One Tool, Multiple Businesses: Capptoo’s Path to Smarter Project Management

We’re based in Switzerland, but we primarily serve clients in Europe and have begun expanding into the U.S. Our clients come from diverse industries, with a strong focus on the pharmaceutical and life sciences sectors.

As the Chief Operating Officer for our group of companies, I oversee day-to-day operations, ensuring everything runs smoothly across our various segments, and drive strategic decisions, particularly regarding the tools and platforms we use internally.

We operate across four main business segments. One of them is Screver, a cutting-edge AI feedback management platform that empowers businesses to unlock the full potential of feedback, transforming it into the cornerstone of continuous improvement and sustainable growth. Our vision is to redefine how organizations engage with feedback by setting new standards in Voice of Customer & Employee solutions.

The second segment is what you’d call a typical digital agency: providing digital solutions to solve challenges and pain points innovatively through the complete project life cycle (from ideation workshops and strategic planning to the coordination and execution part). The third pillar is similar, but tailored to the pharmaceutical industry, a highly regulated field. We specialize in working with their unique systems and tools, delivering high-impact, innovative, and data-driven projects that break pharma industry records and benchmarks while maintaining compliance.

The fourth segment is Oncology Compass – a platform we co-developed with a major pharma company—it’s designed to help oncologists stay up to date with practice-changing publications by filtering out the noise. In addition to that, we’re soon launching a new CRM platform targeting the U.S. market, starting with the dance and fitness industry.

In the early days, we relied heavily on Google Sheets and Trello. Trello was very basic at the time—just cards moving left and right. It worked when we were small, but as we started handling more projects and grew, we needed something much more robust.

We later moved to Jira, which was a step up in terms of functionality, but it wasn’t very user-friendly. It was complex and became expensive quickly once we started adding the necessary plug-ins.

We didn’t have a proper resource planning module in Jira, so we ended up using Google Sheets again. We exported hours from Jira, reviewed historical data, and used formulas to attempt to forecast future capacity. It was a bit clunky and time-consuming, but it was all we had.

As this is an important part in understanding how a company operates and making decisions, we did have it, but we just had to invest some effort in getting it done. To get any financial overview, we had to export everything manually into spreadsheets. Then we’d plug in our rate cards, which varied from person to person depending on the service or project. It became very complex, very fast. So while we had a system, it wasn’t efficient or scalable.

One of the primary challenges we faced was the lack of effective reporting and budgeting capabilities. While Jira offered some reporting functionality, the absence of integrated financial data rendered it inadequate for our needs. Budget tracking was equally problematic, which, of course, created significant difficulties for our project managers and hindered effective financial oversight.

We were looking for a tool that could combine project management with time tracking, budgeting, resourcing, time-off management, documentation, and reporting—all in one place. We were tired of switching between tools and manually syncing data. Ideally, we wanted a system that would save us time, reduce human error, and give us real-time visibility into what was happening across the business.

The biggest benefit was how much easier life became for our project managers. They no longer had to waste time in Excel calculating budgets or manually compiling reports. Everything is in one place—budgets, time tracking, rates, and profitability. Reporting became much more accurate and much less time-consuming. I find having financial visibility and a real-time overview of profitability across dozens of projects to be invaluable.

My job has gotten a lot easier as well. Especially when it comes to tracking performance and managing the business as a whole. I no longer have to dig through spreadsheets to get a picture of how we’re doing financially or operationally. It’s all right there in Productive. I also appreciate the flexibility. It works well even for a multi-company setup like ours.

We saw that the time saved on reporting alone was huge. I’d estimate a 50% reduction in time spent on some reporting tasks. That’s because we have so many projects, clients, and internal initiatives across our different business units and companies, and we send and use reports regularly. Before, every single report had to be built manually, with data exported and formatted in multiple tools. Now it’s automated or at least significantly streamlined. That’s been a game changer for us.

It’s hard to pick just one because the biggest value is in the combination of everything. Having project management, budgeting, time tracking, sales, and reporting all integrated is the real win. However, if I had to choose, I’d say that real-time budget tracking, resource planning, and reporting are the features I rely on the most.

Depressed. Seriously. Going back to how we used to work—with 10 different tools, endless spreadsheets, and disconnected systems – would be really difficult. Productive has brought structure and clarity to our operations, and I can’t imagine working without it now.