Our Favorite Business Resources
Keeping our business in tip top shape and organized is super important to us as a team. We have learned over the years to work smarter, not harder. We absolutely love using the resources below to streamline our business and make it pretty!
I adore my showit website. I’ve been using Showit for around 5 years now. Prior to Showit, I would purchase templates from other online website shops. Once purchased, I couldn’t really make changes to my website and the layout without having to invest even more money into another template. The templates were also limited on functionality compared to showit. With showit, the websites are able to be completely transformed with drag and drop features.
My current website is from Grace and Gold. I have really loved customizing my new website and honestly, with showit…it only took me 6 days to completely customize my new website. Grace and Gold has so many different templates to choose from. I chose the one that served me the best and then customized the colors {my brand colors}, fonts {my brand fonts} and added my images and text. If you are looking for a beautiful new website template for your showit website, use code sharinshank30 for 30% off a brand new website with Grace and Gold!
I’m not going to lie to ya’ll. Before 2018, I used paper and pen for my wedding photography contracts. I had clients giving me cash and checks. I would then have to run to town each time a payment was given to me. It was a LOT of work just keeping up with these two things. I had no real workflow other than the one’s I printed. I was so limited. Then, I found Dubsado. LIFE-CHANGING. Dubsado is an all in one platform for contracts, invoices, forms, questionnaire’s, canned emails and so much more! Check it out and come back here to grab 20% off using my referral code sharinshank20.
Having a small team, Asana has seriously changed our life. We love having our engagement and wedding workflows in asana. I can access everyone’s asana on my team, add tasks and jobs and then once they complete the task or job, they mark it done. I’m able to see that the tasks have been completed right from my cell phone. We have an engagement workflow and wedding workflow that everyone on the team can see and track and then we have tasks/jobs that are individual to team members. We really love Asana for our studio!
Slack is our teams communication tool. We always use slack unless what we need to communicate needs to be sent by email. We have different slack channels {I love this!}. #everyone – which means everyone can message one another and everyone can see that message. Then we have private messaging which only I can see. Then we can create channels that pertain to certain topics. For example, for our team photo-session, we made sure to create a new channel #teamphotosession. On this channel, we only talked about the team photo session. It really helps keeps communication open, convenient {right from your phone} and streamlined within channels so our conversations stay really organized. Get $100 when you sign up for slack with a paid plan using this referral link.
I’ve been using quickbooks online for years! I love that all of my accounts are all in one place. I can check balances, approve transactions and even break my profit loss down in reports. At any day at any time, I can see what I’ve earned year to date, I can see what expenses I have coming up, I can view any reports from profit loss and even customizing profits and loss by category. I could go on and on – a financial software is a must in order to track, budget and run a profitable business. I’ve even added my bookkeeper and accountant to my quickbooks making it easy for them to access and work for me. I also love that quickbooks tracks my W9 and 1099’s for my associates and other’s I’ve paid that year. Quickbooks is hands down my favorite resource for keeping my business financially healthy.
I adore Planoly. There are several apps out there that allow you to organize your images and schedule them ahead of time to automatically post to instagram. Planoly is my favorite. They also have a feature that allows you to schedule your posts at the best time for engagement. Click “schedule” to see those times are according to when most of your followers are active and engaging.
Unfold is a toolkit for storytellers. I love unfold because I can specially design beautiful stories using templates and text right from my phone.
I remember the days I used gmail or hotmail for my business email. One way to up-level your business and have it be much more professional is to have a professional email! I loved what google g-suite offered for my team. We all three have our own gmail accounts with sharinshank.com as the url. Not only is it super professional but sharin@sharinshank.com is super easy for my couples to remember. For about $50 a month for all three of us, it’s a win win in so many ways!
I hope you have enjoyed browsing through our favorite resources! If you have any questions at all, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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