First , apologies for the terminally unexciting content.

I’ve recently joined a small but growing business. It’s a consultancy so the ‘product’ is people’s time. The current methods for tracking time spent on various projects, invoicing etc is a series of huge excel workbooks which are a bloody nightmare to maintain, track etc (even as someone who’s plenty comfortable with excel and VBA).

So I’m looking at trying to introduce something better, and do it asap as the change will only get more painful as the business grows.

Any of the IT folk (or solicitors/consulting folk etc) got any pro tips for where to start?
Go bespoke? Microsoft dynamics? Punchcards?

The MS level of intetgration is getting better there, other way is GSuite, who’s doing your mail at the moment?

Our place is just moving to Projector PSA to replace a similar mishmash of Excel and quickly knocked-up bespoke tools. It’s just priced per user so works out well for smaller orgs.

Email is Office 365, CRM is one web based platform, project control is all excel based, ideally it’d be nice to have something that integrates it all in one platform. Trying to narrow my options a bit before contacting pushy salesfolk to ask about pricing!

Have a look at Touch systems, Clarity. Made a big difference to us. Not cheap though.