Methods of monitoring teams allow all project tasks to be delivered within the agreed criteria and time limit. Sometimes though, you might have everything in check and still not get the work done. Panic creeps in and everybody starts looking at you for an answer. So what do you do to keep everyone focused and their spirits high for the next projects? You look for a project management app that allows all members to be on the same page and continue their work in a happy, chaos-free environment.
Paymo is a full-featured project management platform designed for small and medium businesses. Its main purpose is to help you improve your project delivery time and overall workflow, relieving you from the burden of having to manually manage tasks from several different other apps. Core features include time tracking, teams schedules, project management, and even accounting modules. Used in the right context, they help teams with collaboration, timesheet management, and project accounting while allowing you to manage projects from start to finish. The app is currently used by companies in several industries such as Web Development, Creative Agencies, Architecture, Legal Services, Marketing Agencies, Business Consultants, and many more.
Project management tools are not just for teams. Individuals can use them with great benefits as well. If you’re a freelancer, you will find Paymo useful for keeping your work in check at zero costs since the app is free for individual users.
Paymo allows you to create tasks, group them into task lists, assign them to users, set due dates and milestones, as well as get a visual overview of your team’s progress with Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and a Team Scheduling module.
If you’re looking for a tool that can solve your project management problems in a single place, consider the following features before using this product:
Detailed project data
Getting lost in all of your data? A complete dashboard can give you an overview of the most important data concerning your projects: time entries/month, invoices sent and due, billable and non-billable time, etc. Using these metrics, you’ll be able to adjust your project’s development according to your internal and external circumstances.
Real-time collaboration
Project management involves collaboration as well. The discussion module at the project level is ideal for when you’re trying to improve team communication. It also allows you to collaborate with team members and submit comments on specific tasks. In this way, you’ll avoid any errors or misunderstandings that can postpone your deadlines. No need to switch to another tool to ask a question anymore.
Email notifications are provided for updates such as being assigned a new task, being removed from a task, or receiving a message. There is also a project dashboard where you can see recent team member activities to keep you connected to everything that’s going on with a project.
Secure file sharing and unlimited storage space
With Paymo you can attach files securely either at a task or project level to collaborate on the content. Your team will be able to use those files for tasks whenever they want to. You can preview image files directly into the browser and download only the ones needed. Additionally, you can upload your files from Google Drive at a click of a button. Bonus: the Business plan allows unlimited storage space, thus removing the need to buy and use supplementary storage tools.
Saving your files in secure cloud-based tools can keep you away from losing files or not being able to use them when needed.
Managing clients
Any project starts with a client. Therefore, the first logical step to take in Paymo and perhaps in any other project management tool or process is to add a client to the system. All projects need to be associated with a client. However, if you have internal projects, you can add your own company as a client.
Typically, clients are represented by companies, with each client having multiple contacts. To add stakeholders, sponsors, and other relevant people that need to be informed about the project progress, first add them as a contact. Then give them access to the client portal in case you wish to notify them when you’ve sent an estimate, invoice, or a late payment reminder.
Time Tracking
Another feature that can improve your team’s productivity is the robust time tracking module. You can add and monitor time using mobile, desktop, and online timers too. Another option is to manually add bulk time entries from the Timesheets area. This will help you discover the areas where you slack off. Tracking the progress of all your tasks can help you adjust the project’s development on the go, spot bottlenecks, and avoid mistakes that could postpone the final deadline.
Think you’re not getting paid fairly?
You can track your work time with the possibility to divide it into billable or non-billable hours.
Although time tracking might not seem that useful at the beginning, remember that it pays off when you bill your clients. Additionally, it eliminates guesstimates and awkward conversations with difficult clients who are not willing to cooperate.
Time reports
Time reports are created based on your tracked time, offering a detailed look at how your team spends their time on actual work. These can be shared with your clients, printed, saved (PDF, Excel, CSV and format), or viewed as a pie chart and a bar chart.
Web Timer
If you’d rather record the time spent on a task from your browser, you can do that with the web timer that’s part of the app and you won’t need to use a separate tool for this anymore. When you are ready to work start the stopwatch. All-time entries will be saved with start and end times for accurate time reports. The web timer can be docked or you can run it detached and minimized.
Below is an example of a web timer. Notice that you can select the project and the specific task before you start tracking time with a click on the stopwatch play button.
Gantt Charts
Made for teams, the Gantt Chart is one of the most popular techniques used in project management for scheduling, monitoring, and adjusting projects. By displaying all activities against a timeline, you can visualize the relationship between each and every task in one single place. The Gantt Chart module helps your team plan, schedule, and monitor project progress by showing what needs to be done, when, and by whom. This helps you identify if you need more employees and keep your team satisfied by not overloading them with too much work.
The Gantt Chart’s design is intuitive so every person who’s part of the project will be able to use them without prior training. It’s the best way of seeing how activities or tasks display against time at a single glance.
Progress Kanban boards
There are many other ways of viewing task distribution. Kanban is another project management tool that gives you a visual overview of the tasks’ status. The progress board allows you to create a workflow and move project tasks through sequential and logical steps. Everyone involved in the project can see the work progress at any time. The boards can be customized to adapt to your specific workflows. Using Kanban boards to structure your work can help you visualize your project workflow, identify and remove bottlenecks, improve team collaboration, and even speed up your workflow.
Creating workflows
Workflows are a series of task statuses that indicate how the project is evolving. They’re used to map out the phases that each task has to go through before it’s finished.
Typical workflows include these three standard Kanban columns: To Do, In Progress, Done (or Complete), but they are not set in stone. You can also edit and create your own Kanban board to match your project requirements. By setting predefined workflows you can use the same progress stages repeatedly for similar projects.
Real-time Task Management
You can also put an end to all delays and time inconsistencies. You get the possibility to change or add tasks quickly, even organize and reorder them into task lists according to their similarity. If you’d like to see detailed data, switch to the advanced tasks view to filter task information or check the full task view to see everything related to a specific task: description, files, budget alerts, comments, and mentions from team members.
Team Scheduling
For those of you who want to manage their people and time bookings from a visual timeline, there is the team scheduling feature. You can schedule bookings and assign tasks directly on the calendar, check what employees will be working on, and how their time stacks up against each other to prevent overbooking or underbooking.
Such a feature can reduce your meeting times and remove the need for unnecessary communication to find out who’s available or not.
What are bookings?
A booking represents the defined time when a user should work on an assigned task. This helps your team to focus on specific tasks and know how much time is needed for them. Project managers can then follow on the team status user by user and spot empty time slots for additional activities.
Invoices, Estimates, and Expenses
Once you have finished your tasks or project, you’ll be able to invoice your client from the platform. In addition, you can also create estimates for your next projects and add unexpected expenses you want to charge. This system allows you to turn existing timesheet data into an invoice or convert approved estimates into invoices. The data can then be adjusted, while invoices can be shared with your clients via email. They can also be created in multiple languages and currencies or customized in order to better reflect your brand’s uniqueness.
If you use a payment gateway, your clients can pay you directly from the invoice. With this invoicing module, the bookkeeping process will be easier and you’ll manage all of your finances from the place where you control your projects. Furthermore, you are less likely to encounter errors or payment mistakes. Not to mention all the paperwork that you’ll never come across again.
Estimates are an approximation based on well-defined data and established ground rules. They are usually sent to a client for approval before the start of actual work so they have an idea about how much the project will cost them and what the stages of the project are.
An expense is an additional cost on top of your established work. Typical expenses can be customized and include travel, hotel, meetings, lunch, merchandise, and external help. An expense can be attached to an invoice as long as they are issued in the same currency.
Pricing
To use this project management tool, you can choose from three different subscription packages:
If you’re a freelancer, you can use Paymo for free. You’ll be able to create Kanban boards and to-do lists, track your time, share files, and issue up to three invoices for your clients. Tracking billable hours can help you get paid more while managing your existing projects to ensure that you’ve got everything under control. The free version lets you use the mobile apps as well as store 1GB worth of data.
Are you in charge of a smaller team? Maybe you’ve just started your business or you want to grow your departments and improve team collaboration. For $11.95/user/month, you can plan any project, track work time, invoice your clients, and use real-time communication to balance tasks within your team.
Larger teams can use the Business plan ($18.95/user/month) to get a full-featured project management solution and plan their project portfolio in detail while getting professional help whenever the team needs it.
Tip: Paymo supports anyone who is committed to doing good for society, be they organizations or individuals. Nonprofit organizations are eligible for a 50% discount. They also support schools, colleges, and universities around the world by offering Paymo free subscriptions for 1 year without any feature limitations. Check their nonprofit page to see if you’re eligible.
Mobile apps
Project management can now be done even when you’re out of the office. You can use the mobile apps to track your time with or without an Internet connection as long as you’re logged in. Any changes you’re making while working offline will be automatically synchronized with your online account when you connect again to the Internet. Their apps can be downloaded from Google’s Play Store for Android and the App Store for iOS.
Desktop widget
The Desktop widget can be used in beta for now by those of you who’d rather not work with the web app. Its key features include time tracking using a stopwatch timer or manually entering time, daily timesheet overviews, daily totals and time entry groupings, installation directly in Adobe Creative Suite apps as a panel, and many more.
Automated time-tracking
Let’s face it: some of us hate tracking their time and having to remember when to start or stop the timer. To fix this, Paymo Plus is an automatic time tracking tool that tracks what you do on the computer. This desktop app records how much time you spend browsing social media, editing documents, and even the idle time you spend away from your desk. You don’t have to remember to start and stop a timer anymore. Set it to run in the background and link the entries with the tasks whenever you like to.
Integrations
Through Zapier you’re able to integrate Paymo with over 1000 apps. You’ll be able to connect Paymo with more than 1000 apps including Google Apps and Slack. You need to have a Zapier account and create a zap or choose one from a list of most recommended zaps.
Paymo can put an end to your struggle of managing multiple projects and clients using a series of different apps. Take a look at this quick tutorial to see Paymo in action.
With its intuitive design and end-to-end approach, this cloud-based app is specifically built for freelancers to help them track time, manage tasks, and get paid fairly. Over 70,000 companies and freelancers from 50 countries currently rely on Paymo to help manage their projects from start to finish. Consider switching to a complete platform to manage all your work from one place and try the app for 15 days for free.
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