The Digital Café

How I Use Dubsado to Run My Business

We’re all looking for ways to make running our businesses easier so we have more time to focus on other things. Before I started using Dubsado for my business I was using so many different platforms and it was a pain. I had one platform for invoicing, another for contracts, I was doing proposals in Microsoft Word and couldn’t find a task management system I wanted to use at all. Plus, I tried several other CRM’s and didn’t think they worked well for my business.

Then, one day, I randomly happened upon Dubsado in a Facebook group. I tried it out and never looked back! It had everything I was looking for, which at the time was a single application with a nice user interface that could handle contracts and invoices. Dubsado had that and so much more!

Dubsado has been a total lifesaver for my business and these are just some of the functions that I feel are super helpful.

How I Use Dubsado To Run My Business

Lead capture forms.

A lead capture form is basically a contact form. It allows you to collect information from people who want to work with you. The difference between using a contact from your web platform and a lead capture form is the lead capture form will automatically bring all of the collected information into Dubsado. This lets you track where a lead is at in your intake process and easily upgrade a potential client from a lead to a job.

I use several lead capture forms (I have one on my contact page, one on my 404 page, one that is linked to Facebook, and one that I use for ad landing pages) allowing me to quickly see where leads are coming from.

Canned emails.

If you answer the same question often, send out the same email to each client canned emails will save you SO MUCH TIME! I have emails pre-written for maintenance reports, invoices, hosting updates and all kinds of other things. A lot of times these emails end up getting altered before sending, but having a starting point is crazy helpful.

Custom questionnaires, proposals and contracts. Oh, my!

Onboarding clients can involve a lot of paperwork. Luckily, Dubsado allows for everything to be digital and kept in one place. Their drag and drop interface makes it easy to customize all of your forms too. In addition to adding text to these documents, you can add things like images, gifs and even code blocks, which allow you to incorporate schedulers (Calendly, Acuity, etc.).

The proposal process is great, moving clients easily from proposal to contract to invoice. I use the Dubsado questionnaires for a couple different things like project briefs, website content, collecting client login information, case-study followups… the possibilities are endless!

Need a second contract? You can do that too! Sub-agreements allow you to add things like project sign-offs, model releases, addendums and more.

And the icing on the cake? Dubsado has an amazing form template library to get you started!

Dubsado Form Library

Invoicing and recurring billing.

When looking for a CRM, it was really important to me that it handle contracts AND invoicing. I really wanted all my shit in one place. Their invoicing is super easy and now supports recurring billing which I use for my maintenance plans.

Workflows.

Workflows really bring everything in Dubsado together. It does so much and the folks at Dubsado do a much better job of explaining it. But I use it to automatically trigger actions from a lead form. Once the form is filled out Dubsado will automatically send an email to the potential client, create a job, start to-dos, etc.

They recently added a great workflow overview to let you see exactly where everyone is in your process!

Dubsado Workflow Overview

Calendar integration.

Being able to see my calendar (you can sync Google or iCal) in Dubsado has been really helpful. When I log in I can see everything I have coming up that day right on the dashboard.

All jobs and appointments created in Dubsado are automatically added to my calendar. Plus, any tasks that have been assigned a date.

Client portal.

One of my absolute FAVORITE features of Dubsado is their client portals. I love that clients have an area where they can see all of their contracts, forms, invoices and job details. It also houses all of our email communication and you can now share task boards with clients which has been great for project management.

Dubsado Client Portal

White labeling.

EVERYTHING ON BRAND! Dubsado is so modest that it let’s you brand every inch of it. Amazing.

We recently discussed Dubsado on The Digital Café Podcast! Check it out at thedigitalcafepodcast.com.

Ready to make your life easier?

Sign up for your Dubsado trial today. You can use my Dubsado referral code, caffeinatedweb, for 20% off your first month or year!

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