There’s no single solution that fits everyone, but it’s great to see a company do a proper indepth evaluation of some available tools and even better to see where we sit with ours (ProWorkflow).

We did think it was a well balanced report so have a read and see what you think. Feel welcome to try a free ProWorkflow trial account!

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Project Management and Time Tracking

Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

The world of Time Tracking and Project Management is a vast one. For small businesses like ours, there are seemingly endless time tracking solutions and a good number of project management answers.  I spent nearly two weeks evaluating options in my spare time, so hopefully this data will help save you some time.

Here are the criteria I used to narrow down the possible project management and time tracking solutions:

• Web based application
  Our dev’s use various platforms and it needs to run everywhere without install and upgrade headaches, I also considered Air and Flash apps
• Support for 5 users
  Because, yanno, we need five people to record time
• Time tracking must include timer with start/stop capabilities
  We are multi taskers and like accuracy; we considered products with timer widgets as well
• Feature list and pricing prominent
  Excluded all sites with vague details, no screenshots,  or “contact us for details and pricing” models, due to sheer volume and time needed to research
• Must have a free trial evaluation
  Yanno, so I could evaluate them
• Professional and sharp web site
  Attention to detail is critical to good software design and project management, how they run their site should reflect this

After nearly ten hours of research, I narrowed the field to fifteen products. Then I evaluated each product by importing several of our current projects into it and using the time tracking tools for one day. After which I ran reports and recorded my findings in a spreadsheet. The final ratings were on a 1-5 scale, based on usability, project management capabilities, time tracking capabilities, invoicing features, reporting capabilities, and API and integration tools. Here’s what I came up with:

Once I had some numbers to work with, I weighted each product to meet our needs, based on the following criteria:

• Usability: Ease and speed of use is very important to us, as we have little time for project management (x2)
• Time tracking capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Project management capabilities: highly critical (x5)
• Low price:  we want to keep the price under $50 a month, so our value calculation was tweaked accordingly:  rating *3 – (price per month/10)
• Invoicing, reports, and so on are nice, of course, but we can make due with our external, existing solutions

So, using this data, here were my findings:

It should be apparent that ProWorkflow is, hands down, the best overall project management software on the market. It’s quality, well thought out, bug free, fast, and powerful.

Skylight was by far the best for our needs, according to price versus quality. The rest of the data is interesting, but several of the products listed had a time tracking or project management rating less than three, which is insufficient for our needs. So the final choices for us were as follows:

• Skylight – use this and put up with the slow, laborious interface; our preference for now
• Basecamp + MyHours/Harvest/Tick – together, these products are a complete package, but pricey
• ProWorkflow – very pricey, but we could bite the bullet on this and get the best quality product on the market.

If you’d like to view or download the complete data, including links to all of the product sites, you can find all the gory details in the Google spreadsheet. You can also view the same data sorted by total quality instead.

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Article Republished from: Zenovations Blog
July 28, 2010 at 4:30 pm

I do realise that not everyone hangs on everything I have to say, but for those out these who leap out of bed in the morning just to hear my thoughts on things, here’s your very own “Julian101 iPhone app!”

Keep me in your pocket! Show me to your friends (and followers)! And let me keep you updated with my latest ramblings! I’ll be sharing thoughts on business, design, creativity and to be honest, whatever comes to mind!

Download Now!

Awesome! After about 6 months hard work and testing, the ProWorkflow native iPhone app is now live and available in the iPhone App Store!

I’m really proud of our ProWorkflow team and the dev team at Curious Media. Curious Media are PWF customers that developed the app in conjunction with the PWF guys. They all put in solid effort to plan, design, develop, test and document this app.

The iPhone app will add some awesome value to our user base and extend the ProWorkflow application’s use past the desktop to anywhere people are connected! This is a first release so we’ll be looking for feedback to develop the solution further.

Although there was significant cost to develop, we have decided to make this app free so it’s easy to download and deploy for all ProWorkflow users and their staff.

