Your Online Management Guru

Projects
Milton's Project Manager tool prepares estimates, tracks outstanding proposals and schedules follow-ups to help seal the deal. Once work begins, the service tracks time and expenses against the original estimate, and it also serves up follow-through reminders if a project appears to lose momentum. "Over time, you can compare projects and improve your estimates and pricing," Ralph says. "It's a great tool to determine what kinds of projects are most profitable."

Contacts
YourMilton.com manages your contacts, projects and finances so you don't have to. The brainchild of marketing, pricing and profitability expert Eric Ralph, the Milton web application organizes and simplifies project life cycles from start to finish, streamlining cost estimates, spending and billing along the way. "A lot of freelancers and small firms face the same problem--there's no integrated system for them to manage all aspects of their business," says Ralph, founder and president of Columbus, Ohio-based Milton. "Milton gives you that visibility." Clarity begins with a list of questions designed to prioritize contacts and separate good leads from bad. Milton also reminds execs when it's time to reconnect with clients, and it integrates contacts from different social networking platforms.

Finances
Milton's Finance Manager oversees client billing and sends reminders when invoices go 30 days past due. The service also assembles profitability reports broken down by client or project. And Milton's own financial impact? The service is available to individuals for $15 per month, which includes unlimited contacts, projects and invoices. A three-user package is available for $60 monthly, with the option to add more users for an additional $20 each.

This article was originally published in the September 2010 print edition of Entrepreneur with the headline: Your Management Guru.