I too have been facing the dilemma of trying to find that ‘perfect’ PMS / Time Tracker / CRM. My situation is fairly unique. My company operates as a division of a much larger marketing company. We handle all of the sales, work, project management etc… but I need to communicate with HR and Accounting departments what projects we’ve got, who’s assigned and what the status of the project / timeline is for billing purposes.
We currently use Basecamp and Highrise but I don’t get much use out of Highrise and Basecamp is great but it’s missing some key features in my book.
Basecamp Wishlist
• Ability to track projects from initial consultation through proposal, contracts, deposit and completion. It would be nice to be able to catalog which projects we landed, which ones we didn’t and let authorized people see what billings are coming up.
• Simple Billing Layer - My billing department has to email me to tell me what’s been paid and what hasn’t which is hard to keep track of to make sure that no bills / time slips through the cracks. Would be great if they could flag “time logs” as paid or “billed”. Seems like a simple feature. We use the time logging feature which helps but you can’t log “time” on a project based fee in Basecamp.
• Simple Mind Map Functionality - Mind maps are tremendously helpful. I use Basecamps “White Board” feature but it’s pretty useless when considering you can just as efficiently create a shared Google doc which is what we do 99% of the time anyways.
• Embedded CRM - I hate having to switch to Highrise and don’t feel like it offers us the tools which we need. One simple feature would be the ability to setup reminders to contact clients at specific dates. Sure you can do this with To-do’s but I don’t want my client relations biz mixed with my dev biz.
Update: now our winning combination is ActiveCollab + Pivotal Tracker + Freshbooks.
We went to Freshbooks because the time tracking integration with aC isn’t much, and there is no tracking with Pivotal Tracker. I did a rough analysis and decided that the ‘value’ of having super tight time tracking integration was significant - who doesn’t want to have developers starting and finishing tasks with automatic time tracker?
But, even though that is valuable we get a much higher value by having excellent collaboration through aC and a very simple and effective taskflow through Pivotal Tracker. So, it’s actually easier to have an administrator/bookkeeper type nag developer to track their hours (old school) and have them use the friendly Freshbooks interface to do it.
In the end, the overall productivity seems higher if we leverage tools for development speed and quality first, and administrative things like time tracking second. There is a new agile plug in for aC that I might try, and if they put together a better time tracking system I’m interested in that, too.
ActiveCollab is drifting from being a basecamp clone (which I am happy about) and is really becoming mature. Zoho is also pretty impressive!
Right now I’m testing producteev. It’s very simple, just for creating small tasks. But that’s all I need - the most important is the project not its management.
Hi,
I can suggest you to have a look at eResource Scheduler. This configurable resource scheduling software is easy to use and generate booking on a single click. You can assign costs to projects or resources where financial reports give all the financial details of a single resource or the whole project. The software is collaborative which facilitate users to create multiple login and check out their schedules. Timesheet , forecasting report, drag & drop scheduling, etc are features of eResource Scheduler.
Given the features that you’re looking for including finance management, team collaboration, resource allocation and others - I’d suggest you check out Microsoft’s project management software. It can be accessed over a web-based connected platform as well.