Richard has added an iPhone App section to our Help Center to help users get the iPhone app up and running.

Make sure you spread the word! Tell your workmates, friends, colleagues, business contacts, clients, contractors and anyone you can think of!

Download Now!

There are heaps of powerful features in ProWorkflow that can be enabled as and when needed, but they’re generally hidden to keep the interface uncluttered.

Contact the team to find out more about ProWorkflow

Software Review:

“Like all good online project management software, ProWorkflow manages projects and tasks assigned to users. Where ProWorkflow is set apart from its competition is in the extra features: time management, reports, invoicing, quote management and customizable settings.

ProWorkflow is marketed as having been designed with customer feedback, and it shows. The interface is streamlined and arranged in such a way that what users actually use is readily available. Other, less-often used features are kept a few clicks away.

We were especially impressed with the dashboard that users see upon login: a comprehensive view of tasks and projects that managed not to feel cluttered. The calendar on the left-hand side menu is a nice touch.

For managers, it is even possible to see the dashboard for another user, so that he or she can have a bird’s eye view of the user’s workload. But team management in ProWorkflow goes further than that: we were impressed with the staff workload report, which shows, for each user, how many hours are scheduled. It can even be broken by project and tasks. This makes it easy to see when a resource is overscheduled.

Yet another impressive feature is the invoicing module. As staff log in their time and expenses for each task and project, ProWorkflow builds a “bill” for the client. Then, within a few clicks, a professional-looking invoice can be built, that includes everything from staff hours and billed rates, to other expenses. Invoices are fully customizable.

ProWorkflow is chockfull of details that show they really listened to their customers:

• Multiple Tasks can be edited all at once in a grid.
• Email alerts are detailed and can be adapted to the company’s needs.
• The basic look and feel of the system can also easily be changed without having to contract work from ProWorkflow’s developers.
• Project managers can leverage a search feature that includes clients on top of the usual parameters.

Pricing is also simple at ProWorkflow: users pay for file space and staff logins. Tasks and projects are not limited. This is a welcome change from other systems that charge per project.

Overall, ProWorkflow is a highly flexible system that will benefit organizations big and small, without a steep learning curve, both on the user and the administrator sides.”

Julian,

Thank you for your response. I totally understand the situation and I’m happy to assist you guys in any way necessary for future releases or testing.

And in that train of thought, let me first say how tremendous your application is. I carefully and painstakingly reviewed well over 60 various online project management systems before selecting ProWorkflow and have been thrilled every since. I run our entire agency on it now and all my staff love it.

Second, I would like to tell you how instrumental Lara was in our decision. Sure the application is feature rich and slick, but her hands-on approach to sales and training made the decision a no-brainer.

We have kept in touch over various technical issues and she’s always happy to hear all my extensive program request ideas for future releases, (Or at least she’s great at pretending she’s happy to hear them).

Anyway, I believe she is a tremendous asset to your team and we are pleased to work with her whenever possible. Keep up the great work and thank you again for providing an application like no other.

Take care Julian and just make sure you guys never go anywhere. We depend on your app way too much now and from what I’ve seen out there, there’s a far distance to anything that’s even close to being considered comparable!
______________________________
www.envision-creative.com
David P. Smith | President

We love these emails. They give us confidence that we’re on the right track with the solution. Especially when we hear that ProWorkflow beat 60 other project management software solutions! wow!

We’ll continue to improve the app and ROI to customers. It’s what we live for!

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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Refer people and companies to the ProWorkflow solution and when they sign up as an ongoing customer, we’ll thank you with an affiliate payment! Easy!

Note: The affiliate program only pays out for Subscription accounts at this time (ie: not code sales)

WHATS THE COMMISSION STRUCTURE?

ProWorkflow subscription accounts sell for $10, $20 or $30 per user per month depending on the plan chosen.

We have 3x plans ($10, 20, 30 per user p/m). But ultimately there is a monthly price for an account based on the number of staff users.

