What is WCD Business Connect?

WCD Business Connect is a small business CRM for managing all kinds of projects, generating and sending invoices, digital contract signing and much more...

Unlike other CRM platforms, we offer a dynamic experience that allows you to select the features you want and only pay for those features, and the most you will pay to use WCD Business Connect is $30.00 CAD/Month. All features in WCD Business Connect are modular and have the ability to integrate with each other. For example, if you are subscribed to use the inventory and invoices features you can select items from your inventory as invoice items. All features are built to work independently from each other, but have the ability to improve your experience based on what you're paying for.

This platform was built by a small business for small businesses. We're using this platform alongside you! So it's just as important that this service works as well for you as it does for us. We are very receptive to feedback and feature requests, and we often tackle new requests almost immediately.

My Account

Along with standard account and billing details, you can update your business contact information which can be used to optionally display your business details on our website. This allows your business to be searchable by prospective clients looking for your services.

If you have the team members feature you can also create team members from the 'Team Members' tab of your account. You can also set permissions for each team member to grant read only access, full access, or no access on each feature in WCD Business Connect.

Contacts

The Contacts feature is your main address book. You can set whether a contact is a client, another business, a prospective client, an inter-organizational contact, or other. Almost all interactions within WCD Business Connect requires a contact to be bound to it, so we recommend adding all of your contacts before using any other features.

You can also create logins for your contacts to allow them to collaborate with you on projects, pay invoices, or request meetings and appointments. Creating a login for your clients is not required in order for them to sign agreements or pay invoices, but it does give them access to view projects, invoices etc. on demand. If you do not create an account for your clients you can simply share the unique link bound to the item requiring their attention.

Agreements

Depending on your business, you might require your clients to sign an agreement/contract. This feature allows you to create a variety of contract templates, and automatically fill agreements with contact information. When your agreements are ready to be signed you just click the mail icon to send an email to your contact. Your contact will receive a unique link in the body of the email that will direct them to sign the agreement. After all parties have signed the agreement it will be available for download and print.

Inventory

Inventory allows you to manage the products or supplies you have on hand. You can also use this feature to list all of your services and their fees.

When bound with an invoice, the invoice will automatically deduct the quantity from your inventory and warn if quantity is low. You can also turn off quantity checking on an item by item basis; this is useful when your inventory item is a service and you want your invoices to auto-complete invoice items with service fees.

Invoices

Invoice Settings

Before creating any invoices we recommend that you ensure your Invoice Settings are updated. In your Invoice Settings you can supply the following details:

  • Government issued business numbers
  • Government issued tax number
  • Default tax percent charged on each invoice
  • Default interest charged on outstanding invoices
  • Default invoice due date
  • Set whether you want to receive an e-mail when an overdue invoice reminder is sent to a client
  • Set whether you want your invoices to display a button that will direct your clients to pay by credit card (only available if you on-board with Stripe)
  • Set how your invoices are numbered

Payments

WCD Business Connect does not impose any rules about how you collect your payments. However, if you intend to collect credit card payments in your account you will be required to on-board with Stripe. If you choose not to collect credit card payments through your account, you may arrange any other means of collecting payments from your clients but you will be required to manually update all invoices yourself. Also note that automatic reminders to clients will still occur if an invoice was paid but you haven't set an invoice as paid.

Stripe Onboarding

WCD Business Connect is set up to help you onboard with Stripe Connect. Stripe will ask you to complete their onboarding process and provide identification for you and your business. Onboarding with Stripe does not cost anything up front, but standard invoice transaction fees will apply for each payment collected. When you accept a credit card payment through your account you will be charged Stripe's 2.9% + $0.30 fee and WCD Business Connect's platform fee of 0.1% (3.0% + $0.30 per transaction).

Expenses

Here you can track all of your business expenses. Start by creating expense types (eg. Gas, Travel, Supplies etc.), enter the amount of the expense, expense date, a description, and upload a photo of your receipt.

You can export your expenses on demand which will create a zip file containing a CSV file with a list of all expenses within a date range, and any related receipts that you have uploaded. This makes it easy for you to supply this data to your accountant.

File Sharing

File sharing is a feature that lets you share large files, or large quantities of files that you otherwise wouldn't be able to share by e-mail. Each uploaded file cannot exceed 200mb.

When you set up a file share, you can select any number of contacts to share the files with. You can track when each file is downloaded and by who to ensure your recipients receive the files. File shares can be given a maximum expiration period of 30 days. After the expiration of a file share, all download data will be kept on record, but all physical files will be permanently deleted.

Calendar

Your calendar allows you to manage your day to day activities, and can be used to allow your clients to request their own appointments by either embedding your calendar on your website or providing your clients with their own login. When clients see your calendar they do not see the events themselves, but will only see whether you are available or not.

Currently this calendar does not intigrate with Google or other services, but we will be looking into this in the near future.

Projects

Projects is an all-encompassing feature that can tie into almost every other feature in WCD Business Connect. Here you can create intake/contact forms that you can send to your prospects to complete. A new project starts after the submission of an intake form. To create a new project yourself, simply select one of your intake forms then fill it in and submit.

The steps outlined on the main projects page can be used as a guideline to help streamline your projects. All submitted intake forms create a new project that starts in the 'inquiry' phase. You can create any number of project statuses for a variety of project types.

If you are a business with repeat clients you might be fine to create just one project for each client. Simply create new tasks and/or notes for the next step in your client's project and keep everything in one place.

You can also add team members to your projects. Make sure each team member has the required permissions to perform any of the actions you intend for them to participate in.

Reports

Currently our reports feature will show you your total invoices and expenses and total projects created for up to 1 year. We will update this feature with more useful data in future.