To Use One Core Tool or Integrate With Many?

If you had to decide on just one profit that you simply worth most in a enterprise administration instrument, which one would it not be? 

Would it’s its variety of completely different options, its person friendliness, its skill to simply combine with different instruments, buyer help, or flexibility in pricing?

It’s arduous to decide on only one profit, isn’t it? In truth, you’d most likely like your company administration platform to have all the above.

In this text, we sort out whether or not or not it’s doable to make use of just one instrument to run your whole company—or if end-to-end company administration requires quite a few completely different integrations to get the info that you must transfer your company ahead.

Whether you’re a challenge supervisor, head of operations, or the CEO of an company, one of the necessary issues that you simply want is to have the ability to entry real-time enterprise information. That mainly means all of the most important KPIs to keep your agency profitable: income, revenue margins, utilization, forecasting, and comparable. 

To do that, you’re continuously looking out for that one instrument (or a mixture of instruments) that can make complicated tasks less complicated, timelines and duties extra clear, and your teammates extra aligned. 

So the query is: can an company discover (and use) just one instrument as a substitute of a number of enterprise administration instruments? Maybe a greater query is: which options are essential for an company administration instrument to have? 

We all know that company administration encompasses a number of disciplines: gross sales, HR, operations, consumer servicing, manufacturing i.e. challenge administration (any sort of inventive work—from copywriting to improvement), monetary forecasting, accounting, and extra.

Option 2: Multiple Integrations 

There are enterprise instruments on the market which might be specialised in challenge administration, time monitoring, gross sales administration… Yet, when all these options aren’t related in the identical system, how do you get consolidated information?

That’s the place integrations are available in. At a look, a instrument that’s specialised in a single service and might combine with a whole lot of different apps is nice. But the difficulty nonetheless stays: how do you get all of your teammates, exterior companions, purchasers, accounting companies on the identical web page? It could also be simple to navigate from one to a different—however ultimately, you’ll begin shedding focus.

A typical state of affairs when working process administration in a single platform, time monitoring in one other, and making an attempt to maintain monitor of price range administration and tasks in Gantt chart-like instruments or spreadsheets is squandering precious time and artistic vitality whereas switching between these instruments. Another massive problem is getting consolidated information at your fingertips.

Using Productive as One Scalable Agency Tool 

Productive is an company administration instrument that exists to assist businesses attain their highest potential. Its purpose is to be the one instrument that you must run a worthwhile company by changing spreadsheets and a number of instruments. 

It does that by supplying you with healthful view of your enterprise via seven core options:

productive-sales-dashboard
Source: Productive

Productive allows you to set your company’s gross sales funnel up in phases so you possibly can push offers in direction of closure and see the place your potential purchasers stand, at a look. Once a brand new deal is closed, it’s easy to transform it into a brand new challenge and hold all the info in a single instrument.

productive-time-tracking-feature
Source: Productive

Productive made time monitoring easy-to-use by providing a number of completely different strategies to trace time: it may be tracked every day, weekly, through calendar integrations, robotically… Because tracked hours are related to your company’s challenge budgets and companies, reporting and billing, you may get correct information in actual time in Productive.

productive-resource-planning-dashboard
Source: Productive

Operations and useful resource planning are essential in businesses. You can get a high-level overview of useful resource schedules and utilization and do monetary forecasting, plus predict hiring plans with Productive’s Scheduling characteristic. Employees who requested any sort of break day in Productive are additionally robotically indicated as unavailable in Scheduling, which makes it all of the extra simpler to plan work out.

productive-budgeting
Source: Productive

Productive’s Budgeting characteristic allows you to get a world view of your consumer’s challenge budgets and monitor the state of every price range. You can add customized fields, columns and filter information because it fits you and your workforce.

productive-project-management-dashboard
Source: Productive

Agency work largely revolves round delivering companies via challenge timelines, that are damaged down into smaller duties which might be assigned to completely different teammates with deadlines or time frames. In Productive, you possibly can set your tasks up in several views (e.g. Board view, Table view, or Timeline view) and collaborate with teammates, exterior companions (contractors) and you may even invite your purchasers onboard.   

productive-reporting-dashboard
Source: Productive

With tracked time and bills entered into Productive, your company can get real-time information to make assured, data-driven choices via over 50 agency-focused insights, or by constructing your personal stories from scratch.

productive-billing-feature
Source: Productive

In Productive, you possibly can select from budgeted quantities, recurring charges, tracked time or bills to rapidly create invoices and ship them out to purchasers. After every challenge is full, your accounting division can simply care for billing as a result of all of your information is in a single place.

To Use One Core Tool or Integrate With Other Tools? 

You can’t run completely all your company work in a single instrument. First, that is unattainable as a result of businesses normally ship companies which might be produced in specialised instruments. Second, relying on the dimensions and sort of your company and the nation (or a number of markets) you use from—sure extra instruments will streamline and automate your company’s work. 

Productive is built-in with quite a few in style enterprise and finance administration instruments, equivalent to:

  • Popular Calendar Tools: Google Calendar and MS Outlook

The greatest good thing about synchronizing calendars with Productive is having these occasions as robotically tracked time in Productive.

  • Accounting instruments: Xero, QuickBooks, Exact, Visma e-conomic

Productive’s sync with Xero, QuickBooks, Exact and Visma e-conomic allows you to simply export and duplicate invoiced quantities from one instrument to the opposite for additional processing.

If your company does a variety of improvement work and your groups are accustomed to utilizing Jira, you possibly can merely join the 2 instruments and streamline work.

  • Zapier and Custom Integrations

Productive’s API allows you to fill in any gaps that your enterprise wants. On the opposite hand, if you wish to entry particular apps that Productive doesn’t instantly combine with, you possibly can arrange sure actions in Productive to set off reactions in different apps through Zapier in a whole lot of different instruments.

Last, however not least—Productive and Slack work hand in hand, in a means that process and challenge administration are streamlined via Slack in direction of Productive, and vice versa. For instance, you may get Productive notifications in Slack, or ship fast replies to feedback in Productive with out leaving your company’s Slack group. 

Another cool choice is syncing your Slack standing together with your Productive group and calendar of selection, so your break day standing or calendar occasion are all the identical.

productive-slack-integration
Source: Productive

One Core Agency Management Tool and a Few Key Integrations

The conclusion is fairly easy: sure, you could find one core company administration instrument, however you’ll additionally have to arrange a couple of integrations relying on the kind of company you run. Usually, these integrations can be geared in direction of market particular accounting companies and broadly unfold communications and organizational instruments equivalent to Slack and the Google Suite.

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