“Having one solution for every aspect of our business has saved us time, money and confusion.”
This is just one G2 review from our many happy customers who use Scoro not just for project management, but as an end-to-end collaborative work management (CWM) platform. In other words, a solution that improves productivity, profitability and employee satisfaction across all areas of the organization.
CWM is based on four basic principles: sell it, plan it, track it, bill it.
For almost every business – but perhaps especially marketing agencies, professional services firms, software developers or any other company that sells their employees’ know-how by the hour – a CWM has become table stakes. However, sophisticated your individual project planning and time management platform may be, an end-to-end solution enables you to work far more effectively.
By including the initial selling stage, as well as the final invoicing stage, a CWM tool like Scoro completes the work cycle and enables businesses to take more control. It helps you to:
Sell: Manage your customer relationships, prices and quotations
When work management solutions don’t support you in providing quick and accurate quotations for customers, it can be easy to trip up. Even with clients you have known for years, these processes can be time-consuming and complicated.
With Scoro, you can manage your customer contacts and prospects, segment customer groups for marketing initiatives and use pre-designed templates to create standardized quotes. You can create professional PDFs in just a few clicks.
“Scoro is the best tool to handle clients, and even sales, in a very satisfactory way. It has an excellent function of task automation, which allows us to take an organized and effective approach.”
Most business relationships involve nuggets of information that are easy to forget and costly if you don’t account for them when you are pricing a job. Scoro’s templates allow you to create custom price lists for each customer, including items like customs rates, margins, mark-ups, discounts and approved suppliers. This way, you can be confident you’re not overlooking any factors that could affect your bottom line or force you back to the client for an awkward conversation about varying the contract.
Scoro’s automation helps you keep track of progress and plan follow-ups in the post-bid period. It then allows you to turn the quote into a contract, raise purchase orders with suppliers and create tasks for your team – all in just a click or two.
Plan: Get the project into shape before you start
The data from the quotation process can then flow automatically into task planning. Any work management platform that’s worth the name will support planning and resource allocation, and then provide tools that allow project managers to monitor and evaluate progress and produce timely, accurate reports. Certainly, Scoro does all this, and automation also makes it very simple, a benefit that customers value:
“We can customize projects or use task/project bundles for “repeat” projects to save hours each month.”
And, as a CWM, it does much more, supporting better communication between all stakeholders and enabling team members to work more effectively together. It removes the likelihood of misunderstandings and allows workers to pivot and adapt when hitches occur or priorities need to change.
“What do I like best? Task bundle set-up and how I can tag individuals on projects and raise awareness or ask questions directly on the system. It really avoids back and forth on emails.”
Track: Boost business with effective communication and time management
We’ve talked before about how outmoded forms of time management, like filling in timesheets, cost businesses big money. They can also sometimes look like a blunt managerial instrument to pressure employees into working harder. Today’s more effective models of time management focus on ways to identify tasks that waste time and those that could be automated. Finding and automating these tasks leaves employees with time and headspace to focus on the meaningful work that your clients pay for.
Scoro offers numerous ways to track time, as well as multiple options for automating repetitive activities. For example, you can log time manually under various tasks and link the tasks together as you need to, to give a real-time overview of how time is racking up on the project. You can also choose the time tracker to monitor time for you automatically and to provide accurate reports on all activities. The time tracker function can also enable you to create an invoice for billable time. This customer’s feedback emphasizes how better communications and efficient time-tracking is improving their business:
“Cross-department integration has improved dramatically. As a consequence, our efficiency has increased by leaps and bounds, and we’re able to move through production with greater speed and increase cash flow and profitability.”
Bill: Get paid faster for all your hard work
Fast, accurate invoicing is the final piece of the work management jigsaw, especially, perhaps, for businesses that charge by the hour or day for their expertise. That’s why Scoro automates the invoicing process. With all project management information clearly available in one place via customizable dashboards, there is no need to hunt through files or switch between applications to issue invoices. Instead, you can create them in seconds from quotes, orders or records of time worked. This is something that our customers mention again and again. With accurate, detailed bills, queries are reduced and you can be paid faster:
“Billing processes are extremely fast and the invoice monitoring is done in a fantastic way that gives you a complete description of all the details that you need.”
Scoro can also send recurring customer invoices automatically, as well as sending scheduled late payment reminders. It can also provide overviews of sales, costs and budgets to support financial reporting via intuitive, customizable dashboards.
In our work-from-anywhere era, where businesses are striving to build solid foundations for future growth, a collaborative work management platform is an essential tool to sell, plan, track and bill. Scoro allows your team to work smarter, by automating repetitive, unprofitable tasks and allowing them to focus on the tasks that bring in the money. Explore it for free with our 14-day trial.