The Tools I use for managing my work remotely.
Communication
I use Slack to communicate (synchronously or asynchronously) with clients and other team members. Thanks to it’s integration of audio and video calls as well as screen sharing capabilities it is a great tool. If some enterprise firewalls won’t let me, Google Hangouts is my fallback for calls.
File Storage
For storing files and being able to share them I use Dropbox a lot. That makes it easy to have a backup of all my personal and professionell data independent from any physical device. Google Docs is simply the best tool for collaborating on documents, so this comes in handy as well.
Receipts
As you do not want to discuss with german tax authorities about any missing receipts, I scan them with my phone and the Scanbot App as quickly as possible (as I loose paper documents all the time but can store them perfectly digitally). After scanning they are automatically uploaded into my Dropbox (Scanbot can integrate with many more services). The app has integrated OCR support which is super nice for full text searches.
Versioning
All my code is stored in different GitLab installations (some clients have their own on-premise, otherwise I use their hosted service as I do not want to handle with the server administration). With issues and merge requests it is nice to work together with others. I use their CI Pipelines for automatic testing, building docker images, deployments and more.
VoIP
For the rare occasions where I need the “good old phone”, I have a VoIP number from Sipgate. For 10€/month I get a flatrate for calling German numbers and I could always add international packages if needed. Their mailbox is pretty impressive, as you get not only the audio-file via mail, but also a transcript via text.
Timezones
To stay on top of all the timezones people are in, I like to have their current date and time at hand. For a long while I used Clocker to have a second clock on my Mac. I recently switched to try out There as it is promising to update timezones of other users automatically. But I miss to have a second clock to see other timezones without an additional click. We will see which tool will make it in the end. On my iPhone I use Klok (we will see if There will make it’s way to that, too).
Accounting
Fastbill is my tool of choice to handle time tracking, quotations and invoicing. My process a one-man company is not that complex and while it is not the best one, it gets the job done for a cheap price and has all the information my accountant needs without big effort. I am missing a few KPIs, but with their API and some Javascript-Code I am able to pull them out of their system whenever I need them.
Asynchronous stand ups
To manage information of my progress and what other team members are doing I use my own Slackbot (yes, this is bias and self-promotion here, but hey… it’s my blog!). It is good to stay on the same page and more often than not it had helped me and the people to achieve that without having another meeting.