Discover how Streamtime works—what problems it can help you solve and who uses it, along with a tour of its features, pricing, and integrations.
I’ll also explain how Streamtime compares to similar tools.
What Is Streamtime?
Streamtime is a powerful tool that allows you to create, plan, and manage projects while keeping your team happy. Streamtime’s interactive ToDo screen can replace timesheets, making chasing timesheet completion a thing of the past.
With effortless project planning, one-click estimating and invoicing, innovative time tracking, slick scheduling, and intelligent reporting, Streamtime gives you complete visibility into your projects within a beautiful interface.
Although Streamtime has been around since 2002, the new product at Streamtime.net is relatively new. Their fresh approach has been recognized with a 2020 Webby award, along with D&AD, AGDA Pinnacle, and Best Design Awards. They’ve also won recognition from Capterra for best service ratings in their category.
Streamtime wants to help build healthier creative businesses. They help by making software intended for creatives, as well as by supporting communities that improve outcomes for creatives.
The best example? Their support for Never Not Creative, a global community addressing mental health, internships, and improving the value that creatives receive from their work.
Who is Streamtime for?
Streamtime’s customer base is made up of…
- Creative agencies
- Advertising agencies
- PR agencies
- Digital agencies
- In-house design teams
- Architects
Case Studies
The following case studies help to demonstrate the types of businesses that use Streamtime. The user base ranges from anywhere between 3 and 90 team members.
1. An award-winning brand and design agency based in London.
This agency has roughly 30 full-time staff, as well as part-timers and contractors that also use Streamtime. Jobs can range in value from £2 or £3 thousand to £200 thousand depending on the nature of the relationship with their clients, and the agency runs at approximately a 25% margin on jobs in Streamtime.
They estimate jobs in Streamtime using quotes to get sign-off and track approval, as well as conduct invoicing in phases and payment tracking using the integration with Xero. They hold weekly planning meetings to schedule the team. Adjustments are made on a daily basis as required. All team members track their time on tasks that take an average of 1-2 hours, using the ToDo screen. They also use Slack for internal communications, as well as Google Drive and WeTransfer for file management and sharing.
2. A large in-house team
This team is based in the UK and works on creative projects for their parent organization, a large media, and telecommunications company. They handle briefs for a variety of graphic design and motion projects and need to schedule the team often with fast turnarounds.
Being an in-house team, there’s no need for accounting integration, but scheduling and transparency are paramount, as is reporting output and productivity back to multiple stakeholders. They will often hold daily scheduling and progress meetings. The team also utilizes the iOS app for when they’re on the go, so they can log time and complete tasks anytime and anywhere.
3. Research and design firm
These data visualization specialists from the US make a living out of making dense information look beautiful and meaningful. With a team of 20+ software engineers and designers, they are running approximately 35 jobs at any point in time with a turnover close to $3 million USD.
Keeping the finances under control and the money coming in is essential to the founders. The executives have set up and saved their favorite reports, so they can check how they stand at any point in time. The integration with Quickbooks also lets them know at a glance when invoices have been paid.
What challenges does Streamtime help solve?
1. Inaccurate or Missing Data
If you’re constantly chasing down timesheets for completion, then not only are you hassling your team, but you’re also probably getting inaccurate data. Sometimes it’s a struggle to remember what happened yesterday, let alone a week ago. The data your team records is the data you use to make decisions. Streamtime’s ToDo screen helps you to plan ahead, edit, and log so you have the most accurate and up to date data.
2 . Multiple Sources of Information
It’s certainly very tempting to use lots of different tools in your business and allow different teams to choose tools that suit their individual needs. But having core time, effort, and financial information in different places might cause revenue and profit to slip through the cracks.
Streamtime connects job plans, quotes, schedules, time tracking, and invoicing in one place. You can check progress, overdue invoices, and profitability in saved reports in a couple of clicks. This makes it easier to deliver successful projects and avoid failure.
3. Inflexible Schedule Changes
Someone off sick? Or just plain overloaded? Drag and drop their tasks onto somebody else. Users can shrink or expand the duration as needed. Just like the ToDo list, it’s all drag-and-drop.
