I'm a bit stumped here, folks. I've been running my own business for a while now, and I've cobbled together a bunch of tools that help me get my work done, but what I'm doing only works because it's just me in the business. Because of that, I get by just fine using the most basic features of Freshbooks and Square, and then routing all my business email through GMail.

But now I'm trying to help a colleague out with her business, which is bigger than mine but very behind with technology. She runs a carpet cleaning (and other home services) company with her husband, and they have a few employees that go out to do the jobs.

She's looking to use technology to help grow her business. She wants her techs to have tablets for a few reasons (presumably iPads but whatever gets the job done - a Nexus 7 would be cheaper). She wants to do the following on these tablets:

- take credit card payments
- have her employees receive their agenda for the day, with all the address and service information on it
- if the employee ends up adding services on site, they update a central ticketing system (which I guess ties into that last one)
- get signatures on estimate forms and work completion waivers (personally, I think that from a legal standpoint she might want a paper trail for this one, but it's what she wants). Anyway, these forms are customized, so the solution here would need to work with them...

In addition to all this, she's also looking for good solutions for keeping track of customer data, and using that to feed the information for sending out newsletters.

Currently, their business uses Quickbooks for their accounting, but they're not in love with it. They also have a payment processor who is apparently really terrible. One of her customers contested a $10K mold remediation charge, and her CC processor refunded the money without even telling her! Yeesh. Long story short, she's not wedded to anything.

I'm really not familiar with anything that combines all of these elements. I also don't know much about ticketing systems...

Do any of you have experience with these kinds of tools, or know of anything that might be useful here?