you have complete control over your employee’s access—divide duties this way, and focus attention on key tasks at hand.
4. Unlimited Data Storage Limits
Read the fine print. Does the subscription price include unlimited data storage? The amount of data in your software will inevitably go up year after year, and you don’t want to be deleting the history on old projects or worrying about what you’re uploading into your software as you work. This is disruptive and just one more thing to think about and manage. Pick a software that has your back in terms of data storage so you can think about more important things.
5. Included Support
When you’re learning anything new, it’s so nice to have people to lean on to guide your learning, answer questions, and troubleshoot as you’re working through your first project and as you continue to use more and more features of your interior design business software. Make sure you choose a software that has unlimited support included with the software subscription, a team of support staff who understand the design industry, and a team that has a track record of delivering excellent service. You should be able to lean on your software company to fast-track your learning and get you started on the path to success.
6. Integrated Accounting
When accounting features are integrated, you benefit from tools that have been customized for the interior design industry, you reduce time spent on re-entering work into a separate accounting system, and you gain automated financial reports. You also save money on the additional accounting software you would otherwise have to purchase. Go with an all-in-one interior design business software to reap the benefits of integration.
7. Tax Reporting
If your accounting is integrated, an additional benefit you’ll receive is a simplified sales tax reporting process. Typically a dreaded administrative and accounting task, this process can be significantly simplified if your accounting is up to date and your software has a tax reporting module to automate this process.
