WordPress has become a great platform for a wide range of website needs. Originally designed for blogging it is now a common package for full fledged content management systems and even complete web based applications.

Now we even have great opportunities to use WordPress as an internal communication and back office tool. With these assortments of plug-ins we can use our favorite open source software to improve our businesses, efficiency and offer more solutions to our clients.

Billing

If you are a freelancer or a small company you know how much time can be sucked up by managing your billing. This is a bit of a shame because the billing part of the job should be the most fun, it's how you get paid! There are a lot of available paid solutions for billing, but they are all hosted on different websites and applications and are not as nice and neatly integrated as doing it through WordPress. Luckily we have WP-Invoice, a full invoice creation and tracking system that integrates with WordPress directly.

It features:

• E-mail invoices to clients
• Save client data
• Payment processing options such as Authorize.net, Paypal, etc...
• Archived invoices
• Secure connection for viewing invoices

Download WP-Invoice

Contact Relationship Management

As your business grows the amount of clients, leads and strategic partners you have will also grow. It is time to throw out the Rolodex, get rid of your piles of business cards, there are better ways to manage your contacts. The newest solution would be using a Contact Relationship Management system or CRM. There are a wide range of different CRM solutions available (salesforce.com, highrise, etc...) however WordPress can function as one with the simple installation of a plug-in!

WP-CRM features:

• Associate an image with each contact.
• Assign each contact to a company… or don’t.
• Create a note history for each contact.
• Clickable email and website links.
• Google map contacts address.
• Dial a phone number (works on cell phones with internet browsers).
• Fully hcard / vcard compatible.

Download WP-CRM

Project Management

Still using a pen and paper to manage your projects? You might as well be using a sundial to check the time! Using software to manage and track your projects is a lot easier and more sophisticated. While there are plenty of good commercial solutions available, why not integrate it into WordPress? That way it is easy to use, customizable and open source. With the simple installation of a plug-in you can:

• Track clients
• Track projects by client
• Track tasks by project
• Track time per task with dynamic timer like Harvest

Download WP-Project

Office Communication

Sometimes proper and adequate communication is the most important and most difficult aspects of running a larger company. There are all sorts of tools that attempt to correct and fix this problem, some of them more effective than others. The WordPress team themselves encountered this issue and sought to find a solution that integrated into their beautiful piece of software. Hence Prologue was born - a twitter like tool that can run off of your web server.

Download Prologue

Newsletter & Notifications

Need to send news and updates to your employees? Maybe you want to do some e-mail marketing for your company? Rather than pay monthly or per e-mail using an overpriced and underachieving e-mail marketing solution just integrate it with WordPress. There is a simple, effective and easy to use newsletter tool that will do everything you need and more.

Download the Newsletter Plugin

Calendar

Keep track of all the events and important milestones going on with your business by using a simple and easy to use calendar system. There are a handful of WordPress plug-ins that let you create and manage calendars, I have had the best luck with WP-Calendar. If you want to get very fancy you could also have a members only calendar so that only employees and those with a login can see it.

Download the Calendar Plugin

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