What is the best CRM for a creative entrepreneur?

The short answer: Dubsado (pronounced: Dubs-ahhh-doe)! The long answer is much more in depth.

At More You, our promise is that by partnering with us you’ll have more time, more freedom, and a more focused you in your business and life. Read the top five reasons why our agency of experienced online business managers prefers Dubsado, not only for our own business but for many of our clients, and how it helps us deliver on those promises.

#1 - It’s a one-stop shop

Dubsado isn’t just a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It’s that and a whole lot more. It’s an entire business management solution.

As an entrepreneur or small business owner you most likely do all the things: client onboarding, client support, bookkeeping, invoicing, scheduling…and the list goes on. Imagine ONE system, ONE monthly fee, and ONE place to go to complete all of those tasks.

Inside this one system, you’ll get all these features:

CRM: Dubsado can serve as your CRM keeping all of your leads, clients, and contacts (and communication to them!) in one spot. You can even add tags and reporting to track lead generation efforts. Want to track referrals? You can. Want to add a custom field to keep track of client birthdays? Great, can do!

Contracts & Proposals: Save templates of your contracts, use “smart fields” for the system to input client specific information, and send them off with online signature capabilities. In this day and age, user experience is key to maintaining clients. The simple ability for your clients to sign your contract online is a huge plus.

If you were to pay a monthly fee for a system that only offers online signatures from templates (meaning you don’t have to copy and paste each time which you’d have to do with many free versions) that would be roughly another $10-$20 per month. Plus, your contract signing platform can’t pull in the client details like Dubsado which is a nice time saver.

Besides contracts, you can build out proposals. These can be public proposals which means you can have them on your site where leads can pick a service, pay for it, and sign a contract in one easy to follow work stream. It’s a dream for you and the client! Or, you can create personal proposals that can go out to prospects through an automated workflow (more on that below!).

Invoicing, time tracking & bookkeeping: Skip the additional monthly fee for an invoicing system and use one that is built right into your CRM system. Use the time tracking feature to keep those hours logged, have that filtered into a client invoice you can send out to clients, then have your clients pay you easily using Stripe or PayPal.

The transaction feature allows you to track all of your business expenses. Pair this with your income that is automatically captured from your invoices, and you are set! You can report on this info for projections throughout the year, export it for your CPA come tax time, and use it to calculate and record quarterly tax estimates.

Scheduling: Again, avoid another monthly fee of about $10 per month and use a calendar link that syncs directly with your CRM. You’ll see the full beauty of this in the workflow section below, but even without utilizing a workflow, you’ll save time by avoiding the back and forth with leads and clients while setting up meetings. Dubsado now even syncs with Google and Zoom to use unique meeting links!

With many calendaring solutions, you get one calendar link for the free accounts, but with Dubsado you can have as many as you’d like. This means you can have separate links for different lengths of calls or different types of calls. Each can have their own availability options and settings. You can even have some require payment so a lead can book a session on your site and pay for it at the same time! Think of the time saved on your end and the ease for your client.

Client portals: Need somewhere secure and private that your clients can log into and see all of their invoices, contracts, forms (create your own in the system or upload pdfs!), all in one spot? The client portal feature is your solution! You can even create boards and tasks for your client and they can access it through their portal.

Workflow automation: This is likely the biggest time saver the system can offer you and our favorite feature here at More You. You can build out custom workflows that trigger emails and actions to take a client through an entire onboarding or entire services offering. Basically you can get more done because you get to skip the “trying to remember each step” and “bottom clicking” phases.

This system can trigger scheduling links to get emailed out, proposals to get built and sent out, contracts to get sent, invoices to go out, and reminders for you to complete something.

If your client books a call using the Dubsado calendar link, then the workflow can send out any of these items based on when the meeting is or was. It can also send out items based on when the project starts or ends, and you can save all of your templated emails and responses in one spot.

Need to send reminders to have clients fill out forms and hate having to remember to do this? The workflow can do this for you based on if the lead has completed the form yet!

Worried about losing a personal touch? No worries, you can require certain tasks to be approved by you first so you can hop in, add a personal note to an email, then approve it to go out based on the timing you set up in the workflow. It’s a thing of beauty isn’t it?!