So for example, a typical sale could be $160 per month.
The Affiliate program pays out the first month’s value of the signup as a one-off affiliate payment. This payment is paid out after the 3rd month the customer is with us.

Example: Customer signs up on the 15th Jan 09 for a $160 per month account

ProWorkflow receives from the customer:
    $160 on June 15, 2009
    $160 on July 15, 2009
    $160 on August 15, 2009

The Affiliate program will pay out $160 (first month) to the affiliate when 3rd month’s invoice is billed, ie: after the 15th August.

How does it work? Where are the banners?
When signed up, login to the Affiliate area and click on the ‘Creative’ tab. There are banner ads and text links to place on your website. Simply copy the appropriate code, place it on your site and the ads will appear. People that click the ad and sign up for a subscription account are tracked and will appear in your reports.

Note: Affiliate payments are only applicable for sales that occur within 180 days of clicking on your website ad.

WHERE IS THE REPORTING?

You will have access to a login area for affiliates where you have access to comprehensive reports about your referred traffic and affiliate sales.

HOW DO I GET PAID?

We are using the MyAp system for the affiliate program. This is one of the leading solutions for affiliate management. As part of our contract with MyAp, we will approve payments and transactions, but MyAp will post cheques out to affiliates when due. These will be sent out on the timeframe shown above.

WHAT IF I HAVE QUESTIONS?

If you come across any issues or have questions, please contact us through our contact form.

From day one, we set out  to build a global business founded on our low inertia business model.  We’ve never just been NZ focussed, it is as easy to reach Los Angeles, London or Levin so why not?

We’ve worked hard to setup automation for trials, sales, support, billing, licensing, client account maintenance and support; leaving our staff free to really talk to customers.  The model has run in profit from day one and the organic growth has allowed us to invest revenue back into the business to support top class infrastructure to support our SaaS application.

“Remember that in SaaS, the app is to SaaS what the hamburger is to MacDonalds – people forget that. The app is a small part. To go global the BUSINESS MODEL and INFRASTRUCTURE and SYSTEMS need to scale… The actual application is the least of your worries. Automation and infrastructure leave people to do what they do best, interact with people to solve problems.”

Supplementing our top team, the backend system called “ProCodeManager, which has seen nearly as much development as ProWorkflow is the ‘Engine’ behind the business and provides us with information on every bit of activity in the business, including dashboards for all user activity, follow up, account management, and financial performance.  PCM also highlights issues, ie: mail backing up, server errors etc. So it helps keep us all  on the ball!

The company has no debt, no cash needs beyond sustainable growth, market salaries, corporate governance, no need for funding, sufficient cash in bank to consider dividends, a 7 figure revenue and a growing happy user base.  We can see the growth and customers tell us PWF really helps in their business – a great place to be,  The PWF solution is essentially  ‘recession-friendly’ as it allows customers to  focus on efficiencies. Saving money in hard times is a handy substitute for revenue growth. Furthermore big business is breaking into small businesses in the USA (and all over), creating a much larger market of SME’s (our target market).

As about 75% of our revenue is charged in USD from offshore customers and the US Dollar has finally returned to a realistic cross rate that has been a shot in the arm for us, we really would like to see the New Zealand government taking more note in policy of our wild currency fluctuations.  It would help us plan better.

In our view the key metric for business is revenue per employee, we are driving for a target of US350k per person, at this level we are relatively immune to what the world does in terms of economic activity.  We are exposed to some risk through broadband connectivity so the better and faster our connections to the world the better for us.

Expenses are relatively fixed and we should be able to drive about 300-500k of revenue per staff member.

With hard work and determined effort  we have made page 1 on Google for the term “Project Management Software” and are now finding an increasing number of referral based sales as we’ve been around a few years now. We’ve been aligning our marketing spend to our product releases and the tidiness of PCM and will tweak it more as our organic growth increases.

We released Xero and QuickBooks integration last year, a Time Tracking Widget in Q3 08 and have just finished the ProWorkflow API.  We have a growing number of developers lining up to get into the API, either to integrate with their intranets or to build cool apps! We plan to build an app library for the ProWorkflow solution this year.