There’s no need to check the schedule then head back to the job plan — you can create new tasks for jobs straight from the schedule. If you’re feeling really kind, you can even log your team’s time for them!
What’s On The Streamtime Roadmap?
Since the new cloud-based version of Streamtime was launched in 2002, the product has continued to evolve. In 2020 alone, Streamtime has added a collaboration suite, rate cards, the ability to have multiple branches, and recurring to-do’s. And the product roadmap for the coming year includes some exciting updates, namely:
- A revamped schedule with saved filters and views
- Team happiness tracking
- Improved Kanban functionality
Streamtime Features Overview
To get an idea of how Streamtime works, here’s a tour of the main features and how they can help you run a healthier creative business.
Time Savers
Create and plan jobs quickly: Pick your team, estimate your hours, and set deadlines. See clear visual indicators that let you know whether or not your projects are on-time and on-budget.
You can take your plan to a quote in just one click: Why put hard work into your project plan, only to do it all again when you prepare your quote for the client? In Streamtime, they’re one and the same. Plan your job, then click “Create Quote”.
Scheduling is a simple case of drag and drop. Your team can easily manage their own time from their ToDo screen. Or, as a project manager, you can plan tasks and jobs from the Schedule. Choose from a 360 ToDo view where you can drag and drop or manage tasks and deadlines in a jobs view.
No more timesheet resentment
Taking the emphasis off timesheets, Streamtime’s innovative approach tracks time precisely on tasks via its drag and drop ToDo screen — a more intuitive way for staff to manage their day.
Time is simultaneously logged when a to-do is dragged to done, or the entire day of to do’s is completed with the click of a button. Time entry is automated so there’s no more wasted time chasing timesheets!
Forward-thinking project reporting
Streamtime’s Analytics are quick, preset segments where at the touch of a button you can see work in progress, time spent by week or month, items over budget or expenses for the month. Filters also allow you to create your own reports and export to .csv for further manipulation if needed.
It’s easy to create your own reports and share them with the rest of your team, so you can be sure that you’re all looking at the same insights. And as we know, getting the right reports at the right time can make all the difference between success and failure.
Collaborate on the job
New functionality in 2020 rounds out Streamtime’s project management suite. Teams can post briefs, messages, and comments on a job, mention each other, and get notifications without having to leave the software.
The Priorities view (a kanban view for Streamtime) also makes it easy for teams to collaborate or build their own views for projects, themselves, or different teams in the business.
Seamless Xero Integration and a Public API
Invoices can be sent straight to Xero and will be updated immediately in Streamtime once you’ve reconciled in Xero. You can match line items to general ledger codes and also export PO’s and expenses at the click of a button.
The public API adds even more possibilities if you’ve got the know-how on-staff.
Streamtime vs Monday.com
Like Monday.com, Streamtime can help you to plan and manage a project from start to finish.
Consider Streamtime if you want to tie your project management activities with recorded data that validates or tracks your decisions. With data that includes tracked time, used vs planned reports, and projected profit margins, Streamtime can go one step further in helping you make decisions about future projects based on past performance.
Streamtime Integrations
Streamtime’s native integrations are for super-powered accountancy. Xero and Quickbooks are built-in, and with Xero webhooks, real-time quote and invoice information is quick and seamless to find.
A public API allows you to develop your own tailored actions, or if you’re not quite there yet, you can use Zapier to set up everything from Google Calendar to Slack notifications.
There’s also wayahead, which has been built specifically for Streamtime customers for additional in-depth and automated reporting.
And finally, need to log to do’s on the go? Do it easily with Streamtime’s iOS app.
Streamtime Pricing
Streamtime offers fixed price plans. Going on a fixed price plan means you can invite your whole team; contractors, bookkeepers, even the office dog.
You can customize your plan with the features you need. Plus, there are no additional charges for another ‘license’ and no cursing when you spot the freelancers in the system that left your team 6 months ago – but you’re still paying for.
If you want to pay more and don’t want to chat to the Streamtime team, you can self-serve and pay as you go for $40 USD/user/month.