Does the thought of implementing this system, getting all of these features up and running, and creating the workflow make your heart race a little? Don’t stress! We LOVE it and are happy to help! Check out our services page and scroll down to the Dubsado support section. We are experienced in getting clients into the system and up and running!

#2 - Flexible Trial Period

We love that Dubsado offers a trial period that isn’t time based. You’ll get to skip the monthly fee until you have three clients in the system. This means you can take your sweet time setting up all of these features, testing them, and then rolling it out to clients at your convenience. Then, you get to use it and tweak things for your first three clients! If you only had a one- or two-week trial period, it would be quite difficult to set all of this up if you are using workflows, and even if you could, you wouldn’t get to test it with clients before you purchased it.

#3 - Pricing

This brings us to our next point. The system at the time of publication is only $35 per month! You’ve seen above that you are already saving that in additional monthly software fees. It’s amazing all of these capabilities are rolled into this low of a monthly fee. Depending on your business, this could very well be one of just a few systems fees you’ll have to pay to run your business, if not the only one!

Plus, once you are on the paid plan, you can add up to three more people to your account with various admin rights. They can even be assigned action items in a workflow. One of these can even be your accountant. Need more than three people in the system? It’s $25 per month more for 4-10 users.

#4 - Support & Trainings

There are numerous webinars and an entire library of training videos and tips put out by the Dubsado team. Plus, there is a Facebook community of Dubsado users to help you with tricks of the trade.

Besides that, their support team has always been really helpful. We’ve put more than a handful of clients into this system and helped others with their workflow creations. Each business has it’s own unique needs and inevitably we come up with a question for how to use the system that we haven’t run into before. We can chat with their team if needed, and they get back to use with helpful ideas, insight, or tactics.

#5 - Good people

We’ve been following Dubsado for about three years now, and we continue to be impressed by the people they are and the culture they have created. The company was founded by a husband and wife team. The wife was a creative entrepreneur and couldn’t find a system that fit all of her needs as a small business owner, so her developer husband simply made her one (well, probably not simply ;)

They actually want to hear your feedback and implement updates based on that insight from their users. They continue to add to and enhance the product which means as time goes on, more and more helpful features and ways to use them will be added, I’m sure! In fact, when I started they didn’t have the scheduling feature and now it is a huge part of how I use the system with many of our clients!

They focus on charity, too! Earlier this year they ran a fundraising initiative to build skateboards for foster kids. :)

Want help getting started or going more in depth with Dubsado?

Hopefully this has helped you see why Dubsado is our preferred business solution for our team and our clients. I’m sure you can see exactly how it helps us fulfill our promise to our clients of helping them have more time, more freedom, and a more focused you in your business and life.

If you’d like to get started in the system or want help going deeper by creating your own workflows, let us know. This is our jam!

Check out our workflow services page. We are experienced in getting clients into the system and up and running! In fact, we are a Certified Dubsado Specialist! You don’t have to simply take our word for it. Hear from some of our clients we supported with their Dubsado efforts:

The minute I began working with More You a HUGE weight was lifted off my chest. They designed systems that actually work for me, and I could implement them right away. I’ve saved so much time and worry. — Katie Smith, Owner/Lead Guide, Wild Path Consulting

I feel confident when I hand things off to More You that they’ll get done correctly and in a timely fashion. I’ve been especially pleased with their assistance in creating new automated CRM workflows, as it saves so much time! — Lisa Mullis, Owner & President, Paraphrase Communications

Working with More You is a GAME CHANGER. I was stuck in the classic loop of working IN my business instead of ON my business. Now I have a partner who helps make the work on my business a reality. And the value is immediately apparent.— Steph Gibson, President, Gibson Insight

Just want to get into the system yourself? Check it out and have fun finding ways to save time in your business!

*We are an affiliate with Dubsado so we may receive a commission if you sign up using the links in this article. Plus, we’ll share some of the savings…you’ll receive 30% off your first month or year. 🎊 When you sign up for Dubsado, you get to enjoy the free version until you get 3 clients. This gives you as long as you need to get things set up before you start paying. 🎊 🎊