Privacy in business
I always try to be privacy conscious in my personal doing and with my personal data. When you manage yourself - one entity, it is nowadays quite easy to reach a point, when your data are on your server and your online tracking is minimized. However when you run a business, you have to collect certain amount of data about other people and handle them with care.
And my wife does run a business. I am taking care of the technical stuff and always trying to ease some of the running of business burden of her while also trying to innovate a bit (she is not a big fan of the innovate part 😄) and not to obstruct the way she works. All the necessary services are running on my server so I would like to dedicate some space to this.
The PWL stack
Can I call it a stack? I always call it a stack. Some of the services were new in the back-end and some of them were replacing some current solutions.
Website
We are running two websites with two different target audiences - English and Russian speaking. They are both running on Ghost and I think it was a good decision. I played around with other CMSs in the past but Ghost is very easy to manage and use. I always say that it was made by iPhone users for iPhone users. These require MySQL database to run, so I had to deploy it aside the MariaDB.
Ghost holds names, email addresses and country of origin. These are personal information so we had to specify those in the privacy policy. Privacy policy is a good place to tell the user all the other pieces of information that you store about them in other tools.
Booking
When the website had something to offer, I also wanted to automate the booking. This can be quite tedious and repeating - you always have to ask what, when, how much, how many people etc. This is now covered by cal.com, which is a very powerful planning tool and we use only small portion of it. This requires PostgreSQL database, so I deployed yet another database.
It was quite sensitive to get it up an running. I was running into all sorts of issues but they mention that the docker container is not ready for production. Some of the issues were definitely happening because I was not aware how the internals work and other portion was because of heavy caching.
Cal.com collect names, phone numbers and emails. Payment details are entirely handled by Stripe and this is covered on their side.
Other notable mentions:
Not as powerful as cal.com, but it might be an option if do not need payments and you have already Nextcloud running.
Accounting
This was a tough one but it was also most needed. The current solution was an Excel sheet, which is perfectly working solution, if you are keeping the books every day. When you attack it once every month or two and there is a lot of physical cash involved, it can get messy. So there was sometimes whole weekend spend in this table.
The offering is quite weak in this area. I tried BigCapital, but did not even manage to start the container. Other solutions did not offer some of the features that we needed - I think the multi-currency option was often missing. I ended up using Akaunting. The support is not great and the software is not flawless, but it works if you find the way to handle it. This runs on a MariaDB or MySQL database, which I had already up.
The accounting contains names and addresses again. Businesses might have more information, like contact details.
Other notable mentions:
I did not manage to run it. Mainly because of the mongoDB requirement.
Recently discovered. Heard only good feedback on this. Might be a replacement of akaunting if I stop liking it.
This has some paid plugins, one of them is accounting. I was testing it because I was also after CRM.
Automation
I started with automation because I wanted to automate adding members to Ghost based on Stripe transactions. This was done in Zapier, which was quite limited. Then I discovered Make, which I used to send notifications about failed mail delivery, and finally, while setting up Cal.com, I discovered n8n. Make was better than Zapier, but n8n is a whole different level.
I never learned to code anything properly. I know HTML and CSS but static sites are not very popular nowadays, although it still comes in handy. In n8n I learned how to work with APIs, JSON, data types and much more. It is a great tool. Requires PostgreSQL database, which I already had running.
Now n8n does not hold any personal data, it just takes them from one service and serves them to another one. You might be able to dig some personal data from the saved workflow runs though.
Other notable mentions:
https://www.make.com/en - very powerful tool. Easy to understand UI and it can be free if you can fit your needs into two workflows.
Good for starters, but you have to keep it simple.
Final words
I will try to describe the containers that I am running in the near future as I am quite settled now. It might be useful for some of you!
