You’ve got a team together, you’ve got an idea, and maybe you’ve even got funding or paying customers and you’re at a point where you really need to manage your team members’ HR matters. You find yourself facing the fact that, regardless of if your staff are employees or contractors, there are forms to be filled out and regularly updated, taxes to be paid, and benefits to be provided and managed.

These are the options currently available for HR management for startups, small businesses, and distributed teams:

PEO (Professional Employer Organizations): In this case, HR is completely outsourced such that there are no part- or full-time employees working directly for the company.

PEOs are third-party providers, often certified by ESAC (Employee Service Assurance Corporation), that serve your business HR needs from soup to nuts for approximately $120-150/employee/mo (~$1800/employee/year).  The assumption is that for up to 30 people, you get savings from hiring a PEO vs an HR Manager.  This fee covers managing all HR functions inclusive of benefit plans, FSA, and healthcare. PEOs provide a branded HR portal to employees to update their info as well as taking care of compliance requirements, issuing FSA (flexible spending account) cards for pre-tax medical expenses, and choosing the best health insurance plans for employees. You, as an employer do not have to.

SaaS (Software as a Service) HR Offerings: SaaS in the HR field are online software services that allow you to manage HR from a central portal. This includes a combination of some or all of the following: employee records, document/resource sharing among employees, job postings, benefit tracking, time management (can include clocking and leave tracking), and company/employee reports. In this case, you would hire a part-time HR administrator or include this in the duties of another person at the company to adminsiter the HR records via the SaaS option and ensure that all necessary forms are completed and updated regularly.

Offline HR: In this case, there is a part- or full-time employee of the company that is responsible for managing all HR functions.  Offline HR management is viable mostly for a team that works in the same office. For distributed teams it becomes increasingly difficult to manage especially for various employment forms and information updates that employees need to provide.

Image credit: thehrpractice.net

This is the first in a series of posts about HR management. Subsequent posts will discuss specifics of the options listed. To be informed about new posts, subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up by email on the right.

In a attempt to find an “all in one” solution for startups and small businesses operations management, after seeing so much praise given to SohoOS by TechCrunch, I gave it a try. Michael outlined some of the issues with the service in his post here.

These are the issues that killed the service for me:
1) It prompted me to bring all my contacts from Gmail, which I did, and then I could not find where my contacts were nor could I find how to delete them from the system!

2) There does not appear to be a way to close an account once you open one at SohoOS. On many web-based services, the option to close your account and how to is stated almost on every page or provided in the FAQ page, so that customers feel assured they can; this is not the case with SohoOS as of 1o/2011.

3)  The service states it is is free, however once you get through a hodgepodge of interfaces ‘thrown together’ to give a perception that a user can manage projects and invoicing with SohoOS  (below you can see an interface with the missing logo and less than optimal UI for adding a task), you soon come to a screen where SohoOS wants you to pay for SMS messages supposedly to communicate with your team members, and for documents from Docstock.

At the end I felt “cheated on”. My info was inside the system with no way to take it out or delete it with no trace (no way for SohoOS to use my contacts), and no value was provided within the project management and invoicing screen. After being promised something for free, I kept bumping into screens that were asking me to pay.

Adding a task to a project:

Pay for sending SMS:

SohoOS Docs — pay to use the documents from DocStoc:

Roi Carthy of TechCrunch posted an article recently after speaking with Eran Manor, SohoOS’s lead designer, that ended on the high note, “The thinking here is that providing [invoicing, billing features, CRM, inventory & project management] to a sufficient depth allows SohoOS to appeal to a larger userbase. With the US, UK, and the EU constituting 54% of the userbase, this is a smart move.”

Let’s get one thing straight: Users, “growing at a rate of 30% month-over-month,” doesn’t say anything about retention, satisfaction, or the utility of the service. Amid the hype I became one of the more than 400,000 users that their front page boasts, only to find that what is presented as a product in Beta is little more than a, “reverse engineered…iPad app”, it is a “service” that lures you in and then doesn’t let you out.

According to Carthy’s article, SohoOS has discovered that small businesses:

• Don’t consider accounting software a substitute for an accountant

• Don’t see accounting as the heart and soul of their businesses’ management activities.

To the first point, it seems unlikely that small businesses feel duped for using both an accountant and software programs programs.  An accounting program allows for day-to-day entries to be recorded so that when the time comes for tax filing an accountant can easily collect the necessary information.

To the second, accounting certainly isn’t the heart of business management but it is a necessary part.

