It’s 3am and you have been laboring with a couple overnight. Your phone rings and you are shocked to see it’s another client that isn’t due for another 2 weeks. She’s in full labor and ready for you to come and support her. Unfortunately, it’s time to call in your backup. What does this process look like for you? Do you scramble to get the information to your backup? Does it require an extensive phone conversation where you relay the details about her birth preferences, fears, background etc? Or do you just give your backup the minimum amount of information “she want’s to go natural and is birthing at this hospital”. This situation is one of the reasons that led me to create YourDoulaBiz.
Before I found my calling as a doula, I worked as a database programmer. I am a true data lover and haven’t met a spreadsheet that I didn’t want to get my hands on. I used a few spreadsheets to manage my own doula business, but yearned for a more comprehensive program. I wanted one that I could access while away from my computer and one where I could easily share data with my backup at 3am.
YourDoulaBiz is a web based doula business management program designed for the modern doula. Its intuitive design is one that can be easily mastered by doulas no matter their technical abilities. The goal of the program is for it to make the running of a doula’s business easy. The secondary result is that the doula treats her doula business as a profession. Being a doula is often a calling, as well as a profession. As professionals we need to spend time on the business side of our work and have a good recordkeeping system.
The doulas using YourDoulaBiz now have an organized system. With just a few clicks they can email their clients invoices, request a DoulaMatch testimonial and share client data with their backup. Mileage and expenses are tracked and tax time is no longer a headache. Without crunching numbers they have access to their birth statistics like number of epidurals, number of csections and number of inductions. At any time they can see how much money they have collected in the year and what is owed.
Converting to a new way of managing your business can be a daunting task. When we are set into a routine it can be uncomfortable to break. Change is like that. I encourage doulas to give it a try. We have many happy customers that have signed on to YourDoulaBiz and haven’t looked back. They appreciate the ability to manage their data with ease and professionalism. When that 3am phone call comes and they have to call their backup, they are overjoyed that they can press a button and know that the backup now has access to all of the information that she needs.
Alice Turner
Before becoming a doula, Alice Turner was a database programmer. She managed her own doula business with a series of Excel spreadsheets and knew that there must be a better way.YourDoulaBiz.com is an exciting outcome of the marriage of her first and second professions! Along with YourDoulaBiz.com, Alice also runs YourDoulaBag.com and YourBirthBag.com. YourDoulaBag.com is the place to find doula tools as well as fun doula items like jewelry and t-shirts. YourBirthBag.com is where mamas-to-be can shop for items for their birth bags.