Why You Need an Agency Management System and Not a Project Management Tool

Productive

Monday

Asana

Clickup

Basecamp

Smartsheet

Wrike

Teamwork

Trello

Workfront

Sales funnel, for tracking sales opportunities and managing customer relationships

Resource planning, for monitoring and managing resources, creating schedules, managing time-off requests, etc.

Project management, for streamlining processes, managing tasks, keeping teammates up to date with developments, collaborating with stakeholders

Time tracking, so you can be able to track key metrics in real time, and get an understanding of each project’s overall profitability

Business Reports, for checking the pulse on the numbers that matter to your agency (e.g. utilization rates, profit, etc.) and use real-time data to make data-driven business decisions.

Billing, for building invoices and tracking invoiced amounts so that you’re confident you’ve invoiced everything on time and you have accurate data in Reports

Integrations with established tools (e.g. Xero, Quickbooks)

Intuitive User Interface so that different roles can easily learn to use the tool

Adequate onboarding, training resources, and responsive support

Sales pipeline: for managing leads and upselling to customers 

Resource planning: for scheduling teammates on projects

Time tracking: for tracking billable and internal time and getting business insights

Budgeting: where you have full control of budgets, profitability, and amounts for invoicing in one place

Project management: where you collaborate with teammates, stay on top of granular deliverables, set up, streamline and deliver projects

Reports : where you can get a pulse on your agency’s key metrics and performance in real time using customized or pre-built reports

Invoicing: for billing project budgets in multiple ways

Monday.com is a great tool for keeping track of day-to-day tasks, organizing, and delivering projects.

In Monday.com, it’s easy to visualize progress. It has a user-friendly interface that’s customizable.

Profitability metrics — Productive’s Reports allow you to focus on your profit and look at it from a higher level, or a specific angle (e.g. profitability by business unit, profitability by client, etc.)

Profit Forecasting — In Productive, once you set up project budgets and schedule resources, you can foresee your agency’s profit and revenue.

Billing — Using Productive, you can create unique invoices that combine different Projects and Budgets, just as long as the Project and Budgets belong to the same client.

Asana is great for organizations of all shapes and sizes

Asana allows you to set your projects up in different views, including list, calendar, board, and as a timeline 

It’s great for planning tasks in the short and long term

Asana is a cloud solution, accessible from anywhere you have an internet connection

Forecasting Sales Revenue — In Productive you can predict upcoming sales revenue using probability percentages in each sales deal in your sales funnel. 

Profit Forecasting — As Productive is an end-to-end agency management tool, you can forecast your profit and revenue based on project budgets and scheduled resources in it.

ClickUp offers control over how you want to manage and visualize your tasks and projects.

In ClickUp, you can manage external email communication and documents related to projects.

Profitability Reports by Business Unit — Since Productive is a tool made for running a profitable agency business, you can zoom in on profitability reports by business unit in it. 

Profitability Reports by Client — In Productive, you can also monitor how much profit each client is bringing to your agency.

In Basecamp you can organize your work by groups and assign team members responsibilities and tasks.

Basecamp has an intuitive interface and it’s easy to use.

Profit Forecasting — As one of the most important metrics to forecast in an agency business is profit, Productive enables you to foresee upcoming profit from a high level.

Forecasting Sales Revenue — In Productive you can zoom in on forecasted sales revenue.

Smartsheet is used for project collaboration by both internal and external stakeholders.

In Smartsheet you can plan all your projects according to priorities, and keep your company’s documents and information organized.

Agency Utilization Reports — As an agency management tool used for project management, Productive lets you see how your resources are being used through time tracking and Insights.

Profit Forecasting — In Productive you can forecast your agency’s profit and revenue based on budgets and scheduled resources.

Wrike helps you keep projects and budgets organized and delivered on time.

Wrike is easy to set up and fast, it has a simple interface that offers plenty of functionality.

Agency Utilization Insights — Productive lets you monitor your most important agency metric in real time: utilization. 

Customizable Task Management — In Productive teams can customize the way they want to view their tasks.

In Teamwork, you can easily collaborate on and deliver projects, since the tool is designed for achieving community objectives.

Teamwork makes it simple to allocate any teammate to a project task and in it, you can set up lists that are mutually dependent.

Customized reports — In Productive you can build fully customizable reports from scratch and save them in categories.

Agency Utilization Reports— This is one of your most important agency metrics to follow.

Profitability Reports— With tracked time and utilization insight in Productive, you can monitor your profitability from a high and granular level.

In Trello, teams can customize project and task management to fit their needs and work styles.

Trello is known as a user-friendly software that you can easily get used to and learn.

View Profitability by Client — In Productive you can see which client is most profitable and which is not performing well in Reports. 

View Profitability by Business Unit — Productive offers you the ability to zoom in on which business unit is bringing your agency the most profit.

In Workfront, you can quickly contact other teammates, which saves time and keeps everyone on the same page.

Workfront offers a variety of formats and styles so you can customize your project workflow.

Project collaboration — Communicate with your co-workers and clients through mentions, share files, upload documents and easily edit your comments in threads.

Private projects and tasks — manage your own projects, tasks, and TODO lists in the same platform as your colleagues while keeping them private.