This, I believe, is where SohoOS has lost sight of their audience. Carthy even praises SohoOS for, “focusing on several services that are key to the daily management of a small business,” rather than “the conventional wisdom, of ‘do one thing and do it well’.”

My criticism for SohoOS then is twofold:

1.       The result of trying to take on so many traditionally divided tasks is a cluttered interface that seems lost between invoicing features and priced-t0-sell business document templates.

2.       The term ‘Beta’ has fallen victim to semantic satiation and companies like SohoOS are to blame. Beta used to mean an essentially finished product that leaves room for rapid user-oriented change, but now simply means ‘something we’ve put together and are still working on defining’.

If a company doesn’t have a clearly defined vision of itself, there is no way that a customer can see future potential. Perhaps my cynicism toward the ‘do everything well’ model will turn out to be the mark of a dying philosophy but until a service like SohoOS pushes companies that ‘do one thing and do it well’ aside, I won’t be investing.

This is the second in series of posts about Google Apps, to learn more about Google Apps for Business see our first post

The number of apps integrated with Google Apps has exploded recently and many are available for free or for a nominal fee (especially if you’re a small business using them among your team members).  At Finance Alpha our goal has been to find the best tools for intuitive and flexible collaboration, which has meant testing tools with a wide variety of intended uses and keeping an eye out for those that operate well in tandem across all members of a team.

These are the tools we have picked so far:

  Insightly: We ran across Insightly (insight.ly) while looking for an intuitive task manager integrated with Google Apps. Google’s own Tasks function has the advantage of being a proprietary and thus extremely integrated product, however we found that there wasn’t enough room for description within the tasks themselves and that tasks could not be easily shared or delegated. In the case of an ongoing task, Insightly allows you to add progress updates, assign a number of statuses (Not Started, Waiting, In Progress, Deferred, Completed), assign tasks to other team members with email notification, and can even act as a CRM. Integration with Google means that you can save an email transaction with a click of a button from Gmail into Insightly and the person’s contact information will automatically be saved in addition to the email exchange itself. Insightly is free up to 3 users and has plans starting at $29/month for more.

MindMeister: Ever heard of or used mind mapping? MindMeister is intended to allow you visualize one aspect of your life / project and its constituent parts. As an example, the standard Personal Tasks template shows how it might be helpful to conceptualize how your Home, Work, Car, Shopping, and Other personal tasks are related. Furthermore, individual nodes and tasks can be prioritized, tagged, flagged, highlighted, and even set up for email notification. Not only is MindMeister affordable ($9.99 per month for unlimited maps and users) but can easily be used for other purposes like project management and flowcharts. It is worth mentioning that like most great services, MindMeister is immediately comprehensible: whatever you think that button does, it does. We wrote earlier that we chose MindMeister over other flow chart tools.

Expensify: Expensify is already a brilliant tool for expense tracking that includes the ability to import credit card and bank records, create expense reports, upload receipts, and even integrate with Quickbooks. The service as a Google App (free for 2 users, $5 per user after that) seems little more than a convenient link from your Google account but nonetheless it saves you the extra login and makes Expensify more accessible if you want to use it from a mobile device.

GetHarvest: Harvest is powerful because it does one thing extremely well: time tracking. For employees Harvest presents a minimal, intuitive interface to quickly categorize and track time. On the accounting side, Harvest makes invoicing and report generation both instant and elegantly presented. A full business account (including unlimited users) is going to cost you $90 a month but if you’ve got a large team working on a variety of tasks, it simply can’t get any simpler.

Shoeboxed: Not unlike Expensify, the Google Apps extension of Shoeboxed is little more than the ability to log in from your Google account however this shouldn’t discount what a valuable tool it can be for your team. Shoeboxed allows you to send physical receipts, upload photos of receipts, and basically transmit any other record of a transaction to them for processing. In return you’ll have access to a clean record of your transactions perfect for substantiation in the case of an audit. Also, if you don’t import transactions from your bank into Quickbooks (or any other accounting software), Shoeboxed can help you there too. They offer prepaid envelopes in addition to receiving standard mail with just a little extra effort (you have to provide your email address on the outside and inside of the envelope). They’ll even dispose of your receipts safely or send them back to you if you’d rather hold on to the physical copies. The $300 annual price tag might seem high at first (includes 150 docs/month and 500 uploads) but the peace of mind it brings means never having to worry about providing a record of your transactions. Besides, who wants to sort receipts when you can mail them off in a crumpled ball?

Check out our example workflow of this process in flowchart form here

What third party apps integrated with Google Apps do you find most useful in your work flow? Let us know in the comments!