The ProWorkflow affiliate program is about to be launched late Feb and our plan is to drive this hard. We want to reward those who refer sales to us.

As our biggest user base is in the US, and the US has been dropping around 500,000 jobs each month, we have of course noticed some slowdown over recent months.  But once customers move past the shock of revenue falls, efficiency soon gets on the radar – so growth, for us, is back.  For us 2009 is about pushing out to new customers, keeping on keeping on with our efforts to supply good products, build on top class infrastructure from a low inertia operation.

So yes, we are in great shape. Slim, trim and rocking!  We will continue to work hard to support our customers and help then find efficiencies – a real substitute for revenue growth until the global economy bounces back

And my advice on company survival does not change in hard times or at any time.   Grow sales faster than costs, automate process, focus people on the stuff only people can do, have a real value (savings or revenue growth) proposition for your customers, if you can, be international from New Zealand.

Remember, if you have to SELL a product, you’re doing something wrong. Instead, you should be FACILITATING a purchase. Think about that for a bit…

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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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I’d say at a guess that it’ll be the end of them. It’s not easy to claw back credibility after an event like that. However, they were just a bookmarking service. You imagine this happening to a major SaaS application provider, ie: Project management, accounting, documents, etc. 

I’m trying to drive a little healthy fear into people as there are many online apps that haven’t addressed their infrastructure and backups. They may look good on the front end, but could just be a one man band with one server and no backups behind the scenes.

Make sure you do your homework when choosing a SaaS vendor for your business applications. At ProActive Software (www.proworkflow.com) we take the security and sensitivity of your vital business and project info very seriously and have professional infrastructure and top security, setup at who we consider the USA’s top data center – www.fastservers.net.

Here’s our data security page: Read about ProWorkflow Data Security.

Regarding backups, the ProWorkflow solution has automatic monitored backups that run 4x daily with a 14 day retention. That means we keep 56 copies of every customers’ database backup for up to 2 week rollbacks! The latest 4x backups are kept on the subscription servers and others are kept on the Fastservers remote backup servers.

In addition! We also allow customers to download their full database backup file at ANY time from within the application!

As it happens, sometimes you need the backups to restore for silly things, like if a customer intentionally (or accidentally) deletes a pile of their precious data…

Here’s an example of a ‘non-stressful’ backup restore we hade to do today. No big dramas… But was the easiest way to fix the issue for the customer.

Good Morning PWF,

We seem to have lost an entire category and our custom “look and feel”. We are looking for our Member Bank Projects category. Is there a way that you kind find and restore?

- CLIENT

Hi there,

Re: Look’n’feel. Just checking your audit log, it seems that XXXX (your Staff) has reset your look’n’feel settings. We’re not able to simply bring these back as it was a chosen option, however we could do this by restoring a backup.

Re: Projects Category. The Project Category was deleted on 2 Feb 09, and subsequently all projects and tasks within this category were deleted as that was the chosen option.

We’re either able to run a script to bring this info back, or restore a backup from before this time (all data entered since that time will be unavailable if we go with this option).

I’ll give you a call and check how you’d like to proceed.

- PROWORKFLOW STAFF

Hi PWF,

I think we’ll have to go with the restore of a backup. I understand that anything that happened this morning after the restored backup will be lost.

- CLIENT

Hi there,

Your account has now been restored from the latest backup which was made at 4.30am on 2 February.

- PROWORKFLOW STAFF

Hi PWF,

Perfect!  You guys saved my life…or at least my sanity :-)

- CLIENT

SO it pays to have backups eh!

————-
About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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I’m the CEO, Alan Barlow is the CTO and we have a tight team of legends. We spend all our days (and nights/weekends) working on our dream app – ProWorkflow. Here’s the crux through… Although we have thousands of users, and the tool is being well adopted and used by some big companies, because we’re virtual it’s hard to get any sort of ‘emotive’ sense of what we’re actually doing for the customer.

If they’re happy, they just use it (and we don’t hear from them), if they’re grumpy they email us, and otherwise it’s relatively quiet! Just a world of ‘ProWorkers‘ busily working away. That’s why it’s great to receive feedback (from our feedback survey) like the below comments! These made our day!

What does your company do?

Crash Brokers provides a unique premium service in motor vehicle accident & collision repair management.

What services do you provide?

Crash Brokers’ service is available to fleet operators and the general public. When car accidents happen, we provide a one-call solution that saves customers time, stress and money. We manage all logistics before, during and after repairs – from the point of impact through to the day of re-delivery. This includes free pick-up/delivery, free late model courtesy cars & vans, fantastic customer service and communications using ProWorkflow.

How do you differentiate yourself from your competitors?

Professional accident management has only ever been available to large fleets at significant cost. Crash Brokers’ model is completely different, and requires no registration or contract so it’s available to everyone when they need it – and the best part is our service is completely free of charge to customers

What’s the back-story of your company? How/when/why was it founded?

I launched Crash Brokers in 2004 in response to an obvious gap in the market – initially SME’s, professionals and individual motorists, though we now serve fleets of all sizes too. I have over 20 years experience in collision repair (“panel beating”) and have held senior roles in car sales and car leasing. As such I’ve experienced the collision repair sector from both sides of the fence, and recognized that there was an opportunity to turn my old “trade” into a professional service that would ensure consistent technical and customer service quality for customers.

What’s your latest piece(s) of work, a recent project, something your company does or did that you’re proud of?

Crash Brokers strength has always been in the caliber of our business partners including preferred supplier status with the professional institutes and car leasing firms. Our most recent, and greatest, success has been a strategic alliance with Protecta Insurance. All Protecta clients now have direct access to Crash Brokers’ expertise so can expect first-class quality and a superior service experience if they’re involved in a collision. Protecta are a great success story themselves, being the only remaining NZ-owned insurance company, they’re very customer focused and Crash Brokers are very proud to be working with them.

Do you have any tips or tricks for other companies to help through the tough economic times?

Nothing is impossible, never give up. It’s a big business pie out there, focus on finding ways to get more of it. Our Protecta Insurance success was no overnight sensation, it’s taken four long years of hard word and determination in the face of constant market resistance and great adversity.

You’re obviously a ProWorkflow customer, why did you choose it over competitors?

I was working with an IT consultant at the time in order to design and develop the perfect web-based system for managing multiple collision repair cases. I happened to mention this to a friend involved in software sales and complained about why there wasn’t an off-the-shelf program that would suit – I got a call from her two days later to say she’d found ProWorkflow and it appeared to provide all the functionality from my wish-list.

How do you use ProWorkflow in your company?

ProWorkflow is now the heart of Crash Brokers’ operation, we’ve eliminated paper records and simply could not function without it. It’s much more than record keeping and billing for us, it is our entire communications system for our staff, service providers, customers and insurance brokers. ProWorkflow provides total transparency and accountability for every case we handle. We love it and our customers love it.

What has ProActive software been like to deal with?

Amazing! I had to become expert in ProWorkflow before training our staff. IT is a major challenge for me, but I found ProWorkflow easy to navigate and intuitive to use, and the technical support is fantastic!

Any final words?

I could not overstate the transformation to Crash Brokers’ operation that has been facilitated by ProWorkflow. I literally is the heart of our operation. I find three factors particularly astounding:
a) That an off-the-shelf program that was never designed for our application or industry can deliver 100% of the functionality we need,
b) We were initially prepared to spend a 6-figure sum to achieve this result and…
c) ProWorkflow does all this for $20/month per user. I consider our move to ProWorkflow to have been our best business decision to date, and the most significant operational improvement by far.

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About the author:
Julian Stone, CEO – Project Management Software visionary for:
ProActive Software, ProWorkflow, ProWorkflow Blog & Julian101
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