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If you have a small business or are starting a small business, the costs add up quickly. You need equipment, a workspace, internet connections, and web hosting among other things. In our increasingly web-oriented society, phone services are falling by the wayside.

Traditional providers charge way too much for limited services, and consumer-grade VoIP may not cut it for a small business. Your phone system, voicemail, and call handling can make a significant impact on both existing and new customers.

A professional presence on the phone will let clients know that you take your business seriously. Phonebooth can help your small business make a great first impression starting out, and it is free.

Phonebooth has several core functions:

1. It is a call forwarding service. The Find Me, Follow Me function will ring multiple telephone numbers for a few seconds each before the call goes to voicemail. If you step out of the office to get lunch, but are waiting for an important call, Phonebooth will ring all of the numbers you specify for a designated amount of time before going to voicemail.

You can pick your call up on your cell phone, and your client does not have to remember to call you at a different number. If you set up more than one employee in Phonebooth, you can also have it ring other extensions.

2. You can set up a group, give it an extension, and have Phonebooth ring all of the employees in the group at once or ring their phones one at a time. This would be a good way to set up an emergency line, so callers have the best chance of talking to a live person rather than being forwarded to voicemail if there is a major problem.

3. If you need to route calls to certain people or extensions for certain reasons (technical support, emergencies, customer service, etc.), you can set up an Auto Attendant in Phonebooth.

You can record custom messages telling callers how to get to the right person, and they will press the appropriate buttons to be redirected. Even though people do not like automated phone services, since you are using your own voice, you can make the messages welcoming, and give the caller that you are running a professional operation.

4. Phonebooth transcribes your voicemail messages (50 per month on for free) so you can read them as well as save a digital recording of them. This allows you to hold onto important voicemails, and keep a transcription for your records. It is a good (passive) way to collect customer information.

Phonebooth’s free service is restricted to 50 users, and 200 inbound minutes a month, which is not bad to start. If you need to upgrade, they also provide premium services for your business.

Even though it is an extremely good service, we did have some difficult getting a number local to our area, but that will become less frequent as they add additional numbers. There also seems to be a large gap between the free service and the paid service that could possibly be filled with another paid tier of service.

The premium service, Phonebooth OnDemand, is a bit too much for a sole proprietorship or a business with less than 5 full-time employees. Hopefully Phonebooth will fill those gaps and provide more services to very small business and teleworkers in the future.