Ten Things That Only Productive Can Do

Marija Kata Vlašić

August 4, 2020

We Help Your Agency Reach New Heights

Switch from multiple tools and spreadsheets to one scalable agency management system.

If you’re reading this, that probably means agency management is an important topic for you.

You’re probably looking for a tool that can give you the most for your agency’s needs. Productive was made for end-to-end agency management. If you’re looking for what Productive can offer you in comparison to other solutions⁠—look no further. Here are 10 things that only Productive can do.

1. Use Powerful Insights That Give You a Bird’s-Eye View of Your Entire Agency’s Workflow, in Real Time

Profitability Insights

Profitability is one of the most important metrics your agency should be paying attention to. That’s why we built Productive in a way that it allows you to analyze not just overall profit, but also break it down by client, project or even individual service. In a few clicks, you can generate profitability reports and dig deep into analyzing the success of your agency. 

Agency Utilization Insights

Productive offers you a clear picture of your entire company’s resources. Your agency utilization rate is one of the most important metrics for your business. By understanding your utilization rates, you’ll see how well you’re using your resources to generate revenue. Using Profitability and Utilization dashboards you will be able to find blind spots that consume time and money and find out if your team is working effectively.

Billable Utilization Insights

Agencies and service providers often struggle with understanding time spent on billable and non-billable projects. Using Productive gives you total control over your billable and non-billable hours. That way, you can focus on billable projects to maximize your agency’s profitability.

Learn more about tracking utilization in Productive.

2. Track Your Agency’s Overhead and Factor It Into Your Service Rates to Know Your Actual Profitability

Overhead costs are generally considered non-billable costs, so it’s easy to get the idea that you should reduce them in any way possible to make more profit. In reality, many non-billable agency hours are also your investments in education, training, research, networking, and building employee satisfaction—which all lead to the ability to offer better quality services. By factoring both non-billable costs and your overhead into profitability calculations, you’ll know the accurate amount it takes to run your agency in real time, at all times. 

Read more about agency overhead costs and how to manage them in Productive.

3. Quickly Build Customized Reports

One of Productive’s most valued features is that you can build fully customized reports from scratch. Save your reports in categories, choose between various views, pivot your data, and add custom fields where needed. What’s best, these reports will always give you real-time data. Learn more about Insights and report-building here

4. Forecast the Future of Your Business

Productive’s forecasting feature will give you a clear picture of where your team should invest more resources. Predict your agency’s profit and revenue based on project budgets and scheduled resources. For Sales revenue forecasting, you can use custom fields within your deals in the Sales Pipeline. Using Scheduling, you can place a hold on resources for projects that are coming in, allocate your existing or new resources, and successfully plan the future of your business. 

Unsure why a successful agency like yours need to foresee its future? Read our top three reasons why forecasting is important for your business.

5. Combine Fixed and Hourly Rates in the Same Project

While many tools separate fixed and hourly billing rates, in Productive we know that you need more flexibility than that. For example, if you’re working on a fixed rate up to a certain amount of budgeted time, but you’ve agreed with your client that any extra hours will be billed at an hourly rate, you’ll have a way to manage that seamlessly in Productive. When you’re ready to create an invoice, Productive will combine fixed revenue and hourly revenue based on accumulated billable time automatically, leaving guesswork out of the equation. 

6. Enjoy an Enterprise-Level Platform That’s User-friendly

Confidently run your entire business’ projects leaning on high availability, performance at scale, and advanced security features. Productive’s intuitive interface makes it accessible to anyone in your agency (from client servicing to the design team). 

7. Use One Tool to Run Your Agency End-to-End

Save time your staff spends on switching between different tools. Managing your entire agency in one place lets you focus on work that will bring more value to your business. You don’t have to worry about any aspect of the company because in no time, you have an overview of any person, project, client, budget—whatever you want to see.

8. Organize Your Projects in Phases

With Productive’s multi-budget architecture, you get the flexibility of setting up projects however you prefer. It’s easier to control your budgets when they’re split up in phases. By doing this, you can easily identify which phase’s estimate was off, instead of guessing. Organizing your projects in phases can help in improving future estimates. When managing a project as a single budget, it’s difficult to determine at what point the estimate went wrong. 

9. Invoice Multiple Projects At Once

In Productive, you can create a unique invoice that combines different Projects and Budgets, as long as they belong to the same client (and they’re all charged in the same currency). Simply Select all budgets that you wish to invoice. The benefit of multi-budget invoicing is that you have the flexibility to organize your budgets and finances in the way it’s easier for you and your clients.

10. Track Time on a Granular or High Level

In Productive, you can track time on two levels. When tracking from a higher level, you’re spending hours allocated to a budget of a particular service within a project. Your other option is getting granular by tracking time for a particular task that’s linked to a service within a project.

For example: you have a project called “Web design” that’s broken down into different services: Design, Coding, Copywriting, etc. Within those different services, you have a ton of smaller tasks, such as “Writing copy for About page”. You can track time on those services via the Time feature in Productive, or track your time directly on a more granular level, like for the “About Us page copywriting” task.

The bottom line: tracking time can be very detailed and very generic in Productive, depending on how much information and control you want over tracked time.

Ready to Try Productive Out?

Get a look and feel of Productive in the context of your agency’s needs—go ahead, sign up for a free 14-day trial.

Marija Kata Vlašić

Content Marketing Specialist

Related articles