You need a business telephone number and (optionally) a fax number. You can choose to continue to use your personal number as the business number, but that can cause you to get calls in middle of the nights (hello timezones), or sometimes your wife may be speaking to your business contacts. It is advisable to get a business telephone number.

Additionally you may have customers who live in different countries that you. Our business is based in India and most of our clients are in the US.

We have a SkypeIN number which has a US local number and rings my Skype. For faxes we use Efax, it gives me incoming faxes and allows faxing documents.

No body has faxed me in an year so a fax may not be necessary.

You have a good leads pipeline and people are contacting you to buy your services.

A rule of sales is that larger the sale price longer the period the client will do a due diligence. So you need to keep a system to keep in touch with your client during this sale period.

The biggest name in hosted CRM is Salesforce. I dont recommend them as they are built with a larger sales team in mond, and if you have only a single person doing sales, it adds too much of a overhead.

I have used a simple CRM like [Highrise](http://www.highrisehq.com/). They make it easy to find your communication with a client in a single place. I however found even this too much of an overhead. But for most people this would be a good fit.

How I work with our leads using my inbox as a simplified CRM. Our contact us page has a unique contact address. As we have a catchall email address, this email comes to me, but gets tagged as leads. Our contacts us form also sends to this address, so the tagging happens either way.

I check my leads folder once a day to see if there are any new leads I should respond to. Once a deal closes or falls through, I put them out of leads and into the closed or fell-through folder.

There is a good chance you may be working in a remote environment from your client.

You need to setup channels so you and your clients can communicate in real time. There are lot of instant messaging tools you can use, but we have two which we use, and recommend.

• GTalk
• Skype

If you created you email with Google apps, you already have a Gtalk enabled email chat. Add your clients gtalk.

For Skype, create a new account even if you already have a personal account. You can use Skype for text chatting, voice and video chatting.

Clients appreciate being kept informed of the progress of their software projects. Your staff and contractors need a way to keep track of their todo and tasks. A project management system is a must to do this.

One of the ongoing challenges to do this is that clients prefer email over a project management system. You should actively work to ensure most of the communication happens in your PM system.

There are a lot of PM systems, but there are three which I like and recommend

* Basecamp
* Unfuddle
* Assembla

Basecamp is the easiest for non technical users, but it lacks some essential tools for software team. (Namely Source control integrations). If you have a non technical client base this is the easiest to get started with.

Unfuddle has tickets, wikis, messaging and source control integration. This is the one we use. This lacks email integration though.

Assembla has more features than Unfuddle. Is also has a very slick email integration, (you can open tickets and messages via email).

There are a lot of others. The most important fact though is that
you should choose one and stick with that.

You need to maintain your books so that it is easy for you to file taxes, calculate your profitability and cashflow and make projections for your business.

Depending upon your local laws and your legal structure your business expenses are probably tax-exempt. So its imperative to keep track of all these expenses.

How I work is this,

I have filters in my mailbox set for all my bills and vendors so the expense mails are automatically categorized as expenses. Once a day I forward all these emails to a specific email address. Once a month, I put them in our book keeping system.

Its important for your invoices to look professional. There are a lot of web-services you can use, but I recommend Freshbooks.

When you send your invoice this should mention

1. Invoice amount
2. Payment terms
3. What period of time this invoice covers
4. What work done this invoice covers

Most good invoice tool will handle this part for you.

Once a client pay, confirm the payment and send them a receipt.

For our expense tracking we use Zoho Books. Freshbooks has a basic expense tracking but we found it limiting.

You should categorize your expense in meaning ful categories. (Like salary, infrastructure, training) etc to find out where your money is going.