Zoho Solo Unifies Workflows for Busy Solopreneurs

Solopreneurs wear many different hats but also need to use a bewildering array of different tools to operate their businesses.

Suppose everything from managing clients to handling projects to tracking expenses and more could be managed by just one app?

”So that’s why we have brought Zoho Solo as a single point solution,” says Ashok Ramamoorthy, Director of Product Management for Zoho Solo.

Zoho launched this specialized freemium app in September 2024 in the U.S. and Canada specifically for solopreneurs like you. A paid version offers more robust features for $96 a year.

Zoho Solo exists as a mobile app only with no current desktop version available.

So download it from the appropriate app store depending on your device.

The Pain Point Seems Pretty Obvious

You might run a life coaching business from a spare room in Eugene, Oregon. Or maybe you offer a handyman service providing help to homeowners in Detroit, Michigan.

In either case, you operate your business alone. And you use a ton of tools. You track clients and contacts across half a dozen social and messaging apps.

You send invoices with one app, take payments with a second and do your bookkeeping on a third.

The results include fragmented workflows, lack of seamless data exchange, manual processes reducing productivity and disconnected systems resulting in inefficiency.

“They’ll be using at least ten to twelve tools to manage that business,” Ramamoorthy explains. And this explains precisely why the company built Zoho Solo in the first place.

Too Many Tools and Too Little Time

All these tools take too long to use because so often data must be taken from one and added into another manually.

Automation often proves impossible because tools don’t belong to the same ecosystem or talk to one another.

This also makes having a good overview of your business more problematic.

“They’ll be using Google spreadsheets or maybe they may be using a free invoicing solution,” says Ramamoorthy.

“But the problem here is the data doesn’t tie up together, which means you’ll not be able to identify at the end of the day which customer is paying you more, which task has taken you a longer time,” he states.

One App to Replace Them All

Zoho believes the answer involves uniting all these functions and more in one application.

“So just imagine the power of this application where all the essential workflows, like all the essential data you need to run your business, are under one hood,” says Ramamoorthy.

“Which means you can manage the work simultaneously. You can create invoices. You can typically do anything which helps you do your business more effectively.” he adds. “It’s a suite of essential business functions and all in one toolkit platform.”

The company expresses the ambition to gradually make the evolving Zoho Solo into a single unifying replacement for those other tools.

To get a better feel of just what Zoho Solo does, we take a deep dive into what’s on offer.

Solve the Contact Conundrum

First, Zoho Solo allows you to manage your business contacts all in one place.

Think of this as a big digital rolodex … or a list of contacts on your phone.

But in this case, you have more than just a list of names. Because Zoho Solo allows you to categorize them as partners, customers and leads.

How cool is that?

You now possess a 360 degree view of all your contacts and their relationships to your business. Take a look at how Zoho Solo helps you build and maintain that list.

Collect Names at your Next Event

Whether you work as a financial consultant in Milwaukee, Wisconsin or a tax attorney in San Antonio, Texas, you likely attend events and mixers.

There you meet both potential clients and important connections who may prove vital to your business in the future.

Don’t try to jot down a name and a contact number on a cocktail napkin – which you’ll be unable to decipher later.

Instead, whip out your phone if you’ve already downloaded the Zoho Solo app. You’ll find a variety of options.

Add Some Contacts with A Few Clicks

Zoho One makes creating and segmenting your list simple.

“So right now the application provides three ways to add your contacts. One is obviously a manual way of adding the name and other details,” says Ramamoorthy.

When attending a chamber of commerce mixer or similar event, our financial consultant might meet potential partners like attorneys, CPAs and insurance specialists.

While our tax attorney might meet partners like wealth managers, estate planners and tax preparation firms.

Build and Segment Your List

At the same event our financial consultant might meet with potential leads or clients like retirees, pre-retirees or professionals with young families.

Meanwhile our tax attorney might bump into potential leads and clients including high net worth individuals, and business owners.

Zoho Solo allows you to enter names, contact information and any other relevant details as easily as you might send a snarky text or selfie.

Then segment these people into partners, clients and leads for later retrieval.

Scan Your Contact Info Right From a Business Card

Oh, and if contacts have business cards, that simplifies things even further.

“The application provides an option to scan a business card and it automatically extracts the data out of it and they can act as a contact,” Ramamoorthy explains.

No more stuffing business cards in your wallet or pockets.

This also saves you time trying to organize business cards or manually transfer the information to digital later.

Consolidate Your Digital Contacts

But what if you already have a large collection of digital contacts spread over a number of digital platforms?

Suppose you work as a fashion or lifestyle influencer in New York City or LA, for example.

Contacts cram your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and even Google Chat accounts. But they represent a mix of followers, potential sponsors, potential customers for your affiliate products and more.

What if you want to consolidate all these into one big list? Well, so long as you load all these apps onto your phone, Zoho Solo makes this a breeze!

“For example, assume that you have synced your Instagram contacts or synced your Google contacts,” explains Ramamoorthy. “It’s a single click to import from your phone into Zoho Solo. It is very easy.”

Kick the Tires On These Other Features

Look at these other features to make the life of a solopreneur easier. Zoho Solo makes it easier to manage projects.

“When it comes to your work management, you can primarily log your job or tasks within the application,” Ramamoorth says.

Imagine you serve as an SEO consultant for clients all over the world, a career coach with clients throughout North America or an attorney with clients mostly in Southern California.

In each case, tracking your hours proves crucial to how you bill clients.

”In the case of consultants or in the case of coaches or lawyers, time is money for them,’” Ramamoorthy adds.

Track Hours You Work For Clients Expertly

Zoho Solo’s work management tool allows you an overview of your day in a single place. Log in and it starts tracking your hours.

If you provide SEO services to clients, this might include providing a website audit examining a site’s crawlability, architecture, mobile friendliness and more.

Deliverables would include a report with suggestions to improve both search ranking and user experience.

If you run a career counseling service, you’ll spend time administrating and evaluating tests to assess a client’s suitable career paths.

Your service may also include creation of an individualized job search strategy for your client and perhaps creating resumes and cover letters for them.

Create a Billable Timesheet For Your Invoice

All of this allows for creation of a billable timesheet which you can send to your clients.

Zoho Solo does all this for you! Imagine the time you save and the productivity you gain. You now can add an itemized list of completed tasks with your invoice.

And Zoho says more features are on the way.

“In the future we will be bringing Meetings as a part of this so you can initiate client meetings within the application,” Ramamoorthy explains.

“And with the help of the timer and Meetings you will be able to do efficient meetings and consulting.,” he adds.

Bill and Collect Payments

Whether you work as a virtual assistant in Edmonton, Alberta or a content creator in Little Rock, Arkansas, billing becomes a job in itself.

A variety of third party software options allows you to create and send invoices. But going through your timesheet and creating an itemized invoice takes more time away from your main business.

You operate as a solopreneur after all with no billing department or help of any kind.

Fortunately, the free version of Zoho Solo allows you to create and send invoices with time sheets already created for you in the work management section of the app.

“You can have your own logo, you can have your taxation number and it is local tax compliant,” Ramamoorthy says.

Track Expenses With Ease

Whether you work as a shared ride driver in Memphis, Tennessee, or a personal shopper in Albany, New York, you must track expenses.

“When it comes to your business, it’s always very important to track your expenses because this is one place where you generally miss out where you’re losing money,” explains Ramamoorthy.

Fortunately, Zoho Solo offers a unified way to scan receipts and record expenses even categorizing them by type.

The app also offers a way to link expenses to specific clients or jobs.

This allows you to see at a glance which clients or jobs cost the most and which are most profitable once subtracting your expenses.

Integrate Third Party Payment Portals with Zoho Option Coming Soon

When it comes to getting paid, Zoho Solo integrates with third party payment options like PayPal, Stripe, Verifone, Braintree, CSG Forte Payments, and Authorize.net.

How does it work?

Well, with the click of a button, you can integrate your existing payment portal with Zoho Solo.

This means when you send your invoice a URL allows customers or clients to use a credit card or other payment of choice. And the payment will appear in your payment portal.

Zoho Solo also plans to integrate its own Zoho Payments portal into the app as an alternative to third party options.

Take Your Business’s Temperature

Finally, Zoho Solo offers a way to create and customize reports to check on your business’s progress.

For example, you might create reports showing income by customer or client, by profit and loss, or invoices by year or by month.

This reporting system allows you to uncover insights including identifying your most valuable customers or most profitable times of the year.

It can even help you see at a glance whether or not your business is truly profitable or how far you are away from profitability.

The App Is Mightier than the Pen (and Paper)

Truthfully, however, Zoho believes many of the top solopreneurs to benefit from Zoho Solo will be those who currently use no digital tools at all.

In fact, Ramamoorthy explains one reason the company introduced a freemium app was to encourage more solopreneurs to move to a digital platform in the first place.

“Solopreneurs use pen and paper to manage their business, so they are not growing effectively,” he explains.

Zoho also candidly admits the aim of encouraging you to move to the more robust Zoho One or other Zoho packages as your business grows.

Final Thoughts

Whether you run a one person plumbing business in Fresno, California or a one person graphic design studio in Boise, Idaho, you wear a lot of hats.

If you use a flurry of digital tools from PayPal to Microsoft Excel, you may suffer severe inefficiencies and lack of productivity.

If your favorite business tool is still a legal pad and a ballpoint pen, you may face significantly greater challenges still.

Fortunately, an answer exists. Download the free Zoho Solo app. Or spend a bit extra for the paid version.

Start improving your productivity and getting a better picture of your business today.

This article, "Zoho Solo Unifies Workflows for Busy Solopreneurs" was first published on Small Business Trends

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