As a consulting company, you must make your clients happy or you won't get repeat business.  Your clients must believe you are the best consulting  partner for their needs.  They must see you as competent, knowledgeable,  and fast.  Part of the recipe is good documentation before the deal is  signed and while it is being executed -- a good task plan, historical notes, and  percent complete tracking.  Fortunately, you can get all that right here in one tool!  This video helps describe a basic plan for keeping clients happy  with your service.

 

1. Start With a Plan Clients like to know how you plan to complete the work.  A simple list of  tasks, perhaps including a few breakdowns or phases goes a long way toward describing your ideas to them.  It puts both parties on the same page and frames the work in a way everyone can understand.  Consider the project plan one of the defining documents that helps you get the deal keep the client happy.  Use the tools in the Project Tasks tab to lay out your plan.   All the tasks you enter will show up on the timesheet where you can log hours to  them.

 

2. Percent Complete Status The hours you log in the timesheet are consider "Actual work" for each task.   That means you can compare estimates to actual work and get percent complete.  Clients like this!  This number tells them how far along you are.   They love that because it's a succinct number that everyone understands.   Just make sure it is correct!

 

3. Marking Tasks Complete When you've completed a task, mark it as complete.  The task will be  removed from the timesheet so nobody can log hours to it.  Again, clients  love completed tasks!  All the worry about whether you can do it or not are  gone.  The task is complete, and you can move on.  Push for as many  completed tasks as you can for each client status meeting.  Show them you  are doing something, and they will be happy!

 

4. Historical Documentation What happens if your clients comes asking for a list of work you did in the last  month?  (The video shows the easy answer for this.)  If you just have  a spreadsheet with monthly hours, you're sc****d.  But if you use this  tool, you just run a quick report and send it off as a PDF.  This kind of  responsiveness keeps people happy.  They know you care enough to document  the work you do.  And really... it's not that much extra work.

 

5. Billing Rates Okay, now what happens if you send an invoice with incorrect hourly billing  rates.  Oops!  You've got a lot of explaining to do.  But if you  had a nice Time Log list that showed billing rates for each record, you could  make sure everything was kosher before firing off an invoice.  You could  filter that list by employee, or category, or date range, or any number of ways  to verify your billing rates.  Do that and your clients won't fire you.   :)

 

6. Reporting Happy clients come from good periodic reports -- progress, status, percent  complete, history, estimated completion dates.  Leave off that and you'll have unhappy clients.

 

7. Client Login You can even give your clients a login page that lets them see much of this  information.  The more information you give them, the better off it will be  for you.  Fortunately, you have an app for that!

 

Also see: Video: Billing Clients, Video: Client Billing Rates, Video: Consulting Software, Part 1

 

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