I've been an independent developer/contractor almost exclusively since 2001. In that time, I've primarily used a hacked together Access database of my own design to track all my business income and expenses.  It even generated my invoices.  Unfortunately, I never really had time to expand it and make it into a robust system so it was very picky and many times I ended up bypassing the screens to input data directly into the tables.  I did think about using Quickbooks, but only briefly. ;-)  My Access database fell out of favor last year as I transitioned to what I hoped would be a simpler method.

Excel or not

2007 was the year of Excel for me.  I tracked my mileage, income and expenses in Excel 2007.  While I tracked my time using a stand-alone time-tracking application (soon to be replaced, but not by a spreadsheet <g>), I used Excel to generate my invoices which were then printed to PDF and emailed to clients.  Overall, this method was a bit less painful than my Access solution, but not much.

One of the real pain points to my Excel method was that all the Excel files were stored on my laptop.  This was ok, but there were times I needed to get access to them from another machine.  Not a big deal because I could just map a drive, but still...not as convenient as it could have been.  Hell, sometimes I didn't have my laptop but still needed to get access to those files, so I 'd end up writing something down on paper and try to remember to get it into the spreadsheet.  In hindsight, storing them on a server could have reduced the pain, but my guess it would have pissed me off to be offsite somewhere with my laptop and not have access to the files.

Google!

In the past couple of weeks, I've slowly been converting / re-developing my spreadsheets using Google Docs.  So far, it's been a great experience, especially considering I only used a tiny fraction of what Excel offered.  This gives me the ability to access that information from anywhere that has a connection plus I'm not having to worry about losing the data if anything happens to my laptop.

Google Docs let's me export my data back to Excel if needed as well as printing to PDF, so I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much right now.

Email?

Over the years, I've been a huge fan of Microsoft Outlook and have .pst files going back each year to 2003.   About 3 or 4 years ago, a buddy and I embarked on a short-lived effort to write an email application that could take its place because one of my biggest complaints about Outlook is the .pst file itself.  It's this big nebulous blob of binary crap that, if corrupted, could spell lost emails.  Anyway, our plan at the time was to store individual emails as xml files, yada yada yada....that plan didn't get too far and so I've continued to use Outlook. :-)

Over the past year or so, I've slowly been sending more and more people to my gmail account since it's something I can access anywhere (even my less-than-feature-filled phone).  Gmail took some getting used to since I liked having a pretty deep folder structure (which flattened a couple years ago ala GTD), but now I'm digging the idea of labels and I still have "a metric buttload" of space left.  Hell, if needed, I can upgrade and get 25GB. :-)

A few days ago, while I was attending the CodeMash conference in Ohio, my laptop stopped working.  I was pretty bummed because not only was most of my project work on it, but my 2008.pst file was too.

When I got home from the conference, I yanked the hard drive and dropped it in my server (thank God the laptop drive was SATA) and pulled everything off, but at that point I really had no desire to install Outlook on my desktop and re-configure all my accounts so I clicked over the gmail (which, BTW, is always open along with twitter and remember the milk) and added my primary email accounts.

Of course, I still need to keep Outlook around in case I need to access my email archives, but that's no big deal.  I can always use my wife's laptop which runs Outlook 2003 if I need to.

Calendar

I also started using Google Calendar today after making sure that Outlook things would continue to work correctly when I sent meeting requests to my wife.  So far, so good.

Tasks

I've tried the 37signals apps but abandoned them pretty quickly  because I absolutely hated the attitude coming from the developers.  There were features I knew I wanted but would never see because they didn't believe in them.  Uh huh....whatever.

A month or two ago, I started using Remember the Milk and I'm loving it.  It fits pretty well with the way I work and I can access it from anywhere that has a connection.

Missing Pieces

Right now, I'm missing two pieces to this puzzle.  I'm currently not sure how I'm going to handle invoicing.  When I first started moving my spreadsheets to Google docs, I thought I could do the same thing I've been doing: create individual invoices, print them to PDF and email them.  Unfortunately, that's a sucky solution.  My next thought was to use the Meiraware Business application.  I've done some initial testing and like it, but I'm not sure there's enough flexibility given the way I normally do my invoices.  I've given Jayme a couple suggestions, but he's been blowing me off (I kid, I kid). ;-)

The other missing piece is my contact list, but I suppose that's what Plaxo and LinkedIn are for huh?  I'm not sure what I'll do about those people that don't have Plaxo or LinkedIn accounts.  Maybe keep them in a spreadsheet?  Hmmm...I'm really not sure.  Any suggestions?

So far, so good

While I haven't been using these apps for very long (with the exception of Gmail), I do feel better knowing I'm not tied to one computer.

Oh, I've also set my wife up with an iDrive account for her backups (thanks for the recommendation Jayme).  If all goes well, I'll start using it as well.  Short of burning DVDs and taking them offsite every couple days, it seems like the best option.

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