Producing great design is one thing, but running a studio means you need a whole lot more than just Adobe's Creative Suite.
I took me most of last year to finally settle into a system that works for us, and I found most of it through recommendation and reading up on the subject. So I thought it might be useful to post about what we use, how it helps us, and maybe it will help someone else in a similar position.
We are a team of 2 creatives, 1 developer and various contractors. We produce design, build websites, manage print and offer project management on exhibition builds etc. So we need to manage tasks, track time, send estimates and invoices - and of course submit accounts / VAT returns.
We've arrived at a solution that is the most cost effective and manageable way for us to do the above:
Freeagent (plus the Eon widget): Timeslips, Paperwork & Accounting.
Basecamp: Project & studio task management.
When I started the company I used (again on recommendation) a piece of software called Billings. It's fantastic for sole users on one machine and really gave me a lot of value when first starting out. From timing jobs to billing for them - both essential!
Last year we grew, and with new team members (full time, part time and remote) I needed a new way to assign tasks and track everyone's time.
I did a lot of looking around, and fell in love with products like Streamtime and Sohnar - but with only a couple of us these systems were simply too big. You need your own server, and those systems also both feature a chunky CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, and we don't need anything that complicated yet. But we do need to keep track of leads, who's called them and what is the next step.
I then discovered that Billings produce a "Pro" version, one which either ran off an in house server - or off their cloud based service, perfect! We could migrate all our data, use a system we were familiar with and people could login using a browser window to track their time.
Well, that worked for all of five minutes.
We found their cloud based service to be very unstable, and after a lot of patches, updates and fixes we were faced with a system that failed to work on a daily basis.
By this point we were already using Basecamp for task management and it works wonderfully, flat monthly rate no matter how many users you have. Give clients and staff access to individual projects, assign tasks, track comments, see timelines on a calendar (which you can import to your calendar) and a whole host of other goodies. Please do go and check it out. I also use Basecamp to keep track of my leads, creating a to do list with tasks for each lead. We can comment on these and keep everyone involved abreast of what stage we're at with each lead.
Thankfully then a friend came to the rescue with a system for timekeeping and accounting he'd been using for his similarly sized company - Freeagent.
Freeagent is bloody awesome! All your time, all your money (inc payroll and taxes) all in one place. You can get a 30 day free trial and I'd wholeheartedly recommend giving it some consideration. You access both these services through your browser, and both carry costs of around £25pcm (cheaper than Billings). To track time using Freeagent you'll need a widget called "Eon" this can be found over here. And it carries a one off payment of £30, you can then install it on all your Macs and sign into Freeagent through it to access tasks and projects. We then all simply submit our time at the end of every day and it syncs straight to Freeagent.
This is what has worked for us, and everyone's needs are different. If you've got any questions please don't hesitate to give me a shout, I'd be happy to help in anyway I might be able to.
Karl.
Glad to hear you've found a system that works. We've been looking for about 10 years now!! It's just now starting to get exciting, as there's some really cool tools being developed that are starting to talk to each other and integrate into a full ERP system for small businesses. The cool thing is that the online guys are developing so much quicker than the old school server or PC/Mac based ones.
ReplyDeleteWe're lucky to have seriously tried both Function Point and Streamtime, neither of which worked for us. But we've learnt some important lessons from it. We've also looked at the Basecamp/FA combo which seems ile a good fit, but right now we're experimenting with WORKetc, which we're pretty impressed with. And WORKetc is just about to launch a Beta integration with XERO which we are looking at for the accounts. We'd just like this to talk to MailChimp and life would be peachy!
Whatever tools you choose though, there's never been such an exciting array of possibilities and I really feel that the time of a few brilliantly integrated and easy to use small business management systems is just around the corner.
Completely share your enthusiasm and excitement! Thanks for commenting :)
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