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AWESOME CLOUD BASED TOOLS THAT YOUR SMALL BUSINESS MIGHT NOT BE USING

A quick peek at what a small business can do in the cloud

· Cloud Based Tools

Many small businesses have not jumped on the cloud computing bandwagon, but they have a lot to gain by doing so.

For the last eight years, I worked at a small business that grew from 9 employees past 200 employees, 0 trucks to over 150 trucks, and 0 rail cars to over 100 rail cars. Our technology goal from the beginning was to run as lean an IT group as possible while adopting modern tools that streamlined our business. We made the jump to Google Apps (now G Suite) as soon as it became available and we grew our business with our email in the cloud. We never had to worry about if the email server was going to go down, which was important because our company operated 24-7.

We wanted most of our servers to require minimal staff hours, and we cloud hosted everything that made sense. Only our file servers and accounting system remained inside our office.

We knew that if anyone had to spend their whole day fixing computers, servers, websites, and email problems, then we were not achieving our goal.

If someone's laptop died, all we merely set up their account on a new laptop, and they could do everything they needed to do with a web browser with minimal loss of time.

I've been planning for a while to document some of the lesser known tools that made this possible.

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Teamdesk.net is online cloud based database application created by Foresoft

One such cloud-based tool that made this possible is Teamdesk.net. We started off our journey in excel spreadsheets like everyone else. We kept endless lists of properties and bill of lading data in spreadsheets. Only one person could access a spreadsheet at a time, and we would get confused by multiple copies. A user would often sort the data wrong before sending the file to another user.

We evolved slowly from Excel to Google Sheets. With Sheets, everyone could use the same spreadsheet at the same time and see what everyone else was doing. Remote field offices could enter data directly into the sheets. This process worked well for many years, but as we grew the sheets also grew much bigger and much slower. The potential for users interfering with each other's work grew as well, and there was not a detailed enough paper trail to reverse every type of change.

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That's when we found Teamdesk, a cloud-based database/web application that allowed us to import any spreadsheet and use the data to calculate driver pay and freight statements in a more controlled environment.

Initially, I built a table that allowed us to find the freight rate for specific hauls quickly. Unlike many online databases, Teamdesk did not have record limits and allowed relationships between tables. All this could be built from the user interface and did not require knowledge of SQL. If the performance began to degrade, their support would jump in and optimize tables for us by creating index's or making modification suggestions.

Over time our simple freight rate calculator grew to calculate the total freight charge, including demurrage, mileage pay, wait time pay, per diem, and more. We implemented contracts, expense reports, and basic maintenance cost tracking system.

With a fleet of drivers and trucks, we were able to build an email notification system that kept HR/Safety up to date on medical cards, license and permits expiration dates, inspection dates, etc. without paying for an entirely separate system for this purpose.

We built terminals that processed natural gas liquids and condensates. Usually, these facilities would use Access or Filemaker to document incoming and outgoing product flows. We expanded Teamdesk to cover inventory tracking, gains and losses, detailed analysis of each truck load and sample test, and more. Teamdesk also has a mobile app that allowed form entry and photo capture from outside the office, something that was not going to be easy using database software on the office computers. At one time we had 90 users who routinely accessed the same database, and we rarely had any downtime.

We built our database ourselves. Our process owners often made their own modifications to improve their own processes. We didn't have to flex around anyone else's rigid system. We calculated everything just how we liked it.

That was before significant updates streamlined Teamdesk's REST API, integrated with Zapier, and now Power BI. I recently discovered Integromat and used it for a small project as well. The possibilities in the cloud are rapidly expanding for small businesses. Don't get left behind.