[Zafar Iqbal]

I've for a long time been looking for a simple yet flexible lead tracking system but have so far not found anything I can settle with. I officially went professional a year ago and have over time felt a greater need to have a reliable and flexible method to keep track of leads, projects and whatnot.

My essential needs are:
- Keep track of contacts
- Keep track of events/projects
- Keep track of communications
- Calendar overview
- Tasks associated with specific events
- Tasks that can have flexible reminders such as remind me 14 days before event date, or remind me 14 days after event date.
- External calendar syncing/viewing (Google Calendar)
- A simple yet good overview/dashboard of whats going on, upcoming events, due tasks etc.

Keeping track of the economic part is nice, but I currently couldn't care less about invoicing and stuff like that.

I've tried following:

Tavé
Though I like it, it's too complicated and I feel like I have to spend too much time with it and jump back and forth a lot when making entries.eds to be entered.

I liked the automated mails and auto generation of tasks (workflow).

OpenCalc (spreadsheet)
This method worked fine when I had only few leads and clients. But as the numbers grew, the spreadsheet method became too cluttered and I started to find it troublesome to keep track of whats going on. Colorcoding the entries helped but only for a while.

fotoclient.com
This one was pretty much perfect in pretty much every aspect - expect, it's loaded with bugs. I patiently wanted for months for the developers to fix the calendar sync bug, which caused the event dates to be off by one day and trust me, over time it really started to confuse me.

They finally fixed it but now (for the past month or more) a new bug appeared: I can't edit leads or events.

I've lost my faith in this and want to move onwards - it saddens me though, because I haven't found anything else that comes even close to this.

I've tried a bunch others and I can't remember all of the names from the top of my head (ShootQ is one, Zoho CRM another).

I'm currently looking into Insightly - it looks interesting and while it's supposed to be easy, I have a serious issue figuring out how to set it up for my needs. I'll give it few more tries but am otherwise on the verge to giving up on it.

I do weddings and portraits but also own projects which are treated as any other project, except there is no economy involved. Some CRM's break down if there's no money involved - or some only do weddings and not portrait's - or reverse, or some do cover portraits and weddings but not weddings that are celebrated over multiple days.

There must be something out there that I haven't yet found. Maybe not a dedicated lead tracker/CRM, but some other tools that can be used as such.

Ideas?

[Winder]

Have you looked at fotoBiz ? Photography Business Management Software

[Zafar Iqbal]

I haven't even heard of it. I tried to download the demo a couple of times, but I keep getting "This archive is corrupted" error

[derekkite]

I'm in a completely different business, but I used Solve360 for a while. It was great for lead and event tracking and is quite flexible. I needed something more job->invoice flow, so moved to something more vertical. But I was impressed at it's capabilities.

[johnmflores]

Highrise. From the makers of the dead simple project management tool Basecamp.

[Zafar Iqbal]

Thanks, I'll have a look at the suggestions.

I'll temporarily use Trello and/or a modified spreadsheet. I used Trello long ago but it's biggest drawback was lack of proper reminders and calendar implementation so I dropped it. A year has passed and reminders are still a rather vague thing in Trello. Other than that, I like how intuitive and fast it is - it's a bit like spreadsheets but visually much more appealing and intuitive.