Websites and custom software for Chicago small businesses

Central time runs two hours ahead of Pacific all year, since Chicago and Los Angeles change their clocks on the same days. That leaves six shared hours, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Chicago, for calls and reviews over a shared screen.

Before 11 a.m. in Chicago the Los Angeles day has not started, and those hours go to writing: comments on the preview link, and answers to the questions the plan left open.

The Loop holds many of the city's law and accounting firms, and the old warehouses of Fulton Market in the West Loop now house restaurants and offices. Pilsen and Logan Square are known for independent restaurants and shops, and Wicker Park has its own run of boutiques. Home services companies, from plumbing to roofing, cover every corner of the city.

The SBA Office of Advocacy's 2025 profile of the Chicago, Naperville and Elgin metro area finds more people working at small businesses in health care and social assistance than in any other industry: 255,608 in 2022. The practices that employ them include dental and medical groups with more than one office, from the city out to Evanston, Oak Park and Naperville.

Corporations and LLCs register with the Illinois Secretary of State's Business Services department. Inside the city, the Department of Business Affairs and Consumer Protection licenses businesses and regulates business activity, and the license a business needs depends on what it does. A dental practice is generally exempt, because the state licenses dentists, unless it also runs a business the state license does not cover.

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce is a citywide chamber, and World Business Chicago is the city's public-private economic development agency. Many neighborhoods also have a chamber of their own, and a listing with yours ties your site to the street you are on.

Patients search for the office nearest them, so each office needs a page with its own hours and the insurance plans it takes, matching its business profile. New patients should be able to fill in their forms before the first visit, on a phone, in one sitting.

The trouble with two offices is two front desks. A patient who moves between them should not fill in the same history twice, and staff at either desk should see which forms are still missing before the first appointment of the day.

Say an invented dental group has one office in Logan Square and one in Evanston. Each front desk keeps its own paper forms and its own list of missing ones, and patients who switch offices fill in everything again.

The build is the price book's Typical tier for apps, $23,800, because it spans two offices with their own staff and sends texts. Forms are filed to the patient, and each office gets a view of the day's appointments with missing forms flagged. The practice software stays where it is.

Nothing forces both offices to start at once, and the forms can go live in one office first. Afterward, the practice could keep the app on the app support retainer, priced as a share of the build each year, or pay for changes by the hour at $150, with the book's minimum per job.

A restaurant in Pilsen or a shop in Wicker Park would use these same services, each in its